Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1227

Setting Principles for Managing Digital Innovation

The blurring border of the digital organization and its business ecosystem make the world hyper-connected, but also over-complex. Organizations today can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation, or still think innovation as a serendipity. Digital is the age of innovation, and innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. But it’s also important to set principles and manage innovation in  a structured way across the organizational scope and digital ecosystem.
“Dissatisfaction with status quo is the psychology behind creative disruptions: Innovation management shapes bigger box, but the traditional type of management cannot look outside the box. When people get stuck at “we always do things like that” mentality, businesses will run in the mechanical mode; or most of the time, the company executives’ nervousness stems from the fear of failure and to some extent loss of control. But from the long term perspective, the innovative management make more profit than those that weren't. So leaders need to understand that as they try to desperately cling to the conventional norms of "command and control" leadership that they are actually stifling the very creativity that their company depends upon for success and ultimately corporate survival in the long run. Hence, today’s digital leaders and professionals should keep learning and adapting, thinking out of the box, making plans, but be dynamic to make an adjustment, and they are just the one who can see things differently and do things alternatively.
“Innovation has to become the philosophy, and part of DNA in an organization: To test for how 'creative' or accepting of 'creativity' a company is by asking - How does learning occur? How is success defined? And how is failure defined? However, most of the traditional organizations are “busyness” to focus only on transactional effort. The challenge is to provide the most desirable environment to spur creativity or to build the culture of innovation. The best way to foster creativity is to help people to communicate in a way that instills confidence, not fear. Creating a culture of creativity is, by nature, a cultural change. Some innovative organizations provide “play time” to encourage creative thinking and experimenting.   As businesses get more cut-throat in the hyper-connected digital environment, innovation has to become the part of DNA in an organization for delivering unique products/services, and improving employee engagement and customer satisfaction.
“Prioritization provides a framework for focusing on creativity: Creativity can be in the form of an idea, a solution, or an approach. Prioritization is about managing constraints, you can't do everything; so which projects will you do to maximize the business value? Prioritization enables businesses to manage innovation with a focus, not for stifling innovation. Prioritization brings transparency to the organization. Prioritization forces people to be more creative, creating internal competition among new ideas and projects, to come up with better ideas, because now they know that their ideas will be discussed at the board level, and if chosen, they will be followed closely and manage more effectively to achieve business goals. So in company cultures where creativity not always valued, to involve everyone in creativity and to provide a focused approach to real business problems, companies could benefit from a structured approach.
The purpose of Innovation Management is not to promote innovation, but to manage innovation as a process. Innovation Management nowadays is more science than art. Most companies fail at innovation execution because they have no clear processes, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally across departments, or a holistic approach to managing innovation. Starting with the end in mind - what you want to see or do or have, and then think backward from to what the next simpler step is, then back to what are the next simpler components, back to what you have at hand. In practice, managing innovation as a process involves the bulk of data, methods, and approaches, the complexity of processes encountered speaks in favor of scientific approach. What defines science from chance is the ability to repeat a process with the same resultant solution every time. Innovation processes need to be rigorous, not too rigid; innovation is the change, change management needs to be an integral part of innovation management.
Innovations succeed when failure is seen as a learning step to great success: Innovation and risk often go hand-in-hand. With creativity, "change" is made." With every "change," the risk is involved. Innovations fail because folks fear innovation. Innovation fails because there are too many disconnects that occur between the birth of a vision/concept and the process of turning it into a reality. The more dramatic and powerful the innovation is, the greater the risk would be. Innovations succeed when failure is seen as a learning step to great success. An overall framework for innovation with periodic reviews will help to sustain progresses and minimize the risk of idea flops.
Setting principles and applying disciplines to innovation is to better align innovation management with strategy, to justify the initial investment in the program and the initial results for innovation management and measurement. Digital paradigm shift also includes the perspective of building a scalable innovation environment or innovation ecosystem. It is crucial to fine tune innovation processes, capabilities, and develop a set of practices to manage innovation portfolio more effectively.


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Five Principles to Manage Change

Change is a digital continuum.
Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. Change Management is a complex management discipline due to the "VUCA" nature of digital organizations. How to set digital principles to improve Change Management effectiveness?

