Journey to a World-Class IT

In a business climate marked by constant change and increasing economic and competitive pressure, executives today seek to increase business agility, advance their digital journey, and drive shareholder value. Despite the increasing urgency to digitally transform the organization, most businesses are stuck with expensive data centers, legacy IT, an organizational design optimized for silos, lack of the right skills and competencies, to just mention some complications. This results in lengthy time-to-market for new applications, slow transition to digitalization and day-by-day an even bigger gap between what the business expects and wish for versus what IT is capable of delivering.

I regularly have discussions with organizations and companies that are looking for ways to blend their business strategy with technologies across all the entire IT value chain to better serve their customers and citizens end-to-end. In order to do so, they often have to examine their business value chains and ecosystems to accelerate digitization and achieve both cost savings and revenue growth. An unsolvable problem?

A for alignment

The key here is to have a strong alignment between IT and the business. Does that sound familiar? Of course, but it is a fact. I can tell you, as much as this have been talked about, it is still not realized in all organizations. And there are strong reasons why.
We have performed an assessment of nearly 50 companies around the world with an average market cap of US$30 billion. What we found was a strong link between the organization’s performance and their ability to align IT and the business. Organization’s profit and EPS growth were 2 to 3 times higher for companies with a close alignment between IT and the business, compared to others with less strong alignment.

A for assessment

To help organizations get a better alignment and to build World Class IT we have developed a proprietary methodology we call Journey to World Class IT. This methodology help clients measure themselves across 10 attributes to feed their continuous improvement strategies and strengthen alignment amongst the stakeholders. The ten attributes are grouped under 3 main domains: Business value, Technology effectiveness and Human capital.

The attributes cover areas like how services align with business requirements, ability to innovate, security and privacy attention, cost-effectiveness of IT and strategies to gain and retain IT competence. This is a fascinating exercise, where we both let business executives and IT executives do the same assessment. The results are usually a real eye-opener to the whole organization. 

Closing the gaps

The most important results are the gaps, where the greatest impact can be made. Based on the gaps, we produce an improvement roadmap. It is not rare, that we also get to put a business case together to simply fix the gaps and ensure that the traditional IT environment is transformed into an agile and digital IT in a hybrid cloud IT infrastructure environment. 

At CGI we have over 40 years’ experience of running world class IT, for ourselves and our customers. This means that we can also buy or simply take over the customers IT environment and help enable a future-state roadmap for the IT. 

Does it sound drastic? Well, it depends how you see it. It takes an average 5 to 7 years to modernize a company’s IT environment. However, many organizations simply cannot wait. 

We are used to working side-by-side with our customers and drawing upon our global capabilities to help identify, develop, implement and operate the strategies and solutions needed to meet their customer and citizen expectations. And I think we have a strong point and solid experience as our knowledgebase reflects insights from 5,500 client organizations located in countries, representing 82% of the world’s IT spend.