就Christian Mate而言，在部署创新技术的同时实现卓越运营并不是一个非此即彼的命题。他说，两者都对于履行首席信息官的工作职责至关重要，这需要“保持光明”的古板口号，同时专注于更令人兴奋的创新以实现增长。
“在某种程度上，人们希望IT就像你拿起电话时的拨号音一样存在，”或者，“足球比赛的裁判，但没有人注意到你，”家庭健康提供商Elara Caring的首席信息官Mate说。
Mate的卓越运营意味着确保新员工在第一天和之后的每一天都拥有合适的设备和应用程序。这对IT来说不是一件小事，因为Elara在200个州的17个地点开展业务，拥有26,000名护理人员和60,000名患者。
帮助Mate和他的团队在保持优质服务的同时实现数字化的推动和拉动的是Elara的文化，它鼓励员工进行实验 – 但当项目没有成功时快速做出决定并迅速失败 – 以及投资于能够带来新想法和观点的人。
根据 Gartner 的 2023 年首席信息官和技术执行议程，首席信息官现在有更多的战术抱负，尤其是在数字计划方面。但是，尽管该报告发现增长很重要，但通过改善客户体验和卓越运营，增长却超过了增长。
对于首席信息官来说，这是一项艰巨的任务，他们感到有压力要做这一切。报告称：“这给首席信息官和IT部门带来了巨大的问题，因为他们希望创建下一代IT环境并管理日常挑战，例如网络安全，数字业务技术平台开发和卓越运营。
根据Forrester的新领导层预测，只有10%的技术高管能够成功推动长期增长。这是因为“大量技术领导者……只是不要专注于增长。他们通常专注于服务交付和质量，“Forrester副总裁兼高级研究总监Matthew Guarini说。
瓜里尼说，那些正在向成长型思维过渡的人“往往在增长桌上没有一席之地和/或与企业没有必要的共同责任”。他说，那些确实在谈判桌上占有一席之地和良好业务一致性的首席信息官们“只是没有带来成功”。这使得一小部分领导者（在这种情况下为10%）能够成功实现长期增长。
Guarini说，技术领导者必须专注于与业务一致的技术战略，以实现相互竞争的任务。
“与业务一致的技术战略建立在架构和敏捷性、’什么’和’如何’的基础上，以实现更好的协调，”他解释道。一致性还需要承诺采用以人为本的技术方法，以实现有效协作。当协作文化强大时，绩效就会提高。
这就是诀窍：弄清楚如何让每个人都开心。在这里，首席信息官和其他 IT 领导者将讨论他们确保 IT 卓越以支持业务增长的战略。
跨职能协作
教师联邦信用社拥有超过 460,000 名成员和 9 亿美元的资产，已经是美国最大的信用社之一。尽管如此，首席技术官Suresh Renganathan的崇高目标是使TFCU成为“美国的信用合作社”。
Renganathan敏锐地意识到，要做到这一点，不仅需要投资技术以对其流程进行数字化转型，还需要实践“人帮助人”的原则，并在创新和增长的能力与提高效率之间取得平衡。在内部，我们说，’让我们在转型的同时表演，’“Renganathan说。
他说，虽然采用和维护敏捷方法来更快地适应行业变化至关重要，但可能会“过分强调技术和期望，比如人工智能，并假设一切都将由技术解决”。
Renganathan回应Guarini说，他已经建立了跨职能协作，并使用传统和数字渠道来收集有关哪些有效和哪些无效的反馈。“这弥合了创新和卓越运营之间的差距，”他说。
真正倾听企业的需求并提出问题，同时授权他的团队进行实验，这一点至关重要，凯悦酒店首席信息官 Eben Hewitt 同意。
Hewitt说：“我的首要任务是确保我的团队的工作以倾听和寻找技术方法为基础，以创造物业级灵活性，并通过创新实现组织增长。对设计和系统的深思熟虑确实是一种同理心、想象力和结构严谨的行为。
他说，凯悦的实验性思维和倾听优先的方法被大量应用于IT对创新的追求。通过采用敏捷的工作方式，IT 部门“不断测试和学习，根据我们从客人和同事那里听到的内容，确定提高运营效率和增强体验的方法。
建立强大的技术基础
然而，首席信息官们承认，取得平衡并不总是那么容易。总部位于圣胡安的Banco Popular为IT设定了三个主要优先事项：建立强大的技术基础，以更好地为银行的未来做好准备，提供数字客户体验，并加强其数据基础。
“我们经常使用的类比是一棵树，确保我们有非常强大的根，并且不会失去对稳定性、可靠性、可用性和效率的关注，”执行副总裁兼首席信息和数字战略官 Camille Burckhart 说。“我们当然专注于业务转型并确保我们保持领先地位，但永远不会失去这些强大根基。
但实现这些目标可能是一个挑战，Burckhart说。“如果只有创新和转型，而不确保运营稳定，你就会遇到麻烦。但是，当你非常专注于两者时，你可以有一个健康的平衡，并确保卓越的运营不会抑制你的创新欲望。
另一个挑战是，实施技术而不升级几年的日子已经结束，抵押贷款服务商Cenlar的高级副总裁兼首席信息官Steve Taylor指出。
“我们不得不不断提高我们的比赛水平。始终保持最新状态并领先于游戏是一项挑战，“他说。“对于我们来说，要提高运营效率，我们不能只是向后倾斜。我们始终必须寻求更有效地做事，并为客户提供竞争对手尚未给予的更好的服务。
这需要更快、更有效地行动，泰勒说他经常向他的团队宣讲，特别是在安全领域。“安全团队验证我们是安全的，但问题是黑客正在寻找更多的黑客方式。所以我们总是必须提高我们的比赛水平，否则我们会落后，然后再次追赶为时已晚。
休伊特说，在增长的同时实现卓越运营始终是一种平衡行为。 “我认为这几乎就像一种叫做’多臂老虎机’的机器学习算法，”它有两个轴心：利用和探索，他说。
