In the past few years, and with the focus on digital and business transformation, IT has evolved from a support function and enabler of business demand to enabling overall business success and transformation. IT leaders are now pushing teams in a way where it has less to do with IT infrastructure and more around business operations. Infrastructure is the commodity now, and it’s all about the operational visibility, inter-operational intelligence, speed of detection, rate of change, and work-flow automation.
As IT leaders experience this shift, they will benefit from aligning their business systems teams to provide their C-suite with the level of business intelligence and operational analysis necessary for them to drive their organization with confidence. Historically, many companies relied on bottom-up reporting, which means teams operated in silos and, inadvertently, delivered incomplete business narratives to leadership. These individual narratives do not focus on the overall health of the business, resulting in additional risk to the business and slow or ineffective change initiatives. By better aligning IT and business systems to the C-Suite, IT teams can more swiftly make impactful changes and present results directly back to their respective dashboards.
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Seeing this opportunity 18 months ago, I partnered with internal teams and together we learned, built, and deployed a business intelligence framework based on cloud-based technology we already possessed. In less than three weeks, we created a repeatable, executive dashboard that affords even better visibility into operational performance. This work laid the foundation by which all other business intelligence needs could be integrated and accelerated at unprecedented accuracy levels within our organization.
As my role has evolved from VP of IT to most recently being named in a newly created position of VP of Business Intelligence & Digital Transformation, I am responsible for (and hold metrics towards) items an IT department would traditionally never hold responsibility for, like the implementation of data integration between all data source systems and our business strategy as it relates to Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) so we can operate smarter and more effectively.
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In contrast, if someone asked me about IT and my role years ago, I’d likely be talking about redundancy, resiliency, and security of the network. While still immensely valuable to any business, IT as a whole is now recognized as business leaders ask, “what can IT do for me?” For them, they now look to IT for data to fuel operational intelligence needs, real-time data visualization & forecasting, and system interfaces to support predictive operational visibility and business intelligence strategy. These are, in fact, our new success metrics.
