Who is Driving Enterprise-wide Innovation, Transformation, Cloud Strategy and More?

Today’s decision-making is different than even a few years ago.  More “data” is used, and the data inputs take several forms, including humans.

A big part of today’s strategy and decision-making at enterprise-class organizations are committees, made up of a company’s subject matter experts and relevant stakeholders for a critical company initiative.  They may meet quarterly or as needed and the committee work is in addition to their “day job.”

In a recent survey of decision-makers and professionals working in, or overseeing, integration infrastructure (i2) architecture or operations at large enterprises, we found that these corporate priorities warranted having a committee:

Top Committees in 2021:

• Cloud Strategy
• IT Transformation
• Innovation
• Risk Management
• Quality / Customer Experience (CX) Improvement
• Other – Integrations

Upon further discussion with senior executives, we kept hearing that while all committees officially drove strategy and direction for their initiative, the named initiatives with both a committee and an attached budget to fund the initiative made progress much more quickly.

This correlation is in line with finance/accounting industry research I conducted a few years ago about how serious firms really were about “innovation” and “IT transformation.”  That research essentially bore out that of the many firms who officially had innovation or IT transformation as a stated corporate goal, the ones who had an innovation committee which included senior decision-makers who met regularly made at least some tangible progress toward the goal during the year.  The committees that also have a budget achieved their goals at a high rate.  The others did not, which meant they were sometimes really just paying the initiatives lip service (e.g. Our #1 goal again is innovating for our customers this year!).

This begs the question, how serious is your company about achieving its objectives in these areas anytime soon?   From a personal perspective, these findings also point out the impact you can have by getting yourself on these committees, taking them seriously, and pushing to ensure there are measurable objectives and a budget.   Short of that, you can offer to support committee members or the committee itself and positively impact the achievement of critical strategic goals.

Join the Research!

If you’re an IT professional making (or contributing to) decisions related to these areas and/or the integration infrastructure and have 18 minutes to spare, join the research panel and add to the data set.  We’ll make the updated survey results available to you and if you also provide your contact details, we can share additional insights on what we’ve learned in these areas.

Survey Link

About Steven Menges: A business-to-business (B2B) innovator and products executive with 20 years progressive experience, Steven Menges is a frequent industry author and speaker on enterprise computing, integration infrastructure management (i2M), data analytics, managed service providers (MSPs), IT Security, regulatory compliance, and buyer’s journey-based engagement. Mr. Menges is also an Adjunct Instructor and Capstone/Thesis advisor at the NYU MS in Management and Systems (STEM) and MS in Integrated Marketing programs and is the co-developer of the Business-to-Business Marketing Maturity Model.

Steven has an MBA in Strategic Planning from the University of Pittsburgh’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. Mr. Menges drives adoption and product efforts for Nastel Technologies and is the Director of the Nastel Technologies Advisory Board.