Please note: the author of this blog and star of the video, Adam, is a fictional character based on the real experiences of CIOs and IT organizations that Tasktop has spoken to and/or worked with.
If you’re an under-pressure CIO who is struggling to transform their IT organization despite your best efforts, you’ve come to the right place. Because I’ve been there too.
I know all too well that the Age of Software is a major threat to my company’s prosperity, and that our future existence rests largely upon my shoulders and my IT team. It’s tough out there for CIOs. Our profession can often appear unenviable, especially when you follow the transformational playbook to a T and still fail to see any tangible gains.
Time isn’t our friend, either. Every day counts. General Electric dropping out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average – the bellwether of the U.S. economy – was a stark reminder that no one is safe in the Age of Software.
The demise of GE – the last 19th century member of the famous index and a giant of the industrial age – sent a clear message to enterprises across all industries; that no one, I repeat no one – is safe from digital disruption. Not that we CIOs need that reminder…
We’re fully aware of the mammoth task at hand and what’s at stake – we know full well that if we don’t accelerate our organization’s transformation sooner rather than later that we will be in the 50 percent of CIOs that Gartner predicts will be out of job by 2020 if they fail to transform their teams’ capabilities.
And even if we start seeing benefits of our transformation, are we set up to keep the momentum of that transformation going? After all, as Courtney Kissler (VP Digital Platform Engineering, Nike) reminds us in the foreword of the book Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations, a transformation isn’t a program, it’s a “learning organization” that’s “never done.”
Now, while there’s many parts of the IT organization that have rightfully deserved our ire at some point or another, there’s one area that more than any other that used to drive me up the wall – and that was our software delivery.
I poured huge amounts of resources into accelerating and scaling our operations to little avail. Our customers continued to complain that IT wasn’t delivering value fast enough. In the meantime, startups and digital-native companies continued to grab their slice of our market share. I felt like I was being pulled in all directions.
Why were my investments into our Agile and DevOps transformations failing? Why was the time to value (TtV) of our products still unpredictable, unmeasured and far too long? Why couldn’t I see how business value was flowing across the software delivery process? Where were the bottlenecks? The waste? The opportunities for process improvement? Why couldn’t I bridge the gulf between IT and the business?
As you can see in the below video, it turns out that I was approaching software delivery the wrong way. What I needed was a framework and system that focused on the flow of work and value across the IT organization:
If my journey resonates with you, please sign up for my educational newsletter. Over the next few months, I will be sharing tips on best practice, informative content, upcoming webinars, and highlighting other events that will help any IT organization to transform their software delivery from weakness to a strength to generate more value for the business.
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