In speaking with our clients, it’s really interesting to hear how many leaders are interested in IT and have an intuition that it can help their organisation. They don’t need much convincing that IT can help. Many are even interested in how IT can change their business models and drive revenues. These leaders typically do one of three things:
- Set aside the idea of exploring IT for later
- Try and do some late night cramming, call a friend, and go for the DIY option
- Engage an expert
OK, so option one is a fact of a busy life, so lets assume at some point things come to a head and something needs to be done. That leaves us with two and three.
DIY versus hire an expert. Why does it always come down to this? And why are people like me always saying ‘hire an expert’. (that’s meant to be ironic).
For many leaders, spending money on experts is simply not an option, or if there are some funds available they are not enough to design and implement a strategic technology project.
For others, money is available but the value in educating and expert on their business before getting any return value doesn’t make sense.
I’ve been running a few thoughts past clients and here is where the feedback is landing:
- IT and Digital are no longer optional extras in defining your business model, embed them in strategic thinking and planning or perish
- The rate of change and the opportunities this change presents, is too much for the DIYer to understand and exploit
- Experts are increasingly becoming used to being deployed in very targeted and focused ways, so are more available to help set a design up, stress test it and map out high level action plans; leaving the fleshing out to you and your team
- The explosion of software available in the cloud means chances are you could avoid bespoke development and focus on patching together (‘integrating’ in IT-speak) existing solutions to make something special for you
- Owning infrastructure (servers, desktops and printers) is increasingly becoming ‘so yesterday’, people are loving streaming music and movie services like Spotify and Netflix at home, and so are looking for the same kind of hardware agnostic, subscription based service for all things IT.
Taking all five things above into account, are CEO”s wearing too many hats?.... I believe they have to add strategic IT to their hat collection, but they can get some really quick benefits from laser like use of experts and the move the cloud and subscriptions.