Understand psychological emotions behind changes: There is so much psychology in openness to new ideas and perspectives. There is not a one size fits all approach to addressing the different circumstance. People’s feelings need to be addressed. The question then becomes one of: "how well do we understand the individual, their goals, and how the change will affect them?" This usually requires a dialogue to answer their questions and address its relevancy. Collaboration is the route towards providing better and more tailored change management. Spending time with people to find out what it is that drives them; what their issues are; what their fears and perceptions might be. Exploring why they are resistant might uncover some aspects of the change process that have been poorly designed or overlooked.  The other reason why is change so difficult could be the leadership factor. Leaders do not set a good example to be change agents.
Change is just the vehicle to elevate you toward the ultimate destinations: It is the key to present the WHY first. Many organizations focus so heavily on the "doing" (the "how"), they lose sight of the "purpose," the "WHY" part of changes. A vision about changes provides the guiding light and direction. Then it is important for the managers to internalize the change. This is best done if they participate in the development of the vision. Primarily, it provides a way to inject enthusiasm, which is infectious and spurs the concept forward. Every process, every expenditure of time, money, or energy, and every assignment of resources should directly relate back to the "Why."  They need to think long and hard about what the change is for and how their part of the organization can contribute to it - and be as specific as possible.
Change Management can become more successful with people at the core of change, the cause of change and the purpose of change: Digital is the age of people. The human element of change entails a people-centric approach to change management styles. Empowering the workforce to embrace change is a most effective, efficient and result-oriented management in organizations. It's important that you make your employees feel like they are a big part of the changes that need to be made. There are two elements that are critical to bringing in the human element in a change management program. These are fairness and communication. Identifying the champions/agents, you should know who the guys on your team who can/are running with it. Support them and motivate them. Build a working environment that is conducive to change. Remember change management is a gradual process. Be flexible- change will always involve failures as well as success. Reinforce success but don't punish failures.
Change Management is an ongoing, continued process and dynamic capability within the organization: Change shouldn’t be treated as a singular occurrence. Change can not be just another thing that needs to be accomplished. It has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the organization. Management is a substantial and ongoing digital capability which not only creates changes but also adapts to changes seamlessly. A capability view of the enterprise helps business identify “actuality, capability, and potentiality,” to build competency and improve overall business maturity. Change Management is an important management capability which often not goes alone, but integrate with other management capabilities such as strategy management, talent management,
It’s often more accessible to measure change readiness rather than change progress: The change needs to be defined in its base elements and associated benefits to be achieved. Not all elements of change are easily quantifiable, whereas some are in terms of hours, and dollars saved. Measuring change involves first accurately identifying where you are now, and then, clearly identifying where you want to be once the change is complete. It's probably better and more accessible to measure change-readiness rather than change progress. Perhaps the difficulty in measuring Change Management is that the very thing you are measuring is changing. It can be argued that if you have good change-readiness, then you will probably be better at change, measure the input, not the output. It's too late to do anything about it by then. The problem stems from the way outcomes are being measured. When the collective outcome is the focus, the silo walls collapse. When individual and departmental outcomes are measured, the walls go up. Whatever the measurement system is, it needs to be consistent, repeatable and as unbiased as possible.
The rate of change has accelerated, indicating that business leaders must learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the uncertain issues of tomorrow. Closer to reality is that 'change' is continuously happening in the digital ecosystem of a company. Change Management success is not accidental, it requires a plan and strategy as well. Change is not for its own sake, a clear vision, effective communication, stepwise processes and exemplified change leadership are all the key success factors to overcome the challenges and manage changes smoothly.




