A few days ago I came across an interesting article in McKinsey Quarterly on “Reinventing IT to support digitization”
In this article the authors state that “Traditional companies seeking strong digital performance must thoroughly transform their IT functions.” They describe several key aspects companies need to consider to be able to compete in the market or create a new strategic advantage.
Reading the article I conclude that efficiency in delivering the company’s core services as well as in the underlying IT functions is still a key priority. In addition and especially due to digitalization and the competition from innovative new entrants time is getting more and more critical in order to keep ones market presence or enter new ones.
As a result the authors suggest considering “seven elements critical to achieving the IT performance improvements required to adapt to the new digital world“:
- Clear, central business leadership on digital.
- Elite IT talent
- Sourcing arrangements to scale the workforce rapidly
- Agile development and rapid releases
- Rapid innovation architecture supported by stable services
- Scalable cloud-based infrastructure
- High-quality integrated data
This is valid for any kind of IT service. When it comes to larger scale application development projects and in particular offshore software projects I am of the opinion that one important aspect to achieve efficiency is to ensure a high level of automation in managing the software development teams. This is one of the key aspects why pliXos and the online tool suite were set up.
Looking at the seven elements mentioned it is obvious that business leadership and elite IT talent of utmost importance and a goal of every company. But elite IT talent might not be available or affordable for every company. Thus having the right outsourcing partners with exactly those elite IT talent might be a good choice. Those outsourcing partners should be able to ensure the elite talent is offered, an agile development with rapid release cycles is supported (even education the customer as might be necessary in many cases). Even going beyond that: Why not offering the customer a scalable and innovative cloud based toolset to manage the customer – provider interaction and ensure the agile development projects deliver according customers needs, in time as well as in quality? I firmly believe this all can best be achieved by building on a set of tools as provided by pliXos and am happy expert opinions from leading business consultants underline our viewpoint.
In addition to the aforementioned seven critical elements I was glad to see the authors highlighting a topic which I consider of high importance and try to implement in all customer projects with support. It is to “combine a start-up mind-set with enterprise accountability” thus keeping the valuable assets of being an established corporation by allowing for the creativity and speed of an innovative start-up.
I look forward to your comments and opinions. Joerg Stimmer, pliXos.
