Entrepreneurial Mindset Is Back: Gartner

According to Gartner, IT organizations are facing a critical challenge in the
current year as they tackle the need to shift gears from a cost-cutting, to a
revenue growth mindset. Its analysts said, the recession of the past two years
has virtually brought every IT organization operating in 'keep the lights on'
mode, and many organizations are ill-equipped to support and drive revenue
growth opportunities.

"For IT leaders, entrepreneurial growth, and the shift from a
'problem-focused' organization to one that is 'opportunity-focused' requires
more planning and execution than simply changing the organization chart," said
Jorge Lopez, VP and Analyst, Gartner. "Entrepreneurial IT organizations must
maintain a dual focus:

achieving ambitious growth, while running the current business," he said.

Gartner maintains that the building of new sources of revenue and positioning
the business for dominance in the new venture is an entrepreneurial task, one
that requires an entrepreneurial organization with an equally entrepreneurial
CIO to seize the opportunity. Analysts have identified two key tools that the
CIO must employ to satisfy ambitions for entrepreneurial growth. These
frameworks define the agenda for change and the key actions required to fulfill
it:

The Entrepreneurial Scope Assessment Framework: This tool enables CIOs and
other business executives to evaluate the magnitude of the opportunity for an
entrepreneurial organization.

The Strategic Change Road Map: This level-by-level tool provides a clear-cut
assessment of the tasks that must be performed by an organization in moving from
the current mind-set and behaviors of cutting costs to a mind-set that is
entrepreneurial. It delineates today's situation, compared with the desired
future and identifies the changes that will transform today's organization,
infrastructure, processes and mind-sets into tomorrow's state.

Lopez explained that in order to understand the scope of change in an
organization, it is important to evaluate two factors that were first defined by
Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad in the book 'Competing for the Future.' They
challenged the concept that to win in business, one must first have superior
amounts of resources. They observed that, when starting out, resource positions
were very poor predictors of future performance, and that the businesses that
seemed to win were those that had two key capabilities - ambition and resource
leverage.

"Ambition is the animating entrepreneurial vision that redefines the rules of
competition for an industry," said Lopez. Further, he said that examples of
companies that have demonstrated high levels of ambition include: Apple, with
its ecosystem around the iPod and iTunes; Amazon, and its ambition to unseat
Walmart, using the Web; and thousands of bloggers, who daily compete for
attention with established outlets, such as the New York Times.

The concept of resource leverage is based on the premise that great
differences exist between different industry rivals. "The greatest conflict
faced by entrepreneurial CIOs will be the tension between the team that is
focused on the entrepreneurial opportunities and the team that is focused on
'keeping the lights on.' Both must function effectively in an environment of
elevated risk because failing on either responsibility is unacceptable and
highly dangerous for the business," Lopez said.

DQC NEWS BUREAU