“这是一种推荐引擎来确定向哪些客户提供哪些产品的方法，”他解释道。这可能意味着利用三分之二的时间，然后运行智能，廉价，快速的概念验证实验来确定什么可能有腿。
休伊特在他的书《技术战略模式》中讨论了这个问题，他指出，大流行后，人们很容易降低战略的优先级，并认为由于不可预测性而提前一年计划可能是愚蠢的。“但这不是一个足够好的理由不这样做。一个人可以机智地战略性地分配资源，同时仍然保持敏捷，“他说。
例如，IT 部门正在努力构建更简单的技术堆栈，以提高凯悦全球近 1,300 家酒店的酒店效率，以及更多定制系统，以推动竞争优势并改善客户体验。朝这个方向迈出的一个举措是最近宣布与Sabre合作升级其中央预订系统。
不要忘记IT的基础知识
Cenlar的IT团队在内部使用技术，并确保在将其部署到客户之前通过所有适当的验证和质量保证流程。泰勒强调，系统永远不应该为了满足一个时间表而过早发布，并指出质量比速度更好。
“确保你在那里推出的产品是最好的产品，”他说。有很多公司试图迅速走出去。…我们正在确保推出最优质的产品，以便我们能够保持最新状态。
在急于创新的过程中，团队可能会忘记基础知识，例如测试不足，因此持续监控对于确保您提供价值至关重要，TFCU 的 Renganathan 补充道。
他学会了艰难的方式。当 Renganathan 在他以前的公司 Farmers Group Insurance 率先进行数字化时，IT 希望为其客户联系管理系统带来卓越的运营。他的团队提出了一个概念，以某种方式汇集所有客户通信，以便客户“以有意义的方式”收到一两个回复。
但在急于部署新功能的过程中，“它以错误的方式引发了大众传播，”Renganathan 回忆道，并造成了许多声誉风险，IT 不得不花费数天时间修复这些风险，因为没有明确和严格的操作实践。
这意味着必须让“紧急的事情打断重要的事情，”他说。“大多数部门不得不放弃一切。他说，以加快上市速度的名义急于部署是很诱人的。同样重要的是，有时不要低估利益相关者对变革的抵制。
“公司可以固执地坚持某些东西而不转向。这是一个陷阱，始终有一个非常全面的风险评估实践是至关重要的，“Renganathan说。“我们生活在一个非常敏感的世界。
为成功而专门建立团队
在满足客户技术需求的同时实现创新和增长的能力需要拥有专注于稳定性和敏捷性的专门团队，Banco Popular 副首席信息官 Jorge Ortiz 说。“没有人在一个团队和另一个团队之间跳跃是我们取得成功的方式，”他说。
他的同事 Burckhart 对此表示赞同，并指出 IT 满足所有业务需求的最有效方式是团队共享目标。通过这种方式，“你可以更好地平衡创新和卓越运营，并确保团队不会以牺牲可靠性/稳定性为代价来实现敏捷性，”她说。
Cenlar首席数字官Josh Reicher也认为，一方面，独立和独特的团队对于保持组织的安全和高效以及创新和现代化是必要的。
“卓越运营是 IT 部门工作的重要组成部分，”Reicher 说。所有基础架构和工具“只是成为称职的 IT 组织意味着什么的基线。没有要选中的框。我们还需要不断改进并保持技术趋势的领先地位。
这种方法对Elara的Mate不起作用，他说，虽然几年前他“可能将创新和运营视为两个独立的桶”，但医疗保健的竞争环境不再允许这样做。
“我没有奢侈的’在这里，我用左手做手术，用右手做创新的东西’。我必须缩小差距，“他说。他这样做的一种方法是使用人工智能来优化物流，并更快地将护理人员从一个患者转移到另一个患者，从而增加他们可以花在每个病人身上的时间。
他还依靠自动化来帮助 IT 部门处理他们每个月必须“以非接触方式”响应的大量事件。
这是技术如何帮助解决卓越运营与加速增长难题的核心示例。但凯悦的休伊特说，IT往往过于关注“技术本身，这造成了如此多的流失和低效率。
他的解决方案是“坚持凯悦的宗旨……关爱员工，让他们做到最好——因为我们继续通过创新的技术增强来提高我们的卓越运营。忠于公司的目标是有意义和准确地衡量任何技术创新有效性的最佳方式。
英文原文：
CIOs set their agendas to achieve IT’s ultimate balancing act
Ensuring operational excellence versus accelerating business growth has long been a conundrum (and trade-off) for IT. Greater prominence and honed IT strategies have today’s IT leaders better positioned to finally strike the right balance.
Achieving operational excellence while deploying innovative technologies is not an either/or proposition as far as Christian Mate is concerned. Both are critical for meeting the responsibilities of the job of CIO, which requires the staid mantra of “keep the lights on” while concentrating on the more exciting innovating for growth, he says.