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CIOs as Linchpin to Strengthen Digital Transformation

At the industrial age, IT is often one of the weakest links in the companies, running at a controller’s mode, slow to change. At the dawn of the digital era, leading businesses across industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business. The highly effective corporations need to embed the power of information in its fiber to weave agility and other business competencies, to ensure it is part of its mechanism and process to improve business responsiveness and decision effectiveness. They also have to leverage the power of the latest digital technologies to improve productivity and efficiency. Hence, CIOs as IT leaders should reinvent IT to strengthen the weakest links and catalyze digital transformation.
Strengthen the leadership links: The CIO is a leadership position. One of the core skills for a modern CIO to be successful is her/his capacity to collaborate with the board and her/his C-level peers and enable them to see the "light.” How does any c-executive direct the creation of a business strategy that is increasingly dependent on technology and, competitive advantages that derive from the technology? As such, the CIO should be a productive member of the top leadership team and provide some active and unique insight and options.  He or she must look into opportunities for business and then see what IT can do to grow the business.When BoD/executive team recognize growth opportunities, the CIO can translate this into an IT-powered business solution that will support the company's vision, in the example to grow market share. The CIO has to become the trusted business partner and the critical link to the business being successful; this requires that you have other C-Levels' support that allows this kind of thought and direction. Businesses can empower their CIOs to voice and contribute more at the strategic level. It is extremely important that CIOs who want to and can work at the strategic board level, need to get the message outside of their own circles so that they can make an influence on organizational, industrial or even national scope and beyond.
Strengthen the links between business and IT: The CIO needs to know how to play a bridge between what businesses understand and what technology understands. CIOs should have great leadership traits, understand business strategy, processes, the latest technologies, motivate IT team and master of business communication. They would en make sure the two worlds meet to ensure an optimal performing business. CIOs are the business executive first, and IT manager the second. CIOs must be able to relay complex technical ideas in a non-technical manner to business leaders. This would then drive products and services for customers at the best possible cost and ensure as high as possible shareholder return on investment. CIOs can provide valuable insight in the form of money saved, revenue from new unexplored business idea etc., at the same time, CIOs should also collect feedback from business upon how to improve IT services & satisfy customers.
Strengthen the link between strategy and execution: CIOs can deliver the ‘competitive capability” to the business as many businesses will plateau without IT. Hence, IT plays a crucial role in strategy management and IT should do more to strengthen the link between strategy and execution via IT strategic planning and capability/process mapping.  However, most IT organizations have not mapped their IT services and systems, or the set of business capabilities to their business processes. Because it is the difficult work and doesn’t produce any immediate tangible results, so it runs counter to the short-term fiscal goals of many organizations. But, to best align mid and long-range strategic IT planning and budgeting with the business, this type of process-capability-strategy implementation mapping is highly useful to strengthen the link between strategy and execution and improve strategy management effectiveness.
High-performance IT organizations see new information technologies as a means to create value for the organization. Running IT as a business begins with understanding the true business needs, strengthen the weak links in the organization, and improves the business’s top-line business growth. So, IT can truly become the digital accelerator, innovator and trusted business partner.
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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 5/19/ 2017

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking, innovating and sharing. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.8 million pageviews with 3700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight about digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.
  The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 5/19/2017The Digital BoD’s Leadership Inquiries Leadership is all about future and changes. Leaders set principles, open to criticism, and take the risk for innovation. Leadership is composed of three characteristics: Substance, skills, and styles. Contemporary corporate boards play the critical role in strategy oversight, business advising/monitoring. They also set the digital leadership tones and advocate changes. They are the mastermind behind the digital transformation
The Metaphorical Perception about Digital Transformation: The shift to digital cuts across industrial sectors, geographic territories, and leadership roles. The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. Change is inevitable, and the speed of change is increasing. Although we have to change with the "tide," we have to stand firm on our principles which would guide us to change for better and forward. We have to engage our sixth sense to decipher when to make incremental changes, and when to make a big leap. We also have to re-imagine "the art of possible," and convey a clear vision with vivid analogs or metaphorical perceptions about digital transformation, to make the journey foresightful, fun, innovative, goal driven and laser focus.
The Monthly “CIO Master” Book Tuning: The Multiple Personas of Digital CIO Role May. 2017? Compare to the other executive positions, the CIO role continues to be shaken up, refined, reinvented and reenergized. The magic “I” of the CIO title sparks many imaginations and modern CIOs need to wear different hats and play multiple roles.
Running a Goal-Driven Digital IT  IT plays a critical role in enabling business and driving digital transformation. However, Information & Technology is not for its own sake, but to catalyze the business growth and improve the organizational competency. IT has to learn the business; be the business and become the business. CIOs have to provide the foresightful leadership for running a goal-driven digital IT and achieve the high-performance business result both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Decipher the Ideal Digital Workplace & Workforce Compared to traditional industrial organizations running as a mechanical system, digital organizations are more like the living things which need to grow more organically and become more fluid to adapt to changes with self-renewal capabilities. In an ideal digital workplace, the organizational structure is solid enough to keep people or things in order; but fluid enough to keep information and idea flow. What are further perspectives to decipher the ideal digital workplace and nurture the creative and productive digital workforce
Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.
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The Digital Board’s Digital Inquiries V

