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Ross Armstrong

Principal Research Director

Business-led digital transformation cannot occur without the full participation of the CIO in the process of identifying business problems or opportunities and creatively ideating solutions that relieve the pain.

While IT may excel at ‘business-as-usual’ IT operations, the CIO must leverage those skills and assets to truly innovate at a level that digital business initiatives demand. In other words, the CIO and their team must adopt a digital-first mindset.

To do this successfully, IT must correctly roadmap the goals, technology assets, and underlying capabilities that are required to enable digital initiatives, as these are critical to the success of strategic technology plans.

1.1 Visualize the “Industry” of the Future

1.2 Assess Digital Innovation Capability & Readiness

2.1 Zero-in on Business Objectives & Innovation Goals

2.2 Build Your Digital Vision and Strategy

2.3 Select and Prioritize Digital Initiatives

3.1 Business-Aligned IT Innovation Roadmap

3.2 Govern & Manage Digital Execution

Discover digital trends within industry

“The Art of the Possible”

Diagnose digital capabilities & readiness. “Build the case for the remaining journey”

Understand business architecture and organizational context

Outline digital vision, define digital objectives and business initiatives

Iterate digital initiatives to prioritize and build business case

Define the innovation goals, as well as core and enabling initiatives for IT

Provide support to IT as needed for a successful delivery

Stakeholders

CIO, IT Management

CIO, IT Management

CIO, Business Executives

CIO, Business Executives

CIO, Business Executives

CIO, IT Management

CIO, IT Management

Advisory Support

• Review CKIP
• Get insight from the CIO on:
• Organization value streams
• Org structure
• Key tech challenges/ opportunities
• Research the industry landscape and tailor Digital Trends report to what is relevant to you
• Present Digital Trends (The of the future) to IT Management.

• Run an Innovation Readiness diagnostic (leverage existing Digital Maturity diagnostic).
• Measure Digital Maturity of business capabilities and IT services using industry reference architecture.
• Leverage existing Info-Tech diagnostics data to provide industry benchmarks.
• Engage IT Management in a discussion on innovation maturity aspirations.

• 1-hr interviews or one session with business executives to elicit business objectives and digital innovation initiatives over planning horizon.
• Understand value prop and positioning.
• Customize reference architecture with Chief Architect
• Map initiatives to value stream stages and capabilities. Color-code by priority.

• Visioning workshop with business executives: Present Digital Trends.
• Ideation session with relevant stakeholders.
• Validate ideas through research.
• Build opportunity map. Prioritize capabilities to transform.
• Identify key stakeholders and define dominant personas
• Map stakeholder journeys, identify digital business initiatives to improve experience, reduce risk/cost.

• Select a digital business initiative and define output (design mockup). Break down initiative into business and tech projects.
• Establish assumptions and evaluate feasibility.
• Develop business case and simulate sensitivity to assumptions.
• Determine initiative benefits and ROI.
• Establish Governance Model for Digital Strategy.

• Determine IT assets and services to enable each digital initiative
• Identify resulting IT projects.
• Map projects to IT capabilities with ITRG M&G Framework
• Identify capacity changes required in IT capabilities
• Identify dependencies, stage gates and timeline for IT projects.
• Define IT goals, KPI, and targets.
• Detail IT innovation roadmap.

• Review IT Innovation journey with CIO, presenting research to support roadmap projects
• Collaboratively revise CKIP to match initiatives resulting from Digital strategy and IT Innovation
• Advisory services as required.
• Executive Advisor review and revision of CKIP as needed.

Deliverable(s)

Presentation: The of the Future

Digital Innovation Capability & Readiness Assessment Report

Business Architecture Level 3 - Heat mapped

Digital Business Strategy

Initiative Business Case,

Digital Transformation Roadmap

IT Innovation Roadmap

Updated CKIP,

Advisory Experiences

You are here

The ability of IT to clearly demonstrate its understanding of the organization’s purpose and leverage technology resources to advance that purpose.

The adoption of digital technologies to innovate and re-invent existing business, talent, and operating models to drive growth, business value and improved customer experience.

A heat-mapping effort to analyze the maturity and priority of each IT capability relative to the strategic projects that they serve.

An institutionalized process for identifying and leveraging technology in novel ways to create business efficiencies, advance business goals, and improve IT-business alignment.

A set of standard objectives that most industry players will feature in their corporate plans.

• Once digital business initiatives have been selected and prioritized, IT must plan for change.
• The CIO must prepare for this change by adopting and instilling a culture of IT innovation.
• This change will also come in the form of new assets and services that must be implemented or optimized in order to enable the prioritized digital business initiatives.

• If certain IT capabilities are not in place, or existing capabilities are sub-par, then digital initiatives risk the chance of failure.
• Like any other project, new or improved IT capabilities must be thoroughly planned and mapped directly to the digital needs of the business.
• Without these linkages and adequate preparation, IT cannot deliver on its key promise of innovation.

• Determine the services and assets required to enable each business digital initiative.
• Identify projects to improve the foundational IT capabilities necessary to support digital enablement via these assets and services.
• Identify any changes in IT resource demand required to implement or improve IT capabilities.
• Create an IT innovation roadmap for resulting projects and associated details.

