The relationships between information technology (IT) organizations and the lines of business they serve are undergoing a dramatic shift, just as digital represents a revamping of the relationship between companies and their customers.
However, the context for digital is quite different depending upon whether the ‘customer’ is internal or external to the organization. For external customers, the digital story focuses on the customer journey. But for the employees of the lines of business (LOBs) who are the internal customers of IT, the story centers on self-service.
In such situations, digital transformation revamps how IT meets the changing needs of the business. Traditionally, IT has always followed a gatekeeper pattern: it doles out specific capabilities as per requirements, but retains control over applications and their underlying infrastructure.
The gatekeeper pattern, however, limits agility and slows the organization down. For most organizations, it’s time for the digital approach, which shifts this equation to one of empowerment: IT proactively looks for ways to help LOB employees with their day-to-day work by leveraging increasingly human-centric automation.
Ripe for Digital Transformation: Corporate Email
A mundane but unquestionably ubiquitous example of this shift from gatekeeper to self-service empowerment is corporate email. Internet-based email became prevalent in organizations in the early to mid-1990s, as it replaced closed electronic mail systems internal to corporations. But in the two decades since, very little has changed.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/03/07/digital-dilemma-drowning-in-email/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, ServiceNow is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Leonora Enking and Judith E. Bell.
