In a CIO Innovators video interview* on SearchCIO.com, Frank Wander, CIO of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, shared his thoughts on collaboration and innovation.
The interview contains several poignant points. But one thought, shared by Wander, was especially profound: embed IT in the business. According to Wander, at Guardian, they don’t run “IT projects,” they run “business projects.”
This point highly resonates as a refreshing evolution from the past ten years of CIO’s striving to get IT aligned with the business. Now we can finally see IT for what it is: an actual part of the business that can significantly contribute to business value—not a separate cost center that drives up budgets and goes past deadlines.
Organizations that focus on collaboration and including IT (along with other players) in their cross-functional product development efforts, experience significantly better results: better quality, better productivity, better insights and decision making—and more. Numerous studies provide data on this claim, as well as our own project metrics here at SDS**.
Great results are no longer a project anomaly but a driving business necessity.
So how can we consistently achieve these results? How can we begin to get IT embedded in the business? Well, it is not going to be through the same work practices many IT and PM organizations use today. Let’s face that fact. If you want a different outcome, you need a different approach.
In our experience, such a transformation requires an alternate way of working. We have seen agile practices successfully drive this evolution, time and again. Agile is about building teams, not spreadsheets. Agile fosters communication, collaboration, participation, and has an uncanny ability to respond to change—all components required to effectively integrate within the business, not block it.
Think about it: if you really want to be embedded in the business, then be open to and explore new work practices to bring to their table. The business may not immediately embrace the idea of change, but they will love the results once you get it underway. Many of our clients proclaim they will never go back now that they have gone Agile. We hope you will too.
*Watch the entire interview at http://searchcio.techtarget.com/video/Guardian-CIO-on-how-innovation-and-collaboration-work-together?asrc=EM_NLN_15574950&track=NL-964&ad=855448&.
**We have numerous case studies we would be happy to share with you, of course. You can also preview an SDS Project Score Card at http://sds-consulting.com/agile-project-score-card.
Author: Stacy Sheldon, Director of Marketing