“To some extent, folks expect IT to be there like a dial tone when you pick up a phone,” or, “the referee at a football game, but no one noticed you,” says Mate, CIO of home health provider Elara Caring.
Operational excellence for Mate means ensuring a new employee has the right equipment and applications on day one and every day thereafter. That’s no small task for IT given that Elara operates in 200 locations in 17 states, and has 26,000 caregivers and 60,000 patients.
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER
From our editors straight to your inbox
Get started by entering your email address below.SUBSCRIBE
What helps Mate and his team achieve the push-and-pull of digitizing while maintaining quality service is Elara’s culture, which encourages employees to experiment — but make decisions quickly and fail fast when projects are not panning out — as well as investing in people who can bring new ideas and perspectives.
ELARA CARING
CIOs have more tactical aspirations right now.
Especially with regard to digital initiatives, according to Gartner’s 2023 CIO and Technology Executive Agenda. But while the report found that growth was important, it was outranked by improving the customer experience and operational excellence.
That is a tall order for CIOs, who feel the pressure to do it all. “This creates large problems for the CIO and IT department as they look to create the next-generation IT environment and manage day-to-day challenges such as cybersecurity, digital business technology platform development, and operational excellence,” according to the report.
Only 10% of tech executives will be successful at driving long-term growth, according to new leadership predictions from Forrester. This is because “a large number of tech leaders … just don’t focus on growth. They are typically focused on service delivery and quality,’’ says Matthew Guarini, vice president and senior research director at Forrester.
Those who are transitioning to a growth mindset “often lack a seat at the growth table and/or do not have the shared accountabilities with the business that are necessary,’’ Guarini says. The CIOs who do have a seat at the table and great business alignment, “just don’t deliver success,’’ he says. “This leaves a small percentage — 10% in this case — of leaders that will deliver long-term growth successfully.”
Tech leaders must focus on a business-aligned tech strategy to deliver on the competing mandates, Guarini says.