Stakeholder Journey maps from Phase 2.2 of Info-Tech’s approach for aligning IT with digital business strategy provided the foundational ideas for digital business initiatives.

In Phase 2.2 you also investigated the business appetite for IT innovation, as well as any barriers to it.

By this point you have leveraged industry roundtables to better understand the art of the possible, exploring trends in budgeting, staffing / hiring / retention, alignment with senior leadership, IT capacity and satisfaction, critical performance areas, and creating new options out of disruption.

The proposed digital initiatives from Phase 2.2 were iterated to create a prioritized list. Next, business cases for each digital initiative were created in Phase 2.3 of Info-Tech’s approach for aligning IT with your industry-centric digital business strategy.

The prioritized list, and associated business cases (example at right), should comprise the digital transformation roadmap proposed by IT and the organization’s business leaders.

What follows from here is Phase 3.1, in which the CIO will determine which new or improved assets, services, and underlying IT capabilities are required to ensure that digital business initiatives are both successful and properly supported.

Identify digital business initiatives prioritized by the organization.

Leverage industry roundtables where necessary.

Understand the business case supporting each business initiative to validate the business initiative roadmap.

Leverage IT competencies to improve upon ‘business as usual’.

Identify new and/or transformed digital business capabilities that need to be supported by IT.

Identify new or improved IT capabilities required to support these digital business capabilities.

Brainstorm and prioritize projects for improving or supporting IT capabilities.

Calculate changes to IT resource demand.

Develop project metrics and estimate budget needs.

Create project profiles.

Consolidate projects into initiatives.

Build project timeline.

• List of IT competencies
• Discussion of which competencies will spur innovation
• Value streams and business capabilities

• List of new software, hardware, and other IT assets required to enable or support digital business initiatives

• Info-Tech business capability map for your industry

• CIO
• CDO
• IT leadership team
• Department / business division leaders

Begin with communicating to IT the current appetite for innovation in technology, why the business wants to innovate, and whether the business should adopt these technologies in the next three to five years. Projects or initiatives that drive technology innovation must always be an explicit category in strategic planning.

Despite a strong business appetite for IT innovation, there may be hidden IT barriers that are not readily visible. Refer to these barriers and ensure they are appropriately communicated to the CEO. Failure to do so could result in CEO expectations that are misaligned with the reality of IT’s current limitations.

Communicate these insights...

...But beware of the following

A shipping company was having difficulty measuring safety metrics on their vessels.

• The CDO was looking for opportunities to innovate and identified the safety reporting process as a source of pain.
• Ships were not equipped with computers. Safety records were kept at sea and input manually when the vessel returned.
• The CDO’s team ideated around this challenge and made the case for implementing tablets on ships.
• Tablets, although not disruptive, allowed captains to record safety metrics in real-time and facilitated data-driven decision making. This was novel for the organization.

A craft brewery was having difficulty managing supply and ensuring customers had sufficient inventory.

• The IT director interviewed business stakeholders to identify challenges they faced in supply chain and inventory management.
• The IT director observed that the business had limited information on real-time customer inventory. They did not know who needed what product and where it was needed.
• The IT director consulted his IT sourcing team and prototyped an analytics application to track inventory at every establishment that sold their product.
• IT was able to implement a solution for a problem before the problem had even been identified by the business unit.

• Digital business capabilities list

• Value-to-difficulty analyses
• Prioritized list of IT capabilities

• Info-Tech business capability map for your industry

• CIO
• IT leadership team

By this stage, the CIO should now have a full view of:

1. The digital initiatives identified by the business.
2. A prioritized list of supporting assets and services.
3. Core IT capabilities needed to support these assets and services.

Before moving forward, it is imperative to ensure that the IT capabilities required for digital business initiatives are robust enough to underpin and uphold mission-critical objectives.

By using Info-Tech’s IT Management & Governance Framework and associated diagnostic tool, you can heat map which foundational IT processes or capabilities need maturation or additional resourcing. Any fixes required are sub-projects of their corresponding digital business and IT initiatives.

Business demand for new technology creates added pressure to innovate. If IT is not viewed as a source of innovation, its perceived value will decrease, shadow IT may grow, or any number of serious problems.

Strong foundational knowledge on business and technology trends will result in identifying specific use cases that could offer your organization a competitive edge.

In our case study, Nesbitt’s CIO has done the following:

• Identified and capitalized on opportunities for IT-led innovation.
• Prioritized ideas and prototyped solutions that will fuel organizational success.
• Established and formalized an effective IT-led innovation process.
• Prioritized use cases that offer high value to the organization while still promising high potential within the constraints of IT.

