Jill Dyche’s latest book – The New IT: How Technology Leaders are Enabling Business Strategy in the Digital Age – is a definite must-read for any IT leader attempting to transform her organization into a strategic asset for the enterprise. What’s unique about The New IT is that it begins with mindset – your mindset if you are the CIO or IT leader – and it probes you to answer a key question: Who do I want to be in order to drive value? The framework that Jill provides for you to examine that question, and her model for how you take action once you know the answer, are the two conceptual jewels in this book.
Ms. Dyche presents a structure of IT organization archetypes that are the foundation for resolving the IT leader’s identity crisis. These representative profiles of the basic value models for an IT organization allow a CIO to examine both the current state of the IT organization (and by relation, the state of the CIO on the executive team) as well as identify a desired target state for the IT function. Then, armed with this self-knowledge, the reader can use the IT transformation toolkit to maximize performance in the desired value-delivery model.
Readers must encounter books at “the right moment” in order for a book to have maximum impact. For me, I certainly encountered The New IT at one of those “right moments,” when I find myself (once again) leading an IT organization through transformation on the road to maturity. Ms. Dyche’s straightforward approach, based on decades of experience and research, provided the clarity I needed to quickly frame my organization’s problem as well as the path forward. If you are an IT leader seeking to maximize the performance of your team, its value to the business, and your influence with the executive team, then this is probably the right moment for you to sample The New IT as well.
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