he industry analysts found that enterprises with best-in-class IT strategies
for selecting and deploying disruptive technologies significantly outperformed
their competitors across a broad range of customer-facing and business
performance indicators. "The most successful
IT strategies involve prioritizing those disruptive technologies with the
greatest potential to enable winning in a highly fluid and complex customer and
partner environment,” says Stan Elbaum, Aberdeen Group senior vice-president
of research and author of the report.
To confront change and align the IT organization with business goals,
Elbaum's research suggests that CIOs take the following actions:
- Lead regular strategic planning meetings focusing on external drivers and
corporate-wide responses. - Measure customer satisfaction in business terms often enough to manage
issues, rather than merely record trends. - Maintain a current list of potentially disruptive technologies,
understanding their potential value to the firm and to competitors. - Adopt consistent, firm-wide, business-relevant financial metrics to gauge
IT costs and value. - Validate priorities of new technologies -- and the impact of regulatory or
competitive initiatives -- with business units for a consistent, firm-wide
position regarding investment.
“The dynamics and volatility of the competitive landscape are compelling
forward-thinking CIOs to adopt SOA and provide remote support and advanced
analytics for the distributed enterprise. It's a whole new ballgame for the
winning CIO agenda,” notes Elbaum.