Digital boards play a crucial directorial role in strategy oversight, business advising and monitoring, exemplifying leadership, advocating changes and innovation. To lead effectively, the board needs to be able to leverage diverse viewpoint via listening, brainstorming, and questioning, make effective decisions via critical thinking, independent thinking, strategic thinking and systems thinking, and become the “mastermind” behind digital transformation. Here are a set digital board’s digital inquiries.
Based on the nature of the changes and the urgency, to what extent can the business make the necessary changes with internal resources versus external resource? The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. First of all, digital BoDs and executives need to clarify the difference between doing digital via leveraging the emergent digital technologies or tools and going/being digital which indicates a more radical digitalization internally and culturally. Hence, you can leverage external resources to manage a few digital driven business initiatives or implement some new technologies. However, when going digital or ultimately being digital, it is a sweeping approach which needs to dig into the internal business functions and underlying organizational processes, as well as rejuvenate the inherent business culture, to get digital ready. It means it’s OK to leverage external resources or service/solutions to shorten the delivery cycle or avoid reinvent the wheel; but more importantly, the business needs to also figure out how to integrate its own resources, talent and process to build changeability, improve responsiveness and maturity. It means the deeper you can perceive the holistic digital impact, the further you can reach the digital vision and pinnacle.
How to assess for the capabilities the business need?  And how to find the talent for the future business growth and business transformation? The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. It is healthy for the BoD and Senior Management to honestly assess their company's maturity level and capabilities for change. If digital capability is dispersed, does it have the depth and resources to be effective? Do they work across functions and business units to share best practices and ideas. Make an objective assessment on how further and how deep your digital transformation can  reach. This will help them with foresight to oversee the strategy and practice governance disciplines for important business issues, such as business performance, investing, etc. It also help the business management build a road map or blueprint to change or improve these capabilities to enable more quickly responses to consumers and technology opportunities and threats.
Does the business possess the ability, desire, and discipline to cope with change along the way, no matter what happens? Change is inevitable. The accelerating speed of change, the volatile and uncertain business environment make the change as an ongoing capability organizations must master. Therefore, the board’s oversight of the business changeability helps further clarify the desire, discipline and ability to change. Change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished. It has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the organization. The roadblocks to change include, but not limited to lack of direction, internal politics, culture inertial, misalignment of systems & process,  too much hierarchy or centralization. This leads to lack of motivation/urgency or poor performance. It takes a lot of energy to break habits and outdated thought processes. Dealing with the significant challenge of digital transformation requires accelerated digital mindsets, leveraging multidisciplinary knowledge and insight, taking an end-to-end response and a structural approach. If you make change part of your routine, then change becomes easier to deal with.
Improving organizational responsiveness and changeability is strategic imperative. Rebuilding capacity and shaping strategic digital capability should be a continuous process. BoDs should act like “Change Agent,” to advocate changes, as well as have an oversight of the business’s change journey, to ensure the business can speed up and achieve high performance result via effortless changeability and seamless strategy execution.

