The Frameworks and Fundamentals Transforming the Businesses in the IT Sector

By David Gollan, CIO, HBF

David Gollan, CIO, HBF

The IT industry has been changing at a very fast pace. The extension of IT industry has linked devices in varying the techniques as business operates across all sectors. As the IT industry evolves to meet the technology demands of today’s workplace, different challenges are arising and IT professionals are striving to meet them. Network security is by far the greatest concern for many companies and they rely on their IT staff to prevent or stop these system breaches.

The quick increase in the use of mobile devices for various uses has increased the potential for digital disruption across many industries. Well, according to my perspective, it’s necessary that the following reasons in particular with digital disruption are happening in the moment. The digital disruption is effectively taking businesses out altogether.

"The most important attribute that the CIOs need to do is that they need to understand the organizations' visions of the business"

Countering challenges

My role as a CIO is to take care of business. Before becoming a CIO, I had spent a lot of time consulting the clients. I reached a point where I became frustrated explaining the clients what are the necessities that are needed to be done, but I rarely saw those getting executed to its optimum. While working as a consultant, I observed that CIOs didn’t have the Framework in the organization to improve their business by applying those strategies. What I did is I created one. I created frameworks called 10 IT Fundamentals for CIO’s and presented it in many conferences around the world. These frameworks suggest the 10 most important strategies what CIOs have to do for their business roadmap.

Improving the businesses

Since I joined Western Australia’s largest health fund, HBF, as CIO in 2013, I have introduced a model to my IT team that identifies the 10 most important things a CIO must address during his or her tenure. These fundamentals will help their career gain a competitive benefit through Information Technology.

Innovations are huge and allocate enough time to it. IT organization as it allocates time each month to find out how you can improve the business and go and present it to the business. Take Google for example. They take 20% of their time for innovation. I usually organize Hackathons once in every two months. What I do is, I start on Friday and run for the weekend. We get people from IT and Business impulse. We speak about the issues and create solutions while we have fitness classes as well. During that time Hackathon Goggle Glasses were getting used to solve the problems in the business which was successful.

Indulging the vision

Leaders must have a good target system. The most important attribute that the CIOs need to do is that they need to understand the organizations’ visions of the business. They also need to understand how IT helps the business in a comprehensive horizon. I’m one of those people who believe that you don’t need an IT vision that is upholding your business vision. Every team member has to understand what the finish line is in the next five years and what role they are playing to get there. The professionals should have a roadmap that gets you there because it’s going to take multiple years to get there. It really “hammers” the business analysts and IT architects on this point because they are generally the face of IT. If those guys truly don’t understand the business, they’ve got no credibility the business is going to be reluctant to deal with them. So it’s something as simple as this, but if you haven’t got that right, I find a lot of it actually doesn’t flow through.

Advent of technologies

Technology has moved on very rapidly all these years. In my lifetime, I have seen the advent of internet and many other technologies. The rapid development of new technology and the changing landscape of the online world has changed the way we work and, for many, where we do our work from? My point here is we have gone through the extraordinary technology evolution not only in my 46 years but also in the 1990’s and the 2000’s. I don’t think there were any other industries in the world that had such fast evolution.

The evolution in the IT industry for more than a decade has helped to structure an innovative world with a turning point in the development of the Internet. This evolution is not a lot different from any other one that has taken place in the history. There are constant improvements in the underlying technologies which make possible new IT applications that affect all areas of society. Nevertheless, the effects which are driven by the continual change in underlying technologies are substantial over time.

The IT Future

The future is expected to be diverse in escalating ambitious disruption in the IT sector services is fundamentally challenged driven by constant technological innovation. Henceforth, a good target system for civilizing the business and understanding the vision is the core structure in the IT meadow. Innovations and time are the most significant fundamentals for any business to be credible. Thus, there should be a framework in the organization to improve the business by applying necessary strategies.

HBF was established in 1941 as the Metropolitan Hospital Benefit Fund, with the core purpose of providing affordable health services to as many Western Australians as possible.