Some Important Aspects of IT Leadership for the Entrepreneurs to Excel

IT business leadership is a single or team of senior executives responsible for the upkeep and effective rendering of the information technology infrastructure and assets to endure business success. They devise the business structure and create policies to drive overarching business strategies and goals effectively. In a typical IT environment, the topmost leader is referred to as the CIO (Chief Information Officer); however, there are several variances of it is also being used as Chief Technology Offers, Information Chief, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Data Officer, and Chief Analytics Officer, etc.

There are various types of IT leadership in practice like paternalistic leadership and servant leadership etc. The primary leadership skill, irrespective of the industries, include excellent interpersonal skills, effective communication skills, technology skills, and being an inspiration to the employees to motivate them to reach to the fullest potential. An IT leader also should have the hard skills in the technology field in order to understand the changing market trends and advancements in terms of technology to effectively render it in their business too.

In any case, a very strong and intuitive IT leadership is critical in well aligning the organizational needs and goals and focus on leveraging the resource for revenue and become a driver of the business change.

 

The changing IT leadership role

The modern-day organizations now focus largely on the SMAC concepts; i.e., social, mobile, analytical, as well as cloud to meet the requirements of digital enterprises. The IT business is now becoming more integrated. So, in addition to the SMAC requirements, IT leadership is also much concerned about the allied systems and applications too well in line with the changing technology scenario.

As we can see, outsourcing and automation of the technical tasks are also becoming much common and cost-effective. So, the IT initiatives in this sector too are getting placed as prospective business units. Recently, cloud computing and artificial intelligence are also making business decision making much effective and real-time.

Business units now mostly contract for the IT services with third parties rather than maintaining a central IT vision for their technology needs. So, the industry is now witnessing an increase in the concept called shadow IT. This is a comparatively new concept to the business IT leaders as the enterprises are now taking IT initiatives with the assistance of software or hardware offered by third parties and not supported by the in-house IT department.

So, the greatest challenge of IT leadership is to go hand-in-hand with this concept of shadow IT to effectively incorporate enterprise resource planning with automation and robotic processes. This kind of revolutionary transformations with the changing trend of diversifying IT models make IT leadership roles go beyond the conventional centralized IT management approach.

 

Oracle RTD

When it comes to IT leadership, the importance of data management cannot be underplayed. In fact, the backbone of any business decision making is now data analytics. Oracle is a global giant which is offering many database solutions to now enable Business Intelligence (BI) process much more effective and innovative. The latest from Oracle database management suite for business leaders is the Real-Time Decision.

Oracle RTD (Real-Time Decisions) is a technology which combines both the set rules and the power of predictive analysis to prepare adaptive solutions to the enterprise leaders to make decision making much easier and accurate. RemoteDBA.com experts point out the fact that RTD is aimed at enabling real-time business intelligence in any type of business and also to the various aspects of real-time customer interaction and sales process.

Oracle offers a high-performing server for transactional purposes, which can deliver live recommendations and real-time insights for decision making. This mighty server can automatically render business decisions by effectively analyzing the business process. By enabling actionable insights and real-time intelligence based on data analytics, Oracle RTD makes technology leadership more accurate and intelligent.

 

Features of Oracle RTD

• Closed loop decision – This enables the business leaders to implement a closed loop logic in business decision making effectively.
• Analytical decision making – This feature enables the high-end business leaders to prepare actionable rules based on predictive data analysis.
• Self-adjusting of processes – This lets the entrepreneurs and IT leaders implement various processes, which can automatically adjust to the system based on historical analysis and feedback from various input data.
• Goal optimization – It helps in real-time business decisions making in order to optimize the competing goals like revenue generation along with decreasing costs.

RTD works on a service-centered J2EE Architecture in combination with J2EE application servers like BEA WebLogic, Oracle Application Server, IBM WebSphere, etc.

 

Some key areas for IT leadership to focus

As we have seen above communication and effective data interpretation are the key to successful IT leadership now. In data management, we have seen about one of the top solutions for the IT leaders as Oracle RTD, and further, we will look into some of the communication-related aspects for IT leaders.

• For any various industry (not directly information technology), it is important to understand IT leadership, and for IT leadership it is essential to understand the business also.
• IT leadership should have the capacity to do effectual value measurements, to delineate its contribution to business success.
• IT leadership must be able to create a very effective, tactical, and strategic governance process for any sort of business IT.
• Effective It leadership should be able to foster a working partnership between the stakeholders and information technology assets.
• IT leadership should be able to communicate the architecture and scope of it to the business leaders by defining the extent of information technology contribution towards meeting the business goals.
• IT leadership should possess the essential technology skills and knowledge of changing IT scenario.

To become a successful IT leader, it is important for individuals and groups to recognize the core fact that IT is a two-way street between business and technology. Any successful IT leaders cannot reach to that point on their own even when they have appropriate technical skills and self-motivation for achievement. In order to compete in IT and become successful in managing the overarching business goals, it requires close collaboration with the business partners inside and outside the organization.