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Three Factors to Accelerate Digital Innovation

There is no doubt innovation is becoming more important whereas technology becomes more advanced in the digital era. In fact, the speed of change is expedited, so does the speed of innovation. Innovation is the core activity of human evolution, to change the environment for advancement; to reach performance for profit, to improve efficiency for saving of resources, to sell products/services for the satisfaction of customers. And digital innovation has much broader spectrum which includes both hard innovations such as products/services/processes/business model innovations, or soft innovations such as leadership/management/culture/communication innovation. Here are three factors to accelerate digital innovation.
The motivation factor: Creativity is an innate ability to create novel ideas; and innovation is to transform ideas for achieving their business value. One important aspect that spreads across the innovation management cycle is the motivation factor. Innovation needs to have a well-defined goal. Innovation, in any organization, comes with the baggage like concerns: Do we really need innovation, who will be held responsible, what will be the cost, risk, and ROI etc. Digital organizations get into the “VUCA” business dynamic that is fast-changing, high-competitive, and interdependent. It has to have the motivation to be in the game or, that has built an innovative culture with motivated individuals. To be highly innovative, it becomes important to break down the status quo, change “what we always do things like that” mentality, or drop all the historical burden and run light. From innovation management perspective, it means to encourage creativity, experiment the new way to do things, actively engage the team to work harmoniously, and build the roadmap which can guide innovation and digital transformation journey.
The information & technology components: Information is the lifeblood of digital organization. Highly innovative organizations master of fostering business innovation via leveraging disruptive technologies and refining crucial business information. From information management to insight management to innovation management, being able to become innovative or close is being able to think, and create new things based on its own needs, true knowledge is an optimal solution. Information & technology are critical ingredients to build innovation as the core strategic business capabilities. Because digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a set of differentiated capabilities to accomplish a defined goal. IT can be used as a tool, enabler, catalyzer, innovation hub, and a digital platform to drive change, facilitate idea creation and implementation, meet the ultimate goal of an organization's short/medium/long-term strategic plans and build the unique business competency.
The art and science of innovation orchestration: Because enterprises have always been parts of simple and complex business ecosystems, so to function seamlessly, an enterprise has to be linked to the many and varying touch points between itself and its dynamic environment. Innovation happens at the intersection point of people and technology, business and customers. Digital is the age of customers. If the delicate, cooperative network between business and consumer can somehow facilitate innovative motivation, it seems to be a win-win for all. When innovating to create new value, position a brand, differentiate and position products or services in diverse markets, organizations can get a clear and uncompromised place void of irrelevant complexity, redundancy, and noise, build a distinguished set of business capabilities to execute the strategy with a predictive pathway. It also has high adaptability to deal with emergent events, work against all odds, make necessary adjustments to orchestrate a digital innovation continuum.
Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity.  There are many key factors to lead the success of digital innovations with an accelerated speed. It is imperative to sharpen them and build innovation as the core business capability, build a living business in the hyperconnected relationship with its environments, customers, suppliers, shareholders, and above all enhances and supports the creative human spirit via connecting, discovery, and experimentation.
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The Monthly Foresight: Self-Management as the Digital Theme May, 2017

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most wanted trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? What are your practices for building a hyperconnected and ultra-modern digital organization?
Building a Self-adaptive Digital Organization? Digital means flow; digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes and business dynamic in striving as digital master. Within system engineering, self-adaptive concepts are applied in order to control system risks that evolve due to dynamics and variation. The self-adaptive system is a system able to re-configure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environment changes. ?How to Run a Digital Organization with Autonomy The business world is moving from a static, siloed, and mechanic industrial mood to the dynamic, fluid, and innovative digital mentality. Because the speed of change is accelerating, so the attempts to solve the existing challenges through the lens of the old paradigm continue failing. The new paradigm that is emerging is a digital organization that is more responsive, holistic, vibrant, self-driving, and above all enhances and supports the living organization and the dignity of the creative human spirit. More specifically, what is the digital way of running an energetic and autonomous digital IT organization?  What are your biggest Challenges with Holacracy at the Moment?? “Holacracy is a new way of running an organization that removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles, which can then be executed autonomously.” (www.holacracy.org). However, organizations have been using the pyramidal organizational structure for so long (since the industrial revolution), there’s no overnight shift for either mindset or structure change. Now Holacracy model is still under experimentation and learning stage, what are your biggest problems with Holacracy at the moment. The Spectrum of Self-Organizing and Self-Managing? Self-organization comes from chaos theory. Living systems are self-organizing—there is no genetic manager. Human systems are living systems, therefore, human systems are self-organizing, by definition. The problem is we are taught to be managed out of this natural state of being, by well-meaning people who believe outside control to deliver more effective results at industrial age. Such command-control management style is the root cause of many business issues such as low employee engagement, lack of innovation, 'toxic culture,' etc. However, forward-thinking organizations today are on the journey of digital transformation, what's the optimal digital management style? There's a whole spectrum between minimally self-organizing and fully self-managing. If the organization were larger, some of the management burdens would likely be shared between the teams. but how much is right? That depends on the context. The “Digital Way” of an Organizational Structure and Beyond? Organizations large or small are on the journey to digital transformation, and there are different theories of organizational structure evolution and continuous brainstorming about the concept of self-management, the format of future of the organization - from Holacracy to sociocracy; from agile to Stoos, etc. The whole point is how to build a more creative and productive working environment in which the employees’ talent can be unleashed; and business as a whole is more optimal than the sum of pieces, in order to adapt to the change with the accelerating speed? Ultimately, what's the digital way to run a business??
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.8 million page views with about #3700th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Digital BoD’s Digital Inquiries

