Turning Vision into Reality – A CIO’s Guide to Digital Transformation
Guest Speaker, Tony Peleska, CIO, Minnesota Housing Finance Authority, sharing his thoughts on developing a digital office. This is a wide-ranging presentation on the critical components required to build, nurture and execute a technology vision within an organization. The emphasis of the technology vision, he says is to be engrained into the organizational strategy and championed by the CEO for a successful implementation.
Right at the beginning, an organization ought to look within and understand the key components required to embark on a long journey such as this. Also, important is to understand the key stakeholders and the manner of interaction amongst these stakeholders. Operational workflows, priority charts and project management structures within the organization must be studied well to define what the eventual success would look like. A clear understanding between the present-day problems and the future solutions/opportunities is a must before the start of the journey.
At the Minnesota Housing Finance Authority, Tony, saw multiplicity of systems which lead to a very unfriendly customer interface and limited the ability of the organization to help them. The starting point of developing and executing a technology vision was to map the customer processes with the organizational processes. To understand where the customers got in touch with the organization, what data did they bring in and how did the organization process it.
This helped achieve two-fold results – identify the silos and identify the bottlenecks. Having identified the problem areas, it was time to create a new structure that was not only going to streamline internal processes but also align them with customer interactions and thereby, creating a unified and customer-friendly organization and organizational processes.
A technology vision was not just limited to implementing IT solutions, but the idea was to utilize IT to make business work better. This resulted in the advent of – Business Technology Services – wherein the Business was the primary stakeholder and the IT was helping technology run the business better. The structure included both IT and Business personnel working in collaboration without any distinction of function.
Developing and implementing a technology vision will need a cultural shift in the organization and it is incumbent upon the leadership to drive it. Once the culture begins to change the actual business changes, acceptance of the vision and execution becomes a much easier proposition.
The organization can quickly change from a silo-driven, customer unfriendly beast to a more agile, customer-centric organization that is ready to embrace future opportunities.
Click here to view the presentation from Mr. Tony Peleska, CIO, Minnesota Housing Finance Authority
