Gartner highlights the complexities of IT organizations moving from a cost-cutting to an entrepreneurial mind-set

According to href="http://www.dqweek.com/Global-IT-spend-to-touch-$3.4-trillion-in-2010-Gartner">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 href="http://www.ciol.com/News/News/News-Reports/Tips-to-write-your-success-story-in-IT-biz/136015/0/">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
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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.