Day-to-day operational issues like outages, security, compliance, and vendor management are taking up too much of your tech leaders’ bandwidth. This is hindering your ability to prioritize strategic initiatives.

Communicating the value of tech to non-technical audience is an art. Most make the mistake of explaining the features and specifications instead of explaining what the tech does or how it benefits real people. Another mistake is not letting the audience experience the solution e.g. using prototypes, mock-ups, and data for feedback.

Tech leaders must fall in love with a business problem first and then look for technologies to solve them and not the other way around. For example, instead of rallying for a new SaaS solution to replace the current HR system, identify the challenges to see if the SaaS solution will solve them.

Nearly two-third IT projects fail – missing deadlines, significantly exceed budget, or miss the stakeholders’ expectations. Engaging with stakeholders using techniques like Design Thinking gives insight into their journey and better understanding their motivations and expectations.

Business leaders typically focus on revenue growth, profitability, customer satisfaction, market share, operational efficiency, risks, long-term sustainability etc. Many organizations continue to operate in silo structure, with IT as one of its silos. This creates a disconnect where IT has its own metrics instead of linking them to those of the lines of businesses they serve.

Staying current with new technology trends requires investment to acquire a technology as well as developing skills within the organization to experiment and build with the technology. In some ways, the challenges described earlier can impact IT leaders’ ability to secure the needed investments.

As organizations push for more innovation, seek more control, and look to optimize IT cost, they tend to bias their decisions towards building software. Except for domains which have well established software platforms like ServiceNow, SAP, and Salesforce, the first instinct is to build. This traps organizations into a spiral of maintenance, support, and technical debt. Instead, organizations need to consider like business outcomes, time to market, operational efficiency, and risk to make build vs buy decisions.

A partner that brings independent advice instead of maximizing their own value. A partnership where negotiations are focused on contract terms instead of long-term success metrics.

The rapid advancement of AI is putting pressure of IT leaders to act fast. However, the complexities of the technology, hype, cost, and ethical concerns are stalling decision making. The fear of mistakes and reputational damage is adding to their worry.

With IT core to most operations, is it enhancing Business Continuity posture or introducing interruption? Traditional Disaster Recovery approach groups applications into broad buckets of RTO and RPO. This results in gold-plating less critical systems.

Sole focus on deliverables and productivity limits employees’ ability to venture outside their day job. A proactive program is required to fosters a culture of continuous learning and professional development.

Innovation cannot happen when employees’ operate within their silos or are afraid of taking risks. Stepping outside of IT and partnering with Line of Businesses (LOB) is necessary to spark ideas. In addition, empowering employees to take risks and experiment will provide the safety net necessary to look for unconventional approaches and creative thinking.

Many organizations struggle to fill key leadership positions. When these positions go unfilled for a long time, it impacts strategic initiatives and key decision making. A strategy to build a pipeline of talent and succession plan is needed to have a pool of next generation leaders.

Many organizations jump to software and invest in automation to implement Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery / Deployment (CD) as part of their DevOps strategy. The more important aspect, however, is the organization structure where dev and ops teams continue to operate in silos. A true DevOps strategy promotes an operating model where dev and ops come together to deliver reliable* systems that meets and exceeds the expectations.

* Reliability is one of the core pillars of well-architected frameworks like AWS, Azure, and GCP. Further, new disciplines like Site Reliability Engineering and Chaos Engineering have emerged to make organizations more proactive in addressing reliability concerns.

High-performance is not about measuring the output, but is characterized by teams that are self-directed, collaborative, flexible, accountable, and transparent. While Agile is the core foundation for building such a team, but empathy and trust, where each member is invested in the success of others, creates a true high-performing team.

Security and Compliance is everyone’s responsibility. A secure and compliant by design approach requires detailed examination of all steps of the DevOps lifecycle and integrate necessary controls into each of those steps. There will always be trade-offs where the teams would need to balance the cost of implementing the controls against the risk appetite of the enterprise. Many teams struggle because the risks, its business impact, and the risk appetite are not clearly defined or articulated.

Centralized IT governance can stifle creativity with slow decision making, while a decentralized governance can lead to chaos and shadow IT. Instead, an adaptive governance model requires a mixture of strategies: centralized bodies for decisions that have a strategy level impact (for both business or IT); cross-function bodies for items that affect business domains; and decentralized for individual technologies and systems. All of these bodies need to collaborate each other.

Most mergers & acquisitions focus on financial aspects and overlooking the value IT can bring through synergy or the drag incompatible systems and culture can have during or post transition.

Mergers and acquisitions require complex decisions to pick the best solution, merge data, integrate systems etc. Similarly, exits and spin-offs require protecting sensitive data, intellectual capital, and clear separation to avoid regulatory and legal issues. Without careful planning, these could directly impact the M&A timeline.

It is easy to get distracted with technical debate on architecture, governance, ownership, etc and leaving the strategic reason behind the M&A in the back burner. Organizations miss the opportunity to create a future state architecture and work their way backwards.