It is an exciting time to be in IT, when your company looks at what it needs to do
to stay competitive, when looks at digital innovation.
It's probably coming back and looking at you in IT.
My name is Alex Calen, and before I became an instructor here at UVA Darden,
I spent years and years in enterprise software working with IT departments.
I'm really excited for
the things we're going to do together here in customer centric IT strategy.
There's a lot of great technology available in IT, which I'm sure you know.
And we've learned so much about start-ups and the innovation process and what
actually works and what's just kind of pretending over the last few years.
That I think it's a really great time to kind of step back and
look at, how do we really drive better outcomes in IT?
And there's not a silver bullet, but with some discipline and
some hard work, I think that you can reliably get much better outcomes.
And we're going to possibly cover three things in this course.
One is how do we take tools from innovation that
are used within the practice of agile in practical ways out in Silicon Valley and
in the community of practice, how do we apply those in IT?
And specifically, we're going to use the business model canvas as a tool to
help you focus your stakeholders and your management team on what they
actually mean by their strategy and how do we connect that with actionable,
testable things that we can do in the domain of IT.
And finally, we're going to reboot kind of old crufty processes like process design
with some new approaches and some dovetailing with these techniques.
So that they become kind of a prototyping tool for you to help evaluate
what constitutes a good outcome before you over invest in an IT system.
That's potentially not going to work out and get a good outcome for you and
your company.
And throughout, we're going to have lots of examples, lots of templates and
lots of tools so you can get started with this stuff in a practical way immediately.
I hope to see you in the course!