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Summary – Faced with evolving business requirements and Switzerland’s high reliability standards, IT can no longer be a cost center. It must co-create strategy, convert technical metrics into business value and speed up innovation. By combining cross-functional insight to detect friction and inefficiencies, modular open-source and custom architectures, agile governance aligned with financial KPIs, DevOps cycles and incremental legacy modernization, the IT department gains agility, resilience and competitiveness.
Solution : cross-functional audit → shared roadmap → agile deployment driven by modular CI/CD to transform IT into a measurable value engine.
Long relegated to a support role, IT must now reinvent itself to become a genuine source of value. Rather than merely responding to business requests, the IT department is encouraged to co-create strategy, identify transformation opportunities, and link technology investments to measurable outcomes.
This shift requires leveraging IT’s cross-cutting view, translating technical metrics into business benefits, and adopting agile methods to accelerate innovation. In a Swiss environment demanding reliability and accountability, this strategic repositioning strengthens the company’s competitiveness, agility, and resilience.
From Cost Center to Strategic Partner
IT must move beyond its basic support function to co-create corporate strategy. By harnessing its panoramic perspective, it spots friction points and orchestrates value creation.
Cross-Cutting Vision to Drive Innovation
The IT department holds a global perspective on processes and data flows. This view offers a unique advantage for detecting inefficiencies that siloed business units often miss.
By mapping interdependencies among applications, databases, and users, IT can propose targeted optimizations, shorten decision cycles, and boost responsiveness to market changes.
Implementing modular micro-frontends and hybrid architectures—mixing open-source components with custom development—makes it easier to adapt systems to business needs without major disruptions.
Early Involvement in the Business Roadmap
To become a strategic partner, the IT department must participate from the outset in defining commercial objectives. This co-creation ensures technology projects support operational and financial priorities.
A steering committee composed of IT and business leaders consolidates a shared roadmap and aligns IT investments with key performance indicators, such as market share growth or customer satisfaction.
By balancing agility, security, and modularity, IT helps design scalable solutions, minimize vendor lock-in, and maximize long-term return on investment.
Example of a Successful Transformation
A Swiss industrial company involved its IT leadership in the product innovation phase. IT identified synergies between management applications and production tracking tools, revealing major bottlenecks.
Deploying a hybrid open-source solution to centralize data collection cut downtime by 30% and sped up decision-making on the factory floor.
This case shows that when IT intervenes early, it transcends its technician role to become a catalyst for operational efficiency and an accelerator of innovation.
Overcoming Perception Barriers and Demonstrating Business Value
To break free from a cost-only mindset, IT must translate its actions into measurable business benefits. Communication aligned with financial and strategic goals boosts its credibility before the executive committee.
Moving from Technical Jargon to Business Language
Typical IT metrics, like availability rate or incident count, aren’t enough to convince a board. They need to be tied to revenue impact, customer retention, or new-market penetration.
By expressing reduced system latency as a percentage increase in online conversion, or strengthened cybersecurity as a reduction in financial risk, the IT department positions itself strategically.
This approach requires developing shared dashboards with business teams and adopting agile governance that includes periodic IT-to-business reviews.
Measuring Concrete Benefits and Continuously Adjusting
Strategic management demands linking every IT project to a measurable goal: lower operational costs, faster time-to-market, or improved user experience.
Indicators must be tracked throughout the project lifecycle and compared against initial forecasts to reprioritize efforts and ensure value creation.
This data-driven approach relies on automated reporting tools, modular architecture, and iterative cycles that allow continuous updates to assumptions and KPIs.
Example of Strategically Aligned Reporting
A Swiss financial institution rolled out a unified dashboard combining IT data with business metrics. Back-office processing times were correlated with billing cycles and outstanding receivables.
Through this reporting, IT demonstrated a 20% reduction in process costs within a critical scope, validating its technology decisions and strengthening its influence on the executive team.
This case underscores the importance of linking technical performance to business challenges to reshape perceptions of IT and earn a seat at the decision-making table.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support companies and organizations in their digital transformation
Adopting Agile and DevOps to Accelerate Innovation
Modernizing IT requires agility and automation, the cornerstones of responsive governance. DevOps and iterative cycles reduce time-to-market and enhance deliverable quality.
Fostering Continuous Collaboration Between IT and Business
An agile development process brings together IT, business owners, and end users around shared objectives. Regular sprints, reviews, and demos ensure constant alignment and quick adaptation to feedback.
Creating cross-functional teams—comprising developers, architects, UX specialists, and business representatives—breaks down traditional silos and improves mutual understanding.
This ongoing interaction promotes co-design of contextualized solutions, boosts user buy-in, and reduces the risk of late-stage adjustments.
Automation and Continuous Deployment
Automated tests and security checks validate every change through CI/CD pipelines before deployment. This practice minimizes human errors and speeds up production releases.
By standardizing test and production environments, organizations limit discrepancies and ensure system stability while increasing the frequency of feature rollouts.
Reducing manual steps, combined with proactive monitoring using open-source tools, guarantees high availability and improved infrastructure resilience.
Example of a High-Performance DevOps Pipeline
A Swiss retail SME implemented a DevOps pipeline based on open-source components to automate testing and deployment. Releases now occur daily instead of monthly.
This resulted in a 40% increase in responsiveness for client-app updates and a 25% reduction in production incidents, proving that agility and quality can go hand in hand.
This experience demonstrates that transitioning to DevOps with modular components delivers tangible gains in operational performance and user satisfaction.
Modernizing Legacy Systems Gradually
Refactoring existing architectures should be incremental to minimize risks and ensure continuity. Contextual modernization fosters agility and sustainability of IT assets.
Map and Prioritize Your Critical Assets
A thorough inventory of existing applications, dependencies, and maintenance levels lets you prioritize initiatives by their business impact.
By distinguishing high-value business modules from those with significant technical debt, you can create migration roadmaps tailored to your context and resources.
This approach relies on hybrid tools that analyze open-source library versions, hosting types, and data flows to assess risks and opportunities.
Opt for Incremental and Hybrid Evolution
Rather than a complete overhaul, favor adopting microservices or containers to progressively decouple core functions.
Coexistence of legacy components and new open-source elements ensures a smooth transition, limits service interruptions, and spreads investments over time.
This iterative method allows you to validate performance gains at each step and swiftly correct deviations from initial goals.
Example of a Controlled Migration
A Swiss hospital planned to break its patient records management system into modular services. The first three features were migrated to a new open-source environment.
Each migration was accompanied by parallel monitoring and testing phases, reducing downtime to a few minutes and maintaining user satisfaction.
This project shows that progressive modernization, combined with a hybrid strategy, accelerates innovation while preserving operational stability.
Reinvent Your IT as a Strategic Enabler
IT stops being a cost center when it takes part in defining and steering business objectives. By leveraging a cross-cutting vision, communicating around financial KPIs, and employing agile practices, it becomes an innovation catalyst.
DevOps methods and an incremental modernization approach ensure long-term performance, resilience, and efficiency. Every technology project then translates into measurable gains and reinforces competitiveness.
Our experts at Edana are here to help you co-create an IT strategy that places your company at the heart of digital transformation. From audit to execution, our support adapts to your context to deliver concrete results.
