“The pace of change has never been this fast, and yet it will never be this slow again.”
The biggest problem that the Indian technology sector faces is the transactional headcount / man-hour-based thinking of traditional IT companies, and the outdated mindset of old-school corporate CTOs.
A Business Requirement Document (BRD) is a prime example of that old-school technology mindset. You cannot drive innovation through tightly defined BRDs (Business Requirement Documents). Traditional technology BRDs hard-cast the end product even before the first line of code is written. However, when you are working on a truly innovative project, you do not know exactly what the end product is going to look like, and what kind of resources you might have to deploy as you venture on this journey. The partnership contract as such has to focus on business goals and milestones, rather than features and head-counts.
This is even more relevant with the rapid rate of advances in Artificial Intelligence. E.g. by the time you would negotiate a traditional BRD, new generations of generative AI would have been released. We have seen examples of large companies getting so deeply committed to a predefined approach to product building that their product/solution is out-of-date even before the first version is released.
It is rightly said that –
‘the pace of change has never been this fast, and yet it will never be this slow again’.
To work in this environment, you need extremely agile processes and approach to technology partnerships. It is no longer a client-vendor relationship, but a partnership of equal stakeholders. To achieve this, you need to work with people who have that kind of mindset.
Some companies with dynamic CEOs have realized that a traditional CTO who has been molded in the old-school tech environment often acts as a blocker rather than a driver of innovation. To address this problem, some of these companies are now bringing in a new role of – CDO (Chief Digital Officer). The CDO comes from a non-traditional Tech background. So while the CTO continues to focus on managing the existing IT infrastructure of the company, the CDO acts as a driver of innovation.
Eligere Tech Product Studios evangelizes these innovation partnership models and works with change-makers within client partner companies to catalyze digital transformation.
