Published on the 07/11/2024 | Written by Heather Wright

F1 guides the way…

High levels of innovation, strategy that is tested at every turn and altered and tweaked for every race and a set of rules known simply as ‘the formula’…

While Sam Higgins is talking about Formula 1, arguably the pinnacle of motor sports and the most prestigious racing competition, he’s also talking about high performance IT.

“If IT stays fully aligned with the business, if it hugs those curves, matches the acceleration, it can achieve greater levels of success.”

“Each of you is running teams like those in Formula 1 every day, and you are the leaders that will enable your organisation to win,” he says.

In the face of changing technology, regulations, talent and customer needs, winning and driving in Forrester parlance ‘high performance IT’ is about incremental performance gains and the pursuit of continuously improving business results through technology.

Forrester’s recent Technology and Innovation Summit saw a big push for companies to move into the high performance IT arena. Higgins pointed to the benefits research suggests high performance IT organisations are achieving, including 1.2x to 1.6x business outcomes across innovation capabilities, customer experiences, operational growth targets, employee experience, time to market and operational resilience.

“High performance IT is not some far off aspiration. It is in fact how some IT teams organise themselves to continuously deliver business value. It is the pursuit of continuously improving business results through technology.”

And the ‘formula’ to achieve high performing IT?

Higgins says that starts with understanding what your objective is – in this case what your organisation wants.

He says Forrester has identified that as the scale and speed of business changes occur, leaders move between four different styles of IT investment.

First is enabling, and focusing on running the business effectively.

“Think of this as operational excellence. You’ll see things like modernisation of legacy systems, managing down tech debt and effectively managing cost and standardisation within the business when it comes to technology.”

Co-creation is about establishing new opportunities, finding new growth, new services and new programs. Here, you’ll see a higher focus on application development, product management, agile and continuous delivery custom experience that tends to be focussed on small groups of people who are experimenting and trying out new ideas.

Amplifying is about optimising business outcomes at scale, with business leaders looking for more insight, automation and AI, and ways of creating value from what already exists within the enterprise.

Transformation rounds out the four styles of IT investment. This is where you see organisations driving real strategic change.

“It impacts the strategy and operations, so research and development, innovation and change management become extremely valuable,” Higgins says.

“Like a racing team we know each business will need IT to deliver differently at each turn. And if IT stays fully aligned with the business, if it hugs those curves, matches the acceleration, it can achieve greater levels of success as it moves as the business moves through different dominant it styles over time.”

But Higgins says it’s important to understand what IT capabilities you need to strengthen to support the needs of the business expressed through their IT style changes over time.

“For example, if the scale and speed of business changes, the dominant need from IT is just to enable the business. Then IT needs to be able to modernise and maintain the currency of existing platforms, rationalise systems to reduce tech debt and increase efficiency within the IT organization by automating its own internal processes as much as it would the business. This means ensuring that service management capability, operations and IT cost control are all really mature.”

If co-creation is the dominant style of the IT business, the development of new products or channels for service means having a good problem discovery capability, great IT stakeholder relations and application development to support that experimentation and the creation of a minimum viable product are all going to be important IT capabilities that you have to foster and mature.

For amplification, the scaling of existing platforms means increasing capacity within IT through existing talent, external vendor support or even contingent labour, as well as engineering solutions for reliability using techniques like site reliability engineering.

“And then transforming is where we are going to have to focus on the strategic use of enterprise architecture as well as leveraging data management, information and risk and compliance to make sure we can actually operate the big changes that we are making without upsetting the existing business significantly.”

Each style brings with it opportunities to communicate the value of specific technologies to the business, from data and analytics, predictive AI to identify new opportunities, automation and DevSecOps when amplifying to low-code, product management and TuringBots for co-creation. AI for those in the transformation mode may mean GenAI agents.

“The ‘styles’ of high-performance IT power business in different ways and your IT capabilities must adjust to fulfil these needs, while applying different technical capabilities to support a given style,” he says.

“The other thing we need to appreciate is that like a racing team achieving high performance by changing their tyres from compound to soft to match [conditions] high performance IT also means knowing when over the life of the strategic plan these shifts in dominant IT style will occur and in turn the need for you as IT to make the related internal capability changes.

“Just as every race is run uniquely by every Formula 1 team, race after race after race that team monitors their results and tunes their efforts looking for an advantage, beating themselves as much as the competition, so too the scale speed and shape as well as the order in which a business employs the various IT styles of high performance will be unique,” he says.

“Winning with high performance IT is a journey that looks different for every team. Each of you faces unique business dynamics, market forces and policy shifts. Remember your business results are not just about massive digital transformations, new streams of revenue or business models. Business results are about optimising performance by increasing profitability or the impact of outcomes, well managed operational expenses, ensuring customer obsession and improving customer satisfaction, and maintaining good employee engagement and retaining that critical staff that is so hard to get in the modern labour force.

“That is what we mean by high performance IT and I want you to keep in mind that when this year’s Formula 1 season started out many believed that Ferrari or Red Bull would take the lead. But they have both been surpassed by McLaren which is now on the way to securing enough points to secure the Constructors Championship – proof that even the most unexpected teams and that every team can achieve high performance.”