Business technology transformation: making it real

For the last several years, Forrester has been talking about making the strategic shift from IT as a business-supporting function to Business Technology (BT), where every business activity is enabled by technology and every technology decision hinges on a business need. To be clear, BT is not about “running IT like a business” or “converting IT from cost center to a profit centre”. BT also goes far beyond IT/business alignment, which implies that business and IT teams are on the same page and have a common understanding of each other, but still exist and operate independently. 

While transformation may be one of the most overused terms, it takes on real meaning as we work our way through the worst economic crisis in memory. “Never let a good crisis go to waste” is very easy to say, but really hard to execute when budgets get cut, projects are cancelled and justifying your investment feels like running the gauntlet. At the same time, consider the changes all leaders face today: engaging and adapting to empowered customers, unraveling decades-old systems and processes to increase efficiency and foster innovation and ensuring that new regulations and oversight don’t get in the way. 

For this year’s Forrester IT Forum EMEA, June 9-11 in Lisbon, our clients told us it was time to start really helping IT and business understand how to put the BT idea in action. Whether you are a CIO, Enterprise Architect or Security and Risk professional, the challenges posed by a transformational shift in the way IT operates are real. At this event, we’ll help each of the roles we serve lead the shift from IT to BT, doing so in pragmatic, no-nonsense terms; breaking the transformation into five interrelated efforts:

•    Connect people more fluidly to drive innovation and differentiation. You serve a more socially oriented, device-enabled population of both information workers and customers. You want to empower both groups without losing control of costs or hurting productivity. 

•    Make business processes more informed. You support structured business processes but lose control as they bump heads with a multitude of unstructured processes. You want to connect both forms of process to actionable data, but you struggle with quality and silos. 

•    Simplify everything. You have the tools to be more agile, but you face a swamp of software complexity and unnecessary functionality. You want technologies as well as architectures and management processes that are more fit-to-purpose. 

•    Deliver services, not assets. You want to speak in terms that the business understands, but you find your staff confined to assets and technologies. You want to shift more delivery to balance-sheet-friendly models but struggle to work through vendor or legacy icebergs. 

•    Tie every technology decision to business capabilities. Underpinning all of these efforts, you want to link every technology thought — from architecture, to infrastructure, to communities — to the core business capabilities your enterprise values. 

Each of these efforts represents both challenge and immense opportunity. Addressing them collectively rather than independently will help IT resurge and will ultimately enable the BT transformation to take root. 

Our industry keynote speakers are some of the most successful and influential IT leaders in Europe today. Gianluigi Castelli, Executive VP ICT at Eni, will discuss his company’s three year transformation plan and how falling oil prices and the credit crunch not only accelerated their plans but actually positioned the his team to play a bigger and more valuable part in Eni’s business future.

Peter Hambling, CIO Lloyds of London, will tell us how his organisation is tackling the BT challenge in a business that is all about risk management and mitigation. Charles Newhouse, Head of IT Strategy and Planning at BAE Systems will talk about his firm’s strategy to deal with the consumerisation of IT and redefine service delivery. There are few industries that are more complex, more competitive and more interconnected than the airline travel industry. At the same time, there is perhaps no industry where consumers have so much power and choice over their travels decisions.

Edouard Odier, Executive VP for IT at AirFrance/KLM, will present three case studies on how his company uses technology to deal with sudden travel crises, empower passengers and improve critical processes between aircraft and ground operations. All of these great speakers have a compelling story to tell about how they led the transformation of their own organisations and tackled numerous hurdles along the way. 

From Forrester, George Colony, Andrew Bartels, Alex Cullen, and Ted Schadler will all be presenting bold new ideas and pragmatic, no-nonsense research on the keynote stage. One of those bold new ideas will be Alex Cullen's keynote, "Planning And Delivering The Capabilities Your Business Wants."

As Alex puts it, "Business capabilities are the Rosetta Stone linking business goals, needs and operating models to the IT investments and service that enable them."

Ted Schadler will lead a panel on leveraging empowered customers and employees to drive business success and Andy Bartels will look beyond the horizon to the future of Smart Computing. 

By Simon Yates, Forrester Research

Simon Yates is vice president with Forrester Research and heads up the Forrester Leadership Board for CIOs. He blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/simon_yates. For more information on Forrester’s IT Forum EMEA 2010 please go to: www.forrester.com/itforum2010emea.