Digital transformation unlocks a ton of opportunity. How do you focus and prioritize? How do you choose what to say yes to?


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CTO & CPO, 201 - 500 employees
It's really important to go from outside to in, and to think left to right. Outside-in is basically that you've got to start with the customer in mind and really understand what's happening in the market and understand what your customer is, or prospective customers are, hiring you to do: What job did they want to hire your platform or an alternative platform to do for them? Because that starts to really get you familiar with what are the obvious features that are needed to solve the requirements that they have. And then what are the non-obvious or the latent desires that they have to solve those problems? You just have to spend a lot of time on that dimension first, before you come back to determining the solution, or how to build something. 

It's a foundational point because it can be so easy for an engineering and a product organization to start thinking about the things they know how to do, or technology they are comfortable building, and start building technology for the sake of technology. That's not really helpful. I think you see this a lot, for example, right now in AI companies. Every company that wants to get funded in the Valley is basically like, well, we're an AI company. And that's awesome. AI is a transformative technology. There’s going to be a ton of really big companies that come out of this wave, but I've talked to various senior IT leaders at big companies and they'll say, “look, if I talked to one more AI company that is solving a problem for me that I didn't even know I had or cared about, I'm going to scream. I want an AI company that's going to solve a problem that I do care about because I've got like 50 of them. So please help me with that.” So that's really what I mean when I talk about outside: start with the customer. Really start outside your four walls and then work backwards. That's outside-in. 

Left to right is really about ensuring that as a product organization, I'm not just thinking about building technology and delivering it into the market. I've got to be thinking about how that connects all the way through to what we're marketing, what we're selling, how we're supporting it, and what our channel partners are going to do. Our product really is foundational to what the customer is hiring us to do, but it really is that whole portfolio of how what we're building is aligning to what is being sold and how what is being sold by the people on the front lines is aligned into what we're building that is important.
1
CIO in Education, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
This still comes back to governance for me. Understand what the business priorities are and then align those digital transformation opportunities to those business priorities.
Director in Manufacturing, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
We always evaluate on Cost Reductions first. We always have more ideas from both the Business and from IT than we can implement. Once the value is agreed on we have the business set the priority

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