“A business-aligned technology strategy is built on architecture and agility, the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of better alignment,’’ he explains. “Alignment also requires a commitment to take a human-centric approach to technology to collaborate effectively. Performance improves when the culture of collaboration is strong.”
That’s the trick: figuring out how to keep everyone happy. Here, CIOs and other IT leaders discuss their strategies for ensuring IT excellence in support of business growth.
Just listen
With more than 460,000 members and $9.7 billion in assets, Teachers Federal Credit Union is already among the largest credit unions in the US. Still, CTO Suresh Renganathan has the lofty goal of making TFCU “America’s credit union.”
Renganathan is keenly aware that to do so requires not only investing in technology to digitally transform its processes but also practicing the principle of “people helping people,’’ and balancing the ability to innovate and grow with achieving efficiencies. “Internally, we say, ‘Let’s perform while we transform,’’’ Renganathan says.
TFCU
While adopting and maintaining an agile approach to adapt to industry changes more quickly is paramount, there can be an “overemphasis on technology and expectations, like AI, and assuming everything will be solved by tech,” he says.
Echoing Guarini, Renganathan says he has instituted cross-functional collaboration and a continuous feedback loop using traditional and digital channels to collect feedback on what works and what doesn’t. “That bridges a gap between innovation and operational excellence,” he says.
Truly listening to what the business wants and needs and asking questions while empowering his team to experiment is of paramount importance, agrees Eben Hewitt, CIO of Hyatt Hotels.
“My overarching priority is ensuring my team’s work is grounded in listening and finding ways for technology to create property-level flexibility and enable organizational growth through innovation,’’ Hewitt says. “Thoughtful consideration of design and systems is truly an act of empathy, imagination, and structural rigor.”
Hyatt’s experimental mindset and listen-first approach are heavily applied to IT’s pursuit of innovation, he says. By taking an agile approach to work, IT is “constantly testing and learning to identify ways to create operational efficiencies and enhanced experiences based on what we hear from guests and colleagues.”
Plant strong roots
Yet, CIOs admit it is not always easy to strike a balance. San Juan-based Banco Popular has set three main priorities for IT: Build a strong technology foundation to better prepare the bank for the future, provide a digital customer experience, and strengthen its data foundation.
“The analogy we often use is of a tree, making sure we have very strong roots and don’t lose focus on stability, reliability, availability, and efficiency,” says Camille Burckhart, executive vice president and chief information and digital strategy officer. “We are certainly focused on transforming the business and ensuring we stay ahead, but never losing site of those strong roots.”
But meeting these objectives can be a challenge, Burckhart says.
“If you only have innovation and transformation without making sure the operation runs stable, you run into trouble. But when you have a very laser focus on both you can have a healthy balance and ensure operational excellence doesn’t inhibit your desire to innovate.”
Another challenge is that the days of implementing technology and not upgrading for a couple of years are over, notes Steve Taylor, senior vice president and CIO of mortgage subservicer Cenlar.
“We are constantly having to raise our game.
It’s a challenge to always stay current and ahead of the game,’’ he says. “For us to drive operational efficiency, we can’t just be leaning backward. We always have to look to do things more effectively and provide better service to our clients that our competition hasn’t already given them.”
This requires moving faster and more effectively, which Taylor says he constantly preaches to his team, especially in the area of security. “The security team validates we are secure, but the problem is that the hackers are finding more ways of hacking. So we always have to be upping our game or we’ll fall behind and then it’s too late to catch up again.”
Hewitt says achieving operational excellence alongside growth is always a balancing act.
“I think of it almost like a machine learning algorithm called ‘multi-armed bandit,’” that has two axes: exploit and explore, he says.
“It’s a way for, say, a recommender engine to determine which products to offer to which customers,’’ he explains. “That might mean taking advantage of the tried and true two-thirds of the time and then running smart, inexpensive, quick proof-of-concept experiments to determine what might have legs.”
HYATT HOTELS
Hewitt discusses this in his book, Technology Strategy Patterns, noting that post-pandemic, it’s easy to deprioritize strategy and think that it might be foolish to plan out a year in advance because of unpredictability. “But that’s not a good enough reason not to. One can be tactful and allocate resources strategically, while still being agile,” he says.
For example, IT is working on building a simpler technology stack to improve on-property efficiency for Hyatt’s nearly 1,300 hotels around the world, as well as more customized systems to drive competitive advantage and improve the guest experience. One move in that direction was a recently announced partnership with Sabre to upgrade its central reservation system.
