September 18, 2018
September 18, 2018
Contributor: Laurence Goasduff
CIOs must align business strategy and operating model, or risk the failure of their organizations digital business strategy.
Take the example of Toyota which successfully aligned business strategy and operating model. For the past few decades, robots have been responsible for less than 8% of the work on Toyota’s assembly lines. Toyota was applying a scale-oriented enterprise operating model, and, to remedy many mistakes, it embraced an adaptive enterprise operating model in which people on the production line have greater autonomy.
As a CIO embarking on a digital business transformation, you know that any business transformation leads to changes in business strategy and enterprise operating model.
“Many of you are telling us that your organizations are stuck in the early stages of the attempt to transform. Others struggle to scale their digital business because they have not evolved their operating model to execute the new strategy,” says Lee Weldon, Gartner managing vice president at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Cape Town, South Africa.
Scaling a digital business requires a fully aligned strategy and enterprise operating model. An enterprise operating model is the manner in which an organization aligns its assets — people and culture, information, technology, ecosystems, and capital structures — with a particular business model.
In addition, each operational area — for example, marketing, supply chain and IT — has its own operating model. “As your business strategy changes, each of these individual operating models also needs to change,” says Weldon. “Otherwise, your organization’s business units are working in different directions that the digital business requires, increasing the risk of failure.”
Increasingly, the CIO plays a key role in overcoming misalignment between business strategy and operating model to help scale digital business. The CIO can help C-level executives achieve alignment by:
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Recommended resources for Gartner clients*:
Adapt Your Enterprise’s Operating Model or Risk Failure in Your Digital Business Strategy by Lee Weldon et al
*Note that some documents may not be available to all Gartner clients.