Propel your business into the digital future

Almost any business operating today has undergone some form of digital transformation in recent years. It’s a series of sprints within a marathon, and companies need to keep up to stay competitive.

As a leader in your company’s IT department, how do you balance upgrading the day-to-day functions to keep your business operating with the desire to push your business in new directions digitally?

It is possible, but only with a solid strategy and lots of work. In recent years, a model of managing IT in an enterprise—called the RGT model, it “supports IT portfolio planning and investments in IT products and services”—was developed in the industry.

RGT stands for run, grow, transform—the three buckets that IT work usually falls under while supporting a company’s strategic objectives.

Let’s examine these three themes:

Run

This theme is all about the day-to-day—the bones of your company framework that need to stay strong to operate and maintain your business. IT expenses that fall under this theme don’t typically propel the business forward, but they deliver efficiency continued operations.

Examples of this type of work might be application management, support functions like a help desk, or compliance work.

Grow

This theme looks at the expansion and enhancement of IT systems. Usually, these systems support business growth or improvements to process.

If your company’s strategy is focused on growth in capabilities or competitiveness, it’s likely that some of your overall IT investments—including money, time, and effort—will be focused on this theme.

This type of work usually incurs increased spending for these projects that help grow the business.

Transform

This theme is the one that usually costs your business the most, on a variety of fronts.

It can be a risky theme because these are usually where the big expenditures for innovative projects come into play.

Work in this area is focused on expansion into new markets or new audiences and involves large teams and large budgets in an effort to propel the business forward.

Using the run, grow, transform framework can help IT departments in all industries to stay on top of the digital initiatives that are taking place within their company.