Last month Crimson’s CIO Search practice hosted an intimate dinner at the historic George Hotel in Stamford, Lincolnshire. A dozen technology leaders from the public, private, and voluntary sectors were invited to enjoy an evening of fine dining and discussion. In this series of blogs, we unpack the debate and explore unmissable content around IT leadership.
Technology leaders are being encouraged to decentralise IT capabilities across the business when cyber-attacks are commonplace. Our CIO Search Dinner guests agreed that technology teams have become too ‘fat’, frameworks are needed to empower individual business units. So, an example might be a Power BI dashboard created by the Finance team, built on programmes designed by the technology team. Dispensing these capabilities within teams across a business gives people the autonomy they need and offers development time back to technologists.
Risk and compliance must be considered—for example, cyber security and a sandbox environment for coding. Governing the architecture and infrastructure will help you understand what is introduced and the usage of the technology stack. For instance, the Marketing department often uses many programmes to manage customer data. It's now more about embracing and influencing some of these decisions around products and services that might have previously been referred to as Shadow IT.
Another way to innovate quickly is by looking at the structure of the teams within the organisation.
A fusion team brings individuals from various disciplines, such as product owners and developers, to solve business problems and create value.
Like cross-functional teams that prevent silos, fusion teams work faster. According to Gartner, fusion teams can complete a project up to 2.5 times faster because checks occur within the team, and actions do not need to be approved by middle management. 40% of fusion teams are independent of IT and use no-code platforms. fusion team leaders tend to be led by someone outside the IT department. However, the talent within this style of team means fusion teams can deploy the projects they work on and create products that are market ready.
Gartner states that 84% of businesses already contain at least one fusion team. However, fusion teams are expected to grow and eventually may replace hierarchies within organisations.
Check out our top picks.
Fusion Teams | Microsoft Power Apps
We’re all technologists now – the powerful impact of low-code platforms (crimson.co.uk)
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CIO Jobs UK: Find talent, get placed (crimson.co.uk)
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