Don’t forget the basics — and just get it done
Cenlar’s IT group uses technology internally and ensures it goes through all the appropriate validation and quality assurance processes before deploying it to clients. Systems should never go out too early just to meet a timeframe, Taylor stresses, noting that quality is better than speed.
“Make sure that what you put out there is the best product possible,’’ he says. “There are so many companies trying to get out there quickly. … We are ensuring that we are putting out the best-quality product so that we can stay current.”
In the rush to innovate, teams can forget the basics, such as insufficient testing, so constant monitoring is crucial to ensure you’re providing value, adds TFCU’s Renganathan.
He learned that the hard way. When Renganathan was spearheading digital at his previous company, Farmers Group Insurance, IT wanted to bring operational excellence to its customer contact management system. His team came up with a concept for funneling all customer communications in a way so that customers would receive one or two responses “in a meaningful way.”
But in the rush to deploy the new feature, “it triggered mass communications in a wrong way,’’ Renganathan recalls, and created a lot of reputational risks that IT had to spend days fixing because there were no clear and stringent operational practices.
That meant having to let “the urgent things interrupt the important things,” he says. “Most departments had to drop everything.” It’s tempting to rush to deploy in the name of speed to market, he says. It’s also important not to underestimate stakeholder resistance to change at times.
“Companies can stick stubbornly to something without pivoting. That’s a pitfall, and it is critical to always have a very comprehensive risk assessment practice in place,” Renganathan says. “We live in a very sensitive world.”
Purpose-build teams for success
Achieving the ability to innovate and grow while servicing customers’ tech needs requires having dedicated teams focused on stability and agility, says Banco Popular Deputy CIO Jorge Ortiz. “Not having someone jump between one team and another is the way we’ve achieved success,’’ he says.
His colleague Burckhart agrees, noting that the most effective way for IT to meet all business needs is when teams share goals. This way, “you can better balance innovation and operational excellence and ensure teams are not achieving agility at the expense of reliability/stability,” she says.
Josh Reicher, chief digital officer at Cenlar, also believes that separate and distinct teams are necessary to keep the organization safe and efficient, on the one hand, and innovating and modernizing, on the other.
“Operational excellence is part and parcel of IT doing its job,’’
Reicher says. All the infrastructure and tools are “just a baseline of what it means to be a competent IT organization. There are no boxes to be checked. We’re also required to continuously improve and stay on top of tech trends.”
That approach doesn’t work for Elara’s Mate, who says that while years ago he could “probably look at innovation and operations as two separate buckets,” the competitive environment of healthcare no longer allows for that.
“I don’t have the luxury of ‘Here I do operations in my left hand and the innovative stuff in my right hand.’ I have to close the gaps,” he says. One way he is doing that is by using AI to optimize logistics and move caregivers more quickly from patient to patient, increasing the time they can spend with each one.
He also relies on automation to help IT deal with the vast number of incidents they have to respond to every month “in a touchless fashion.”
That’s a core example of how technology is helping solve the operational excellence vs. accelerating growth conundrum. But often, Hyatt’s Hewitt says, IT gets too focused on “tech for its own sake [which] creates so much churn and inefficiency.”
His solution is to “remain grounded in Hyatt’s purpose of … caring for people so they can be their best — as we continue to sharpen our operational excellence through innovative tech enhancements. Staying true to your company’s purpose is the best way to meaningfully and accurately measure the effectiveness of any tech innovation.”
本文由数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）转载而成，来源于CIO.COM；编辑/翻译：数字化转型网默然。
免责声明: 本网站(http://www.szhzxw.cn/)内容主要来自原创、合作媒体供稿和第三方投稿，凡在本网站出现的信息，均仅供参考。本网站将尽力确保所提供信息的准确性及可靠性，但不保证有关资料的准确性及可靠性，读者在使用前请进一步核实，并对任何自主决定的行为负责。本网站对有关资料所引致的错误、不确或遗漏，概不负任何法律责任。
本网站刊载的所有内容(包括但不仅限文字、图片、LOGO、音频、视频、软件、程序等) 版权归原作者所有。任何单位或个人认为本网站中的内容可能涉嫌侵犯其知识产权或存在不实内容时，请及时通知本站，予以删除。
