Is Your Firm's IT Prepared To Undertake A Key Initiative?

Why Read This?

Understand how a RAITH™ “Point of View” can help you pinpoint what your IT capabilities need to be to undertake large initiatives.

What Should IT Be Good At?

Those of you who are familiar with Chordia Consulting and our range of services, know that a common thread through much of our work is something we call the IT/CBM ™ (IT Component Business Model). Without going to too much detail (which is available elsewhere), IT/CBM ™ is a structured framework that represents all aspects of IT activity as 54 discrete ‘components’ within an 8x3 matrix. Over the years, it’s proven to be a great way to present IT problems and issue areas in an easy-to-understand, color-coded, graphical format, termed a ‘heatmap’.

What Chordia is increasingly focusing on is that this model can also be used to present a target of what an IT organization should be good at if it intends to be successful in a certain context. The same use of color-coding can indicate which activities require the highest level of capability to achieve success, and which ones require, perhaps, slightly lower levels but are still important and worthy of focus. This target ‘heatmap’ can then act as a key input to IT planning, helping an IT leadership team determine priorities and areas for improvement.

What is a Targeted IT/CBM™ Point of View?

A good example of how this can be used is to consider digital transformation - something that all enterprises are now aware of and that typically results in fundamental changes to business models, processes, and skills throughout the organization. However, inevitably (the ‘digital’ word is a clue), these changes depend on a high-level of IT capability in multiple areas – perhaps involving doing things in new ways and requiring knowledge of how to successfully use unfamiliar technologies. These IT capabilities are critical to the overall success of any digital transformation initiative; the grand plans of business reinvention will fail spectacularly if the IT organization is not able to support and enable them. No pressure if you’re a CIO, of course!

This is where the concept of the ‘target’ IT/CBM model proves invaluable. Based on knowledge of digital transformation, research, and experience, Chordia has created a ‘point of view’ IT heatmap for digital transformation (we have them for other things too, but that’s a topic for another blog). This heatmap graphically represents the areas of IT requiring high levels of capability to successfully enable digital transformation; some may not be a surprise, but others may not be things that you would immediately think of. However, they’re all important and can influence business success. Understanding the future IT capabilities required and the relative level of importance better informs IT leaders and helps them focus their efforts on the right things for the right reasons in support of the overall digital transformation effort. We think that’s pretty important and useful!

Please contact us at Chordia Consulting to learn more.