Impact of IT Leadership on Transformation of the Role of IT in An Organization: Case Study of the Directorate General of Taxes

The opportunities from the application of Information Technology (IT) was taken by the Directorate General of Taxes of the Ministry of Finance as the tax authority institution to make various innovations to increase tax revenues. The success of the innovations made by the Directorate General of Taxes was marked by its achievement of receiving the “Digital Transformer of the Year” award from The International Data Corporation. Behind this achievement, there was a large contribution from the TTKI Director who also won the best CIO award from SWA Magazine in 2015 and iCIO Community in 2017. This research is used qualitative approach to identify the transformation of the role of IT and analyse how the IT leadership approach can bring the changes in the role of IT in Directorate General of Taxes. Data was collected through exploratory literature review and semi-structured interview. The informants are CIO of Directorate General of Taxes and Head of Sub Directorate of Information System Analysis and Evaluation, that was selected based on purposive sampling method. From the results and analyses through coding method, there are several IT leadership approaches in making changes to the role of IT from support quadrant into a strategic quadrant. The approaches are continuous innovations, risk taker, fast learner, technology-oriented, and collaboration. From there, lesson learned were obtained, such as the importance of an IT leader who understand business and the need for collaboration with other parties.