1. Work backwards from the list of new assets and services to figure out the necessary actions to achieve the goal and the IT capabilities needed to fulfill it.
2. Brainstorm specific IT capabilities that will be needed to ensure that the new assets and services are successfully launched and supported.
3. Be succinct. Each capability should have an actionable statement associated with it.
4. Prioritize the projects by considering if the initiative is something you feel will make an impact on the digital business initiative it’s meant to support. Eliminate any projects that will not make a direct impact.
5. Collect insights over difficulties that might be encountered, steps that need to be taken, and resources needed to achieve the goal.
6. Review your CEO-CIO Alignment and CIO Business Vision reports and identify projects based on the following:
1. IT’s target maturity and projects that will help achieve target state
2. Low-performing core services

Note: Goals, capabilities, and projects will most likely have a many-to-many relationship at this stage. Ensure your alignment activity provides clarity and insight into why and how you chose the IT capability improvement projects that you did for your strategy.

Create or improve:

Business capabilities

IT capabilities

Capabilities are what a business does to enable value creation, rather than how.

IT initiatives are projects with a definitive start and end date, and they enhance, create, maintain, or remove business capabilities.

• Outputs from previous step
• Heat map of current IT capability maturity

• List of IT capability improvement projects

• Report from Info-Tech’s IT Management & Governance Diagnostic

• CIO
• IT leadership

• Project profiles
• IT resourcing estimates

• Project metrics
• Updated IT budget
• Updated IT resourcing
• Written project profiles

• IT budget
• Project profile slides from previous step
• Info-Tech’s Resource Supply-Demand Management Calculator

• CIO
• PMO leader
• IT leadership team

Which account?

• Labor
• Hardware
• Software
• Services
• Contractors
• Personnel
• Depreciation
• Telecommunications
• Administrative overhead

Which cost type?

• Operating
• Capital

Items for consideration?

• Labor = internal time spent by FTEs
• Contractors = for augmenting IT staff
• Services = systems acquisition and integration, managed services (e.g. SaaS)

• Finalized IT project list

• Affinity map
• Project timeline

• Sticky notes
• Boardroom / virtual discussion space or whiteboard

• CIO
• IT leadership team

1. Digital Business Initiative #1

1. Deploy new devices

2. Deploy new industry software solution

3. Roll out staff training

Digital Business Initiative #2

10. Recruit two additional developers

11. Deploy new development tools

12. Reorganize enterprise data management processes

Digital Business Initiative #3

13. Enact data quality standards

14. Deploy new data reporting &BI Suite

A Gantt-style roadmap depicts IT initiatives, the associated goals, and exact start and end dates for each initiative. This diagram is useful for outlining a larger number of IT initiatives and for its easily digestible and repeatable format.

Initiatives are the waypoints along a roadmap leading to the eventual destination, each bringing you one step closer. Like steps, initiatives need to be discrete: able to be conceptualized and discussed as a single, largely independent item. Each initiative must have three characteristics:

• Outcome: A change in the people, processes, or technology of the enterprise.
• Target end date: When the described outcome will be in effect.
• Owner: Who on the IT team is responsible for executing on the initiative.

This type of roadmap depicts IT initiatives, the associated goals, and exact start and end dates for each initiative. This diagram is useful for outlining a larger number of IT initiatives and for its easily digestible and repeatable format.

Identify digital business initiatives prioritized by the organization.

Leverage industry roundtables where necessary.

Understand the business case supporting each business initiative to validate the business initiative roadmap.

Leverage IT competencies to improve upon ‘business as usual’.

Identify new and/or transformed digital business capabilities that need to be supported by IT.

Identify new or improved IT capabilities required to support these digital business capabilities.

Brainstorm and prioritize projects for improving or supporting IT capabilities.

Calculate changes to IT resource demand.

Develop project metrics and estimate budget needs.

Create project profiles.

Consolidate projects into initiatives.

Build project timeline.

Ross Armstrong

Principal Research Director, CIO Advisory

Info-Tech Research Group

Joanne Lee

Principal Research Director, CIO Advisory

Info-Tech Research Group

Ross Armstrong is a Principal Research Director in the CIO Advisory practice at Info-Tech Research Group, covering the areas of IT strategic planning, digital strategy, digital transformation, and IT innovation.

Ross has worked in a variety of public and private sector industries, including automotive, IT, mobile/telecom, and higher education. All his roles over the years have centered around data-driven market research – in pursuit of insightful and successful product development and product management – at their core.

In addition to his long tenure as an Info-Tech Research Group analyst, Ross has worked in research and product innovation positions at Autodata Solutions (J.D. Power), BlackBerry, and Ivey Business School (Western University).

Ross holds a Master of Arts degree in English Language & Literature from Western University (UWO) and has served as an advisory board member for a number of not-for-profit and educational institutions.

Joanne is an executive with over 25 years of providing leadership in digital technology and management consulting across both public and private entities from solution delivery to organizational redesign across BC, Ontario, and globally.

A Director within KPMG’s CIO Advisory Management Consulting services and practice lead for Digital Health in BC, Joanne has led various client engagements from ERP Cloud Strategy, IT Operating Models, Data and Analytics maturity to process redesign. More recently, Joanne was the Chief Program Officer and Executive Director responsible for leading the implementation of a $450M technology and business transformation initiative across 13 hospitals and community services for one of the largest health authorities in BC.

A former clinician, Joanne has held progressive leadership roles in healthcare, with accountabilities across IT operations and service management, data analytics, project management office (PMO), clinical informatics, privacy and contract management. Joanne is passionate about connecting people, concepts and capital.