From IT to Digital Business

Chris Murphy has a must-read cover story at InformationWeek

"It's not about information technology anymore. It's about digital business. The new description is a testament to IT's advancement from a back-office, support-the-business role into a developer of products and apps that customers use directly. It's also a reflection of the central role of data analytics in letting companies see and anticipate customer tastes more quickly than ever before."

Chris is one of my favorite tech journalists because his stuff is always full of customer use cases. This article is no different. While many of the examples have been cataloged on New Florence in the last couple of years - Walgreen's prescriptions,Vail Resort's apps, Disney's MyMagic - the nice thing in this article is he summarizes composite data from the annual Global CIO Survey.

It shows a CIO pivot away from infrastructure and the back office.

"41% have leaders on the team shaping mobile strategy, and 38% have IT intimately involved in product development."

"While cutting costs is still the area of innovation cited most by survey respondents (39%), that percentage is the same as a year ago. Next come two kinds of growth initiatives: introducing an IT-led product (35%) and creating a new business model or revenue stream (31%). The fourth highest innovation priority among IT leaders, another cost cutter, is making processes more efficient -- though at 28%, it's down 11 points from a year ago. Rounding out the top five is a customer-centric priority -- engage customers in new ways -- cited by 20% of the execs in our survey, up from 13% a year ago."

"Across industries, companies are learning how different developing software for customers is from developing software for internal users. Employees "have an obligation to use your software," Walgreens' Dhar says. "There's something very different when there's no obligation to use your software.""

""The 'standardization of process' and the 'upgrade of ERP' age is past." Those activities are still necessary, of course, but the energy is around customer-facing tech."

It's a new world, out there.