Optimise to Transform: The Blueprint for Collaboration in the Digital Enterprise

With 86% of respondents showing improved productivity, 70% improved sales, and 63% improved competitive advantage, it's clear from the 2016 Connected Enterprise Report that collaboration is an essential element in the digital business of the future.

To achieve transformation, the needs of lines of business (LoBs) have to be recognised, as they're the key to unlock and fund business return. A worrying aspect in the Connected Enterprise Report is the ongoing disconnect between IT and the LoB, which will lead to shadow IT behaviour, siloed decisions, and business inefficiency. This is compounded by technology budgets being aggressively reduced - typically by 20% per year.

What does this mean for the modern CIO?

• The CIO must tap into LoB budget to align to meet strategic enterprise objectives.
• The CIO must ensure shadow IT doesn't get out of control, leading to indirect operational costs, as well as infrastructure, governance, compliance, and security issues.

Being relevant to the LoB means you must be flexible to business change, which is often difficult when restricted by limitations of the past. CIOs often state their goal is to provide more services to the end user, but don't have the budget to remain relevant: as much as 60% of their budget is tied to carrier costs, or they're in an existing depreciation cycle for their core infrastructure.

Optimise to transform

The key is to create sustainable relevance. This approach is called "Optimise to Transform," and it has four strategic considerations:

• cost down
• risk out
• speed up
• innovation in

With this approach, you will ensure that your current investment is being optimised and adopted. This may seem self-evident but consider the following influences:

• The use of consumer applications in the business environment is growing.
• The chasm between IT and the LoB is widening.
• The awareness and adoption of collaboration tools remains relatively low.

With these factors in mind, can cost control be maximised? Is the scarcity and scalability of expertise risk truly mitigated? Of course, the answers will be different for every workload and every organisation. A first step is to identify your risk exposure - because this should determine your strategy, not the hype around cloud or next-generation infrastructure.

IT and business coming together

Once your existing environment is optimised, the platform is now open for speed, innovation, and agility. The LoB can take their entrepreneurial nature and understanding of their customers to bring innovative ideas into the collaboration strategy.

However, they still need to work with IT. While IT's relevance is more important than ever, the reason for this relevance is changing. More and more, the modern CIO views IT as an entity that is inextricably tied to the LoB. No longer just a provider of technology, IT now maximises the business outcomes defined by the LoB's technology strategy.

Read more about the 2016 Connected Enterprise Report.

By Ian Heard, Group SVP - Collaboration, Dimension Data