The corporate board plays a significant role in overseeing business strategy, setting principles and policies, monitoring and making the judgment on and assurance of corporate action within a framework of practical knowledge. The level of the board accomplishment vary but the essential competencies will remain the same, BoDs need to be insightful, influential, and become the mastermind of digital transformation. Here are a set of digital BoD’s digital inquiries. What are the different digital forces affecting your organization? In what ways are they likely to affect the business and how do you prepare for the challenges? The digital shift can be disruptive, digital organizations become more complex due to the accelerating speed of changes; non-linear connectivity, information explosion and hybrid nature of organizational structures. Imagine the complexity and digital disruption that come in due to these characteristics (lack of linearity and increased flux, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, complexity, emergent digital technologies, rules and regulations, etc.) These are emergent digital normals affecting organizations to different degree. The matter of fact is that the changes sweeping the world are hugely disruptive and there is nowhere to hide. And lots of the new things that happen appear and disappear just as fast as Summer rains. To prepare for the challenges, companies have to build the skills at managing complexity by pushing the boundaries of a more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value and ultimately building an evolving digital organization with digital fit. At the business level, the digital fit is about operational excellence, high-innovativeness, high-effectiveness, and agility.  Building an evolving digital organization is about putting people at the center of the business. When customers are delightful, employees are engaged, and shareholders are satisfied, the business is in the healthy life cycle to run, grow and transform.
Is your business vulnerable to the increasing speed of changes, new competitors or an erosion of revenues and profits from new customer behavior? Digital means explosive growth of information and increasing speed of change. Digital business ecosystem with all the aggregates-spanning challenges/paradoxes and opportunities bring organizations further towards the challenges. To overcome the business vulnerability to the change, new competitors or new breed of customer behaviors, digital organizations today should have a degree of variability - If the organization understands itself in relation to its context (the business ecosystem), it should be able to determine whether it requires changing something to become viable. It is about building dynamic business capabilities, influence the emergent properties of the environment and enable emergent change in its own behavior, function, and structure to propagate through itself change how it couples with the environment. One of the key determinants of whether an organization can move to the digital new normal is the digital maturity of its people. When people are ready to changes and processes are not overly rigid, organizations is frictionless to catch up the change speed. So part of the digital transformational journey is to prepare people for the new structures and speed, and to recognize this is a crucial step.
Do you customers want to engage with the business in different ways than in the past? How do you optimize customer experience and improve customer satisfaction? Digital is the age of customers. Today’s customers are becoming more selective because of the abundance of information flow and the multichannel digital convenience. Hence, businesses are always on the journey to optimize customer experience and improve customer satisfaction. Because the customer's experience is about how they encounter, observe, or undergo a company's events or stages, and think the company’s brand. Building customer-centricity consistently in a way that delivers the right experiences to the right customers at the right times is, in most companies, enormously complicated. It’s excellent to leverage the social platform and digital technologies to urge a sense of customer-centric innovation via online conversations via outside-in customers’ viewpoint. Try to digitally connect key assets or context to the resource-rich innovation hubs and cluster across enterprise ecosystems. Hence, customer-experience should be a common topic at the boardroom. You need to believe that, the customer is the lifeline of the business. Once you have this basic premise right, everything flows naturally. Set agendas and start new conversations that galvanize inspiration and gain traction on a powerful theme of renewal and growth.
Digital boards today have to deal with a lot of emergent business challenges. Perhaps one of the dilemmas of the modern board is that at one time, they need to push the gas pedal to accelerate the business speed; at the other time, they will be the brake for practicing governance discipline. Still, it is not about stopping the corporate vehicle, but ensure it’s running at a premium speed, and in the right direction.

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The Five Stages of Information-Knowledge Management

Information is the lifeblood and knowledge is power of modern businesses. All leading businesses across the vertical sectors claim they are in the information management businesses. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses, information potential directly impacts the business's potential of organization. Information management entails organizing, retrieving, acquiring, maintaining, securing, updating, distributing, sharing, publishing and finally archiving information. Managing information-knowledge life cycle effectively becomes a strategic business capability. And there are different level of information/knowledge system models to meet the business requirement at the different stage.
Experiential - Many organizations still feel overwhelming by the exponential growth of information. They are at the experimental stage of accessing information and exploring resource. But often lack of a structured approach with the right talent to manage those soft assets and capture its business value effectively. The pitfalls might include include, they do not understand what raw material they have to play with; or they do not apply the worthwhile evaluation to reveal the inherent value of information; or even worse, they do not understand why they should do these things in the first priority. Information/ knowledge are fluid, they can not be managed like those other hard assets.
Transitional- More organizations are accumulating the experience at the transitional stage, become more fluent in managing information, analyzing information, refining knowledge and expressing ideas. The effort of valuing information independent of its association to the related tangible seems to be difficult, if not futile, exercise. More attention needs to be placed on the conditions that allow information/knowledge to flow and generate value rather than try to manage ("control") knowledge like it is a thing that can benefit from that type of intervention. Perhaps you should first work to identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of your businesses; your products and you resources; like information flows in our processes for example, then its own value will become readily apparent and quantifiable by association.
Transformational –From transitional to transformational shift for information/knowledge management, organizations need to have Information Management strategy as an integral element in the business strategy, in order to manage information life cycle -processing information, synthesizing knowledge; capturing insight, shaping foresight, and abstracting wisdom seamlessly. It determines the strategic objectives, their risk appetite for achieving them, identifies and assesses the risks and make sure it’s all joined up. Perhaps in some organizations with low digital IQ, there seems to be the "expectation" that if you have a great business in one place and it's working ok then knowledge, ideas, solutions and advice will easily transfer and that piece of the jigsaw will fit snugly into somewhere else. In less complex situations, one can see how this easily works. However, organizations become more complex than ever, knowledge needs to be facilitated and managed more systematically to reach the transformational stage.
Motivational- Information Management is not just about information or process, often people are still the information master. Hence, gaining perspective, garnering attitude, and motivate people to frame the right problems, and provided information-based solution is an ultimate goal for achieving information value and practicing knowledge power. It is important to cultivate the learning culture that has awareness and understanding the importance of learning, plus setting a new behavior expectation for active knowledge participants. A cooperative communication framework like social network permits to share knowledge and create common models that evolve themselves naturally like organic organism. Briefly put, Knowledge Management needs to be well embedded into the key business processes to shape a culture of learning, motivate people to become more informative, insightful for improving the overall decision effectiveness and organizational maturity.  it actually extends to the culture of the company - how the collective mindsets and behaviors of the organization become digital ready for opening the new chapter of growth cycle.
Innovative: The ultimate goal of effective information/knowledge management is to keep mind flow, idea flow, and therefore, business flow. Organizations can work toward a knowledge ecosystem view, that incorporates the virtual aspects of the knowledge system, innovation, and intuitive behavior. Collaboration to harness the ideas and ingenuity of your staff cannot be nor should be controlled. . Because at the end of the day what you want is companies that are capable of mobilizing all the ideas, experiences, capacities of everyone in the company and partners to adapt to ever-changing challenges. Knowledge can become the commodity shortly, but creativity is always fresh, from one good idea to the next great idea, companies must compete by creating corporate cultures and ‘labs’ with fertile ground for new ideas to sprout, and blossom to achieve business value.
Information/Knowledge Management is the management with knowledge as a focus, involves the use of technologies and processes with the aim of optimizing the value that is generated, and with the goal to improve organization’s collective learning capabilities. To quote Peter Drucker, knowledge is the most valuable commodity. It couldn’t be truer in the digital era. On one hand, the fresh knowledge can be captured from the abundance of information; on the other hand, it doesn’t take long for that knowledge to become a commodity due to the rapidly change. But information flow can further streamline the idea flow and stimulate collective creativity which can catalyze business growth and build business competency. Information/knowledge management is a differentiated business capability and plays a crucial role in running a high performance business.
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The Monthly “CIO Master” Book Tuning: The Multiple Personas of Digital CIO Role May. 2017

