We all know it was the Beatles who sang, You say you want a revolution… well ya know, we all wanna change the world. But who said this famous quote? “We need to re-invent IT. We need it to lead by consumerizing our approach to technology to drive the next generation of our business.”
The answer? Well, everyone. But who is willing to experiment and scale new approaches to make this transformation a reality? The answer can and should be you.
CIOs should take concrete steps to further both their own development and their organization’s digital transformation, as the 2 are intertwined. The most critical components of these steps are adaptive sourcing and crowdsourcing. Here we’ll go over 2 essential things CIOs must do in order to win.
Understand the shift happening in the future of work
Platforms and networks connect us like never before. As the next billion people and 50 billion things come online, connectivity will only increase. Through savvy mobile applications and interfaces, we can reach anyone anytime, anywhere. Pair that with the incredible boom in the freelance economy and understanding the next generation of workers (millennials) who are craving a new approach to work (journeys over jobs). Ultimately, we find ourselves at the chasm of a tremendous change. A modern CIO must recognize this shift, and begin to prepare their enterprise for this new evolution of work.
Be willing to adapt in order to source talent
Recognizing the change in work and the need for more experimentation is critical. CIOs who believe that “the same old” will get them where they want to go are wrong. Without adapting to the new way of working, businesses will lose new workers in the freelance economy to better opportunities where they can learn and use their skills — on their terms.
Adaptive sourcing helps organizations move away from traditional, static sourcing strategies and move toward a more nimble approach that can respond quickly to enterprise needs. Crowdsourcing — tapping into the diversity and wisdom of a talent pool beyond an enterprise’s 4 walls — addresses the fundamental tenet of adaptive sourcing: the need to remain agile. By 2017, technology departments will have used global crowd-based expertise to replace 20 percent of their internal management staff. Over the same period, 60 percent of technology companies will engage their targeted consumer segments through crowdsourcing.
Revolutions are all around us. If CIOs want to benefit from their own, they must seize the opportunity and — as the one of the greatest rock bands in history advised — change the world.
