The pandemic has transformed Accelerate Innovation the way businesses used to operate. It has forced brick and mortar businesses to go online. It also left its mark on IT teams. Businesses who don’t have appropriate procedures and policies in place to facilitate remote work struggled to adjust to the new reality. 

 

On the flipside, businesses who already have tools, policies and procedures in place for remote work thrived. All this warrants a change in approach, Organziations have remapped their priorities and tweaked their strategy in order to overcome emerging challenges.

 

Rapid adoption of cloud technologies, digital transformation accelerated this change and forced businesses to change their IT priorities in order to stay relevant. Organizations who adapted well to the changing dynamics are the ones who benefited from this shift.

 

As the pandemic effects started to go away, businesses ditched their mantra of survival and started shifting resources towards innovation and accelerating growth. If your business is planning to do the same or has already started on this path, you are at the right place.

 

In this article, distributed denial of service will highlight six key priorities organziation should set to speed up innovation and growth.

6 IT Priorities Organziations Should Set Today

Here are five IT priorities organizations must set in order to innovate and achieve a level of growth.

Strategy

Gone are the days when IT used to be an isolated functional unit looked upon by business leaders as a money pit. Today, it has become a key strategic objective for organizations. It is now being seen as a facilitator to help organizations drive business value. That is why it is now part of every conversation.

 

This has also given IT leaders more freedom and control as they now have a say even in board meetings. With the focus slowly shifting from tactical to strategic, IT leaders must ditch chasing short term goals for long term vision. They should always look at the big picture and broaden their horizon.

 

Instead of wasting time on tactical initiatives, leverage automation so you can focus more on strategic objectives. This will free your IT team from mundane tasks and help them focus on innovation and growth. When developing an IT strategy, focus on creating alignment with business goals. Create a roadmap that outlines steps, measures and milestones you will take to achieve your goal. Lastly, lay down the guiding principles to keep your team on the right track.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has become a top agenda for organization for quite some time now and rightly so. It can not only improve the overall operational efficiency of the organization but can also help you bring products and services faster to market to gain a competitive advantage. Moreover, it can also improve customer satisfaction as it allows businesses to meet customer needs more effectively.

 

Thanks to digital transformation, businesses can bring down their costs while improving the overall quality of the products and services. That is why we are seeing a wide range of businesses across multiple industries adopting digital transformation. Sadly, not every business jumping on the digital transformation bandwagon is achieving success with it. 

 

In fact, 70% of digital transformation initiatives have failed to meet its objectives. This is because of lack of maturity and lack of interest from board members and top executives. To overcome this issue, digital transformation leaders must convince them and make them visualize the real perks of digital transformation to get their support.

User Experience

Successful businesses always put user experience over everything else and you will have to do the same if you want to succeed. By putting user experience and customer experience at the heart of your product development lifecycle, you can deliver a product that can deliver an exceptional user experience every time.

 

In fact, conducting in depth user research and collecting user requirements are also the first stage of software development life cycle. They regularly take user feedback and bring improvements in the future versions in the light of their feedback. This way, their users always get the experience they want, which builds brand loyalty and improves customer satisfaction. 

Identifying and Capitalizing On Opportunity

In today’s rapidly changing IT and business environment, businesses will have to constantly come up with new ideas, create new products and bring something new to the table to stay competitive. They could not rest on their laurels for too long as any of their  competitors could take over them before they even knew it.

 

That is why it is important for businesses to keep looking for new opportunities, revenue streams and markets. IT and business leaders should work closely with heads of other functional units to identify these opportunities and develop a strategy to take advantage of those opportunities.

Cybersecurity

How can we forget cybersecurity? Well we can’t. Data is one of the most important assets for businesses and businesses should go above and beyond to protect that data. If you want to succeed at it, you will have to make cybersecurity a shared responsibility instead of putting all the responsibility on the IT and cybersecurity team. 

 

Every employee needs to play their part to achieve cybersecurity goals. Business leaders should organize training programs to equip employees with the right education regarding best security practices and give them access to security tools and secure hardware such as antiddos so they can protect themselves from cybersecurity attacks.

Hiring and Retention

The widening talent shortfall in the IT and cybersecurity industry is making it more difficult for businesses to find the right talent. The great resignation has also made it a daunting challenge for IT managers to retain their best talent. Instead of looking outside your company for new talent, you can prepare future leaders by nurturing them and encouraging existing employees to learn new skills so they are ready to wear multiple hats at once. Provide them the career progression and growth opportunities and help them strike the best work life balance to retain them.

 

What are your IT priorities and why? Share it with us in the comments section below.