Norderstedt, February 20, 2017 – Transforming the IT organization in companies is an absolute necessity. They must accomplish a shift toward flexible, rapidly adaptable organizations marked by initiative and customer orientation. After all, companies’ digital lifeblood requires networked services and agile provision of IT services. This is the upshot of the roundtable held by Lufthansa Industry Solutions at the Hamburg IT Strategy Days to discuss “Digitization – the End of Traditional IT?” More than sixty CIOs and IT experts from various lines of business discussed how internal corporate IT has to be designed and structured to meet the current requirements of digital transformation processes in companies.
The part played by IT organizations is changing from traditional IT supporters to helpers and initiators for specialized departments involved in digital modification and adaptation projects. These are the key departments of a company and have to keep their eye on everything, because IT competence is more than ever becoming embedded in all divisions of a company. Hence technology-driven innovations are increasingly often taking place outside the IT organization. Considering this fact, IT managers not only have to control the IT organization per se, but also be able to manage technology expertise throughout the company.
It is now imperative to combine traditional IT infrastructure with new applications to create an agile IT environment. What is more, the technology sector itself is also increasingly undergoing change. IT organizations must orient themselves to the new technologies characterized by digitization, such as cloud, big data, mobility, or IoT, while at the same time enhancing performance quality, customer orientation, and transparency at the lowest possible IT costs – and still fulfill the ever more rigorous demands placed on security. “No easy task, but there is no way around it,” was the unanimous opinion of all who took part in the roundtable.
“Extensive changes are in store for IT organizations. CIOs will have to completely understand the processes of their company and their line of business in order to be heard and taken seriously as transformers and innovators,” emphasized Heiko Packwitz of Lufthansa Industry Solutions, who hosted the roundtable together with Franz-Helmut Gerhards of DAK – Gesundheit Unternehmen Leben. “In particular, they will have to be networkers and collaborate not only with all the departments in the company, but also with partners, service providers, and even competitors outside the boundaries of their own company. Digitization is not for lone wolves.”