Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1233

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 4/28/ 2017

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” 4/28/2017CIOs as: “Chief Insight Officer”: What are the Digital Aims of the Organizations: Digital makes a profound impact from the specific function to the business as a whole. Transformation is a leapfrogging change when the final result is not fully defined at the beginning of it and with the expectation to reach the next level of progression. IT plays a crucial role in digital transformation because it is in the unique position to oversee the underlying business processes and functions. Hence, in order to clarify the digital aim and lead change more effectively, CIOs as “Chief Insight Officer” should continue asking: “Why do you need to change?” “What is your digital aims of the organization?” “Who are your change agents?” “Have you reached the inflection point of change yet?” And“How to get the destination with faster speed?”
The New Book “Digital IT - 100 Q&As” Quote Collection III: The purpose of “Digital IT-100 Q&As “ is to summarize 100+ classic and emergent digital debates about digital IT leadership and management, brainstorm how to run a holistic digital business from multidimensional lens, share digital holism and strategic insight, keep IT digital fit, deal with both IT management dilemmas and innovation paradoxes effortlessly, guide today’s digital leaders and professionals to learn the valuable lessons across industrial and geographical boundaries, develop the best and next digital practices to tailor their needs, set the right priorities to achieve high performance, and build a solid digital brand, with the goal to accelerate digital transformation.
Digital Boards with Vision Inquiries The contemporary corporate board as the top leadership team plays a directorial role in envisioning the future of the business and overseeing corporate strategy. Because leadership is about future and change. Vision is not the “Nice to have,” but “Must have” quality for top leaders in order to direct the organization toward the uncharted water or blurred territories in today’s “VUCA” digital dynamic. Vision is basically a qualitative statement defining the "perception" of the organization, and the effective board provides the guidance about what core to preserve and what future to stimulate progress toward. Here are a few vision inquiries of digital boards.
What are the Biggest Barriers to Digital Effectiveness in Organizations? Digital transformation is the rough road with all bumps and curves on the way. There are a number of challenges common in transformation programs, such as having a clear vision, getting the right strategies, execution, a forward-thinking leader to convey the transformational vision, and a broader view of customer demand, etc. More specifically, what are the biggest barriers to digital effectiveness and how to overcome them for improving the digital business performance and maturity.
The Multifaceted Creativity Creativity is the most needed skill in the 21st century, because digital is the era of innovation. Creativity is both innate and a skill. Developing creativity requires both internal motivation and self-awareness. Being original and being yourself is the first step, breaking down the convention thinking box, and practicing out-of-the-box thinking are the mental activities to stimulate creativity as well. Here is the further understanding about the multifaceted creativity. ?
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 New Book “Digital IT - 100 Q&As” Quote Collection V

The purpose of “Digital IT-100 Q&As “ is to summarize 100+ classic and emergent digital debates about digital IT leadership and management, brainstorm how to run a holistic digital business from multidimensional lens, share digital holism and strategic insight, keep IT digital fit, deal with both IT management dilemmas and innovation paradoxes effortlessly, guide today’s digital leaders and professionals to learn the