Time to break the mold: As this technology revolutions continues to unfold, does your IT teams have a survival plan? bnilsen/Flickr
Technology writer Nicholas Carr caused a stir in 2003 when the Harvard Business Review published his article with the provocative title “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Carr argued that IT had become an industrial infrastructure commodity just like railroads and electric power. Since IT is so widely available, it gives no one company a competitive advantage but as we approach the next economic revolution – the digital economy – can IT play a leading role in advancing the competitive advantage for businesses by closing the gap between customer expectations and their experience, or will it no longer survive?
The spread of the Internet and digital technologies is transforming how businesses operate with customers. With the pervasiveness of digital technologies such as mobile and wearable devices, delivering a seamless and continuous digital experience across multiple platforms requires IT teams to know how to design a website or app that performs in the moments that matter. But, bridging the gap between what customers experience and expect is challenging IT to stretch beyond their traditional model of operation to embrace a new way of measuring app and website performance across the digital channels. To close the distance that IT needs to cross to align with the business to have a measurable impact.
Focus on the end user experience. The language gap between IT and the business has long stifled growth to businesses succeeding. IT professionals talk about bytes, bits and user interfaces, while the businesses talks about conversion rates, sales and profits. In the digital revolution, IT needs to articulate the impact of web and mobile app performance by using common metrics that help the company engage and retain customers. Companies lose between 10-30 percent of the their customers annually, and even more in the online world. As the number of entry points for customers to engage with businesses grows, learning how to turn IT from a tool to a weapon can lower the attrition rate of customers.
Progress to new metric practices that demonstrate value in context of business results. A Gartner survey of CIOs revealed that IT budget increases averaged only 0.2 percent in 2014. The Gartner report, “Taming the Digital Dragon: The 2014 CIO Agenda,” also revealed that 51 percent of CIOs are concerned that “the digital torrent is coming faster than they can cope with” and that 42 percent don’t feel that they have the IT staff needed to face this challenge.
This squeeze means IT has to adopt new capabilities to keep pace with the flow of data and communication as the proliferation of digital tools becomes globally adopted. The digital experience will require IT to drive alongside the business by using common metrics such as customer adoption, engagement and satisfaction to remain relevant.
Get in front of the execs – don’t think like a back office. The proliferation and volume of devices with which consumers can access digital content has converted a niche into a transformative global industry. The use of apps that customers use to purchase goods on devices – such as games or publication subscriptions has become a significant industry. The volume of such purchases was almost zero
in 2009 and by 2013, sales totaled nearly $6 billion.1
As the volume of digital flows, keeping pace with this adoption rate requires the business to negate the lingering, and mistaken, perception that IT is a commodity. The biggest opportunity for the group is to explain to business executives that promoting the company’s brand to consumers are about the effectiveness of the technology serving them.
The proliferation of digital channels presents a battleground for a new generation of customers that choose to interact with content on mobile devices. These new channels depend on behind-the-scenes technology such as cloud computing, big data and application programming interface (API)-enabled systems of record.
While IT still needs to address traditional challenges that come up in the digital experience, including developing the right functionality to interact when and where customers expect to, IT also needs to correlate the data that measures the performance of websites and apps with business activities to measure customer adoption, engagement, satisfaction or loyalty.
As IT and the business get closer to understanding each other, IT will become a partner to the business. They will get a seat at the table with the company’s Chief Digital Officer, they’ll be able to partner with multidisciplinary product teams, and develop an agility that enables creation of new products that have a better chance of being market disruptors.
When IT can speak the language of business, we can communicate how technology design can optimize a very positive user experience that results in digital business outcomes that create brand loyalty and impact to the top the line. Businesses will then know why IT matters.
As this technology revolutions continues to unfold, does your IT teams have a survival plan?
Aaron Rudger is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Keynote.
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