The most successful IT organizations are not order-takers: They are innovators. They aren’t sitting around waiting for projects tossed over the fence. They’ve torn those fences down. Now they’re working hand in hand with other parts of the business on cross-functional, co-located teams to drive product strategy and business value.
The very concept of having an IT project with a start and end date is becoming obsolete in the era of digital transformation.
Cynthia Stoddard, senior vice president and CIO at Adobe Systems, says that operating in this way removes the mystery about the value IT brings to the business. “Before, you were talking about projects and milestones, and people weren’t actually clear about what they were going to get,” she said. “Now they understand what they are going to get, how they can use it, and how they can plan their business around it.”
Stoddard and other CIOs and leaders share how they’ve shifted their focus in IT from managing projects to managing products and value streams in the new Harvard Business Review Analytics Services report, “Transformation Masters: The New Rules of CIO Leadership.”
Download the report to learn more about their strategies, including why Walmart CIO Clay Johnson calls his product-focused mindset “the ultimate DevOps model.”
