As a sports fan, the middle of the year an exciting time where we get plenty of sporting action building up. We have tennis action from Roland-Garros, the best of basketball from the NBA Finals, and this year, in Singapore, the 28^th SEA Games are being hosted.

When major sporting events come around, they serve as a good reminder of the lessons available for the IT department.

So what do winners in sports and successful IT management have in common? There are three lessons CIOs or IT decision makers can draw from.

Behind every winner is a great coach

What separates the winners from the losers? Quite often, it all comes down to the game plan. Winners take match tactics seriously, and likewise business leaders should take strategic IT management seriously.

The first step is to understand your strengths and weaknesses. This will help you respond to the current match environment. In sports, this is where coaches figure out who might best be suited for an attacking role and when to use substitutions to turn the tide of a match.

Some sports have embraced the use of predictive analytics to crunch various pools of data to make these informed decisions. Similarly in business, predictive analytics can help. For example, CA Technologies has capacity management tools that analyze data to help organizations optimize their IT cost-efficiencies.

Offense starts from defense

In many sports, it pays to first invest in a solid defence to build as a foundation for victory. Defense is not just about match tactics, it’s also about investing in sound protective gear. Those who do so are likely to be more willing to be aggressive on the field, instead of being worried about injuries and being restricted by an overly conservative approach.

In that light, winners take sports protection gear seriously, and similarly business leaders should take security seriously.

Applying this concept to the application economy, developers need open access to data in order to foster an ecosystem of development necessary to thrive. That’s where good security is critical. Enterprises that invest in a sound API strategy can easily and securely tap into the application economy opportunities, enabling third-party innovation to carry their data and information further than they could have going it alone.

In our recent survey on the application economy, results showed that 93% of leading businesses allow API access to customers and partners. This was only seen in 59% of underperforming companies. Companies which approached security as a business enabler generally saw an increase in revenue for new services, more customers, as well as greater accountability and control.

Whole is greater than sum of its parts

In competitive team sports, everyone has a clear overarching common purpose, which is to work together to score and ultimately win. This approach is particularly applicable to the IT department, because of its impact on the wider business especially in today’s application economy.

Similarly in sports such as football, every player has a role, but they shouldn’t restrict themselves to that one position. An effective team requires each member to understand other roles as well and contribute when opportunities knock.

That’s a good analogy for DevOps, which is an enabler in the application economy where every business is a software business. In order to succeed in the application economy, Development and Operations teams must learn to collaborate for faster time-to-market with minimal interruption to user experience.

If you’d like to find out more about how much you are leading or lagging in today’s business race, check out our Application Economy Research Assessment Tool here to see how you stack up against other senior IT and business leaders.

Manage IT like competitive sports

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