Intellyx BrainBlog for Evolven by Jason Bloomberg
At Intellyx, we like to point out that today’s digital transformation differs from the business transformation fads of the past because it has no end state. There’s no time when organizations can sit back and say that they are digitally transformed. Instead, digital transformation recognizes that change is ongoing, expected, and never-ending.
Furthermore, digital transformation consists of customer-driven change, and the quantity and pace of such change will itself continue to increase as long as the enterprise’s underlying technology is up to the task.
Dealing with change, therefore, is job #1 for IT shops of digitally transforming organizations – and such change is always accelerating.
For these reasons, we say that to succeed with digital transformation, organizations must adopt change itself as a core competency – not just among the customer-facing business units, but across the entire enterprise. In particular, IT must make change a core competency as well.
What, then, does it mean for IT to adopt change as a core competency? What kinds of change must the technology organization deal with, and how can it get better at both responding to change, and leveraging change for competitive advantage?
Intentional vs. Unintentional Change
The first step in adopting change as a core competency is to understand all the different types of change that might impact the IT shop.
While some changes fall into the category of surprises or other unintentional changes, most change is actually intentional. Provisioning tech resources, both physical and virtual, fall under the banner of intentional changes. However, such changes occur in dramatically different timeframes.
For example, legacy modernization may take decades. Technology refresh cycles generally occur on two to three-year cycles. Traditional asset provisioning, say, asking IT for a server, may take weeks to months. Virtualization and cloud computing can accelerate the provisioning of virtual machines to timeframes on the order of minutes to hours.
Each of the types of changes listed above typically include manual human actions, with increasing automation enabling shrinking timeframes. In addition, the longer the timeframe, the more likely a particular change actually consists of a sequence of smaller changes.
