Here are a couple of ways: Build an enterprise app store, gamify your organization, and support as much consumer technology as possible.
It’s tough being a CIO today. There are pressures from all corners to run, expand, and transform the business. CIOs have hunkered down able of protectionism for a few years. They’ve struggled to embrace the millennial era of computing and supply their employees and customers with the applications and tools they should really compete.
[ Seeking to hire millennials? See How To draw Young Talent: 10 Tips. ]
For instance, in coping with the BYOD movement, many CIOs are still fighting the notion of letting employees integrate their devices into the company IT infrastructure. Here’s making a big divide between the CIOs and employees who long for a similar productivity and connection of their work lives that they get from their personal lives. The long run expectations of a CIO might be in becoming a mobility architect or mobility integration specialist as she or he looks to merge these services with deployable enterprise applications.
Another key movement facing CIOs is the emergence of the cloud so as to add cost-effective virtualization and on-demand computing power to corporate infrastructures. IT groups fixated on locking down the desktop to force standardization are in for a large surprise — these common services are actually becoming available inside an easy web browser. This movement will evolve further because the cloud becomes more personal and younger employees use private and non-private third-party cloud services akin to Dropbox and Google Drive for info sharing; Evernote, Google Docs, or Microsoft Office 360 for office productivity; and Skype for primary communications. Facing a bring-your-own-cloud movement, IT organizations should piece together enterprise and consumer software both inside the cloud and at the premises to get the job done.
The final analysis is that many CIOs aren’t prepared to serve their newest constituents — the millennial generation. So how are you going to avoid having your CIO job title become a self-fulfilling prophecy of “Career Is Over”?
Become a customer-centric organization
Step one is to partner together with your key customers and stakeholders to comprehend their goals. The CIO’s goal have to be to become a partner who can advise on the way to use IT to deliver and accelerate business goals. The important thing trait this is less about being a technologist and more about collaborating with people. Merging social and collaboration tools like Jive and Yammer with traditional methods like email and in-person meetings will allow more free-form discussions between business and IT. Using crowdsourcing tools to speak with customers is in a different way to generate out-of-the-box ideas.
Prepare your infrastructure
In place of fighting the adoption of consumer-based technologies reminiscent of video collaboration through Skype, document sharing through Dropbox, and social collaboration through Yammer, prepare your corporate IT infrastructure to support these new paradigms. You would need to organize your network in relation to bandwidth, wireless, quality of service, and security.
Deliver through an enterprise app store
Much as consumers flock to places just like the Apple App Store and Google Play for apps that automate and simplify their personal lives, the worker app experience must have similar benefits. IT organizations should provide employees with applications for expense management, purchasing, HR functions, and customer interactions.
Become the executive innovation officer
CIOs who remain focused solely on infrastructures and platforms without pushing for innovation are doomed. A method to do so is to create separate groups for experimenting with new technologies. My company, Virtusa, is seeing many organizations develop separate innovation labs for integrating new technologies into the mainstream IT apps. As an instance, some financial services companies are creating public-facing sites that permit consumers try new features comparable to mobile deposits and mobile text banking.
Embrace mobility and the cloud
The longer term CIO must become an orchestrator and integrator of mobile, cloud, and analytics tools. For instance, mobile platforms and devices have destroyed constraints on physical location, so providing mobile integration with core business applications is important. Also, by using cloud services, CIOs can increase the dimensions and speed of commercial operations.
Integrate systems of record with systems of engagement
To maintain millennial employees engaged, it is important that your transactional systems (i.e., ERP and other back-office systems) and your engagement systems (i.e, social Intranets, email, and other collaboration tools) be tightly aligned. Make sure your backend systems are able to handle data from mobile devices and social networks, together with video, voice, social, and sensory data. An example of it truly is migrating legacy back-office HR systems to fashionable cloud-based HR systems like Workday.
Gamify your enterprise
Gamification is far greater than bringing Angry Birds to the enterprise. Applying the foundations of game design can motivate employees (i.e., players) to become better at their jobs. As an instance, Virtusa helps organizations apply gamification techniques to enhance productivity and quality of service within the call center.
Create an intelligent organization
Deploying analytics tools on your company can improve your ability to make real-time business decisions. Though this can be obvious, many organizations report that they still lack insights about data, despite an infinite increase within the amount of information they’re collecting and storing.
There’s no single migration route to the following generation of enterprise communications and collaboration systems and services, and Enterprise Connect delivers what that you have to evaluate the complete options. Register today and find out about the complete range of platforms, services, and applications that comprise modern communications and collaboration systems. Register with code MPIWK and save $200 at the entire event and Tuesday-Thursday conference passes or for a Free Expo pass. It happens in Orlando, Fla., March 17-19, 2014.
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