Democratized Digital Delivery of IT

The democratization of digital delivery means putting the responsibility, tools and accountability for building digital capabilities in the hands of not only IT departments but also other business units. The COVID-19 pandemic has given this trend renewed urgency as organizations have had to accelerate the digitalization of how they work and serve their customers remotely. Digitalization opportunities have seen dramatic growth, together with lower barriers to entry (for example, low-code development tools and artificial-intelligence-assisted development). These have enabled technology work that was once primarily the responsibility of dedicated IT teams to become “democratized.”Gartner’s research reveals that business technologists (i.e., personnel reporting outside of IT) outstrip IT headcount by a factor of four to one. The increased number of business technologists highlights a significant shift in how enterprises manage their information technology estate.CIOs and IT leaders must seize the moment to reimagine a technology operating model on an enterprise level (not just for the IT organization) to help the enterprise gain maximum advantage from its technology investments and its growing population of business technologists. Many of these business technologists are bringing new ways of working and being successful as part of the fusion teams that deliver in more agile ways.To provide some context of these new ways of working, we highlight the definitions of fusion teams and business technologists:A fusion team is a multidisciplinary team that blends technology or analytics and business domain expertise, and shares accountability for business and technology outcomes. Instead of organizing work by functions or technologies, fusion teams are typically organized by the cross-cutting business capabilities, business outcomes or customer outcomes they support. A business technologist is an employee who reports outside of the IT department (centralized or business unit IT) and creates technology or analytics capabilities for internal or external business use. Business technologists can be individuals whose primary job entails technology work (such as Python developers hired in marketing, data scientists hired in finance, and accounting teams or software engineers hired in R&D). They can also be citizen technologists whose primary job is done through technology work (such as pricing managers building algorithms, customer service representatives building chatbots or doctors writing pandemic apps).Host Frances Karamouzis is joined by Gartner expert analyst Jaime M. Capella. Capella is a Distinguished VP, Research, serving CIOs and other senior executives. His recent research collaborations look at the evolution of technology operating, funding and governance models to adopt Agile, incorporate product management principles and democratize digital delivery.