Midsize organizations also have pressures from their business to deliver on technology to drive different initiatives, e.g., new customer experiences, services to support digital channels, workflow optimizations, platform performance, more data insights, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) enablement; these are some of the obvious one.
Like large organizations, midsize enterprises seek to drive their technology goals by calibrating their IT (Information Technology) team’s operating model. However, they have more constraints than large organizations to make drastic operating model changes to support initiatives outside normal operations. Some of these constraints include smaller budgets and teams, limiting their ability to task-specialize efforts. The other major hurdle is the lack of specialized expertise sometimes needed to support new initiatives.
Gartner states, “As midsize enterprises pursue new digital business models, CIOs (Chief Information Officers) must ensure their organizations’ I&T (Information and Technology) operating models evolve to match enterprise ambitions. However, MSEs (Midsize Enterprise) face constraints that large organizations don’t as they pursue their digital ambitions to attain organizational transformation.”
A typical footprint of an IT team in a midsize organization is relatively small. According to Gartner, a specific IT team of a midsize organization is between 10 -30 full-time FTEs (Fulltime Employees), including technology leadership. Usually, these organizations have a mix of physical and virtual roles supporting the necessary functions. Physical roles consist of the head of the technology team with infrastructure, operations, and application managers, along with supporting staff in these areas. Technology functions, like Enterprise Architecture, Technology Innovation, Vendor Management, Security, Analytics, and Portfolio Management, are primarily virtual, meaning outside firms like Fuzzitech support them.
Technology teams in smaller organizations do have advantages over their larger counterparts. In smaller firms, Technology leaders are much more in tune with their business counterparts, and many technology roles end up being multidimensional, which helps in some operational efficiencies. Smaller firms also have smaller ecosystems to manage.
Keeping all this in mind, the following are a few ways midsize enterprises can drive their initiatives.
- Top Initiatives – Rank the top ten initiatives that properly consider customer wants, business needs, and operational readiness
- Technology Roadmap – Create a technology roadmap that includes the top initiates based on the ranking from the organization’s business.
- Portfolio Management – Create a portfolio of projects to be delivered each year based on your organization’s staffing and cost constraints.
- Targeted Help – Hire an outside firm to ensure proposed initiatives get delivered for the year without operational compromise.
- Communication – Provide regular and timely updates to the leadership, business, and IT on the progress
The approach mentioned above can assist in driving technology initiatives while keeping the organization in sync on crucial technology deliverables for the year.
We have assisted dozens of organizations in delivering their crucial technology priorities by partnering with them and supporting them in advisory, strategy, road mapping, project deliveries, development, testing, and DevOps. For more information and guidance, you can reach us at Fuzzitech or email us at info@fuzzitech.com.