Compare to the other executive positions, the CIO role continues to be shaken up, refined, reinvented and reenergized. The magic “I” of the CIO title sparks many imaginations and modern CIOs need to wear different hats and play multiple roles.        
       The Multiple Personas of Digital CIO Role
The Metaphorical Understanding about the Contemporary CIOs Multiple Personas? Digital CIOs are the highly complex role, they must look at the future of business from both strategic planning and technology envisioning lens. They must look at where the business is today and where it will be in five to ten years and ensure that information & technology can enable that vision going forward. Contemporary CIOs are expected to play multiple personas; besides being the tactical IT manager, leadership is considered the top attribute for digital CIOs. Creativity and cognitive ability are both nature and nurtured to shape CIOs as "Chief Innovation Officer," and "Chief Insight Officer." Here is the metaphorical understanding about the contemporary CIO’s multiple personas?
CIOs as “Chief Influence Officer” with Multidimensional Influence Tradition CIOs have been perceived as the tactical IT managers, running IT as a support function to keep the lights on. Nowadays, with fast-paced changes and overwhelming growth of information, contemporary CIOs face many leadership dilemmas: Being sustainable or disrupt, keep status quo or innovative? Act as a business executive or an IT manager, focus on transactional activities or transformative change etc. The command-control leadership style is no longer fit for the hyperconnected and highly transparent digital new normal. Digital CIOs today must shape their digital mindsets and develop their leadership capabilities to make multidimensional influence across the organization as well as the digital ecosystem.
CIOs as “Chief Improvement Officer”: How to Demystify the Triple Puzzles of IT? Digital CIOs have to deal with multiple challenges. On one hand, modern IT plays a significant role in gluing the enterprise puzzle together to ensure the business as the whole is superior to the sum of pieces. On the other hand, due to the complex nature of technology and the exponential growth of information, IT itself is also like the large piece of the business puzzle sometimes being misplaced, because many IT organizations are still perceived slow, expensive, and not integrated with the business. In today’s digital dynamic and technical environment where IT is being used more and more around the globe for revenue generating initiatives, how to run a digital-ready IT as a thresholding competency of the organization via demystifying the following triple puzzles?
CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”: Practicing Entrepreneurship in IT Contemporary CIOs have multiple personas, "Chief Innovation Officer," and “Chief Intrapreneur Officers,” are the most pertinent titles for CIOs to fit the digital leadership role in running IT as a business. Companies are recognizing that IT is roughly coupled to the business strategy as an innovation engine. With increasing pace of changes, CIOs generally have greater opportunities to stand out and practice digital leadership in driving innovation across their companies. Being entrepreneurial is first the mindset, then an attitude and skills are the easier part to be developed. More and more forward-looking IT organizations are practicing entrepreneurship and running IT as a software startup to play the niche and make continuous deliveries.
CIOs as Story Tellers: How to Harness Communication for Accelerating Digital Transformation: There are very few businesses today can state that IT does not play a significant role in the day to day operations or even long-term strategic positioning. However, there is the high percentage of IT organizations still get stuck at the very low level of maturity, being perceived as a cost center and back office support function. It is caused by the lack of strategic approach to reinventing IT as well as the poor communication between business and IT. Therefore, CIOs as digital leaders today have to truly become the strategic leader, to envision the role of IT in leading changes, and catalyzing strategy execution. They also need to be the great “storytellers” to harness communication for accelerating digital transformation.
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