2020 IT Goals: Collaboration, Disruption, and Owning Your Data

New Year’s resolutions are often passive, empty promises that we toss aside and forget about soon after January begins.

For IT leaders, the new year is an optimal time for preparing, organizing and launching new strategies and initiatives.

Evolving business trends, security issues and increasing government oversight of many IT activities, combined with a seemingly never-ending series of disruptive technologies, make it essential to begin thinking about tactics and goals as soon as possible for a successful 2020.

The Importance of Collaboration:

Make certain your IT unit is considered a business partner, not an order-taker.

Schedule meetings with key enterprise leaders to review IT’s business value based on the project history in the past year. Reflect and understand how IT can support the new year’s business goals.

Incorporate valuable feedback into a cohesive, actionable strategy to create blueprints for a 2020 IT plan. Get involved in the budgeting cycle.

Make certain that funds are delegated properly in order to fund the strategy — don’t leave it up to the business partners to do this on their own. This type of approach ensures that the CIO is perceived as an enterprise thought leader, while providing a convenient launch platform for IT’s 2020 business mission.

As a result, transparency is enabled into the ongoings of IT, providing a basic framework for measuring high-level results in 2020; and allowing ongoing, quantifiable metrics to assess those results.

Get a Hold on Disruption

In the new year and beyond, we can expect to see business and technology disruption trends to continuously evolve.

IT has an increased responsibility and opportunity to help organizations prepare for the future. How can we gain better control over an often chaotic, unpredictable market?

Implementing a transformation management office is one such control measure, that can identify promising new transformative technologies and methods and administer enterprise-wide transformation initiatives  – whether in the back office or front office.

Proactive foresight is another means to mitigate risk and be proactive about issues before they happen. Creating a six- to twelve-month roadmap is a simple yet effective way to look at future ideas using a weighting system. As such, IT professionals can determine which initiatives to prioritize.

Spontaneity does not work in one’s favor – especially in the instance of fighting fires. If you’re not planning ahead, your organization is always going to be at a higher risk.

Own Your Data

Data collection, storage, and management has long been the responsibility of IT departments.

Data analysis, however, is usually handled within individual business units. Yet, more enterprises are understanding of the strategic importance of data analytics.

As analytics are increasingly performed on a much larger scale, and in real-time, there’s an emerging trend toward moving to a more centralized data analytics approach.

IT engineers and data scientists must work closely with one other and synchronously with business units to develop solutions and generate useful insights. This will lend towards faster, more achievable project success.

The IT department, or even the IT department and a separate analytics department, will be the driving force behind an organizations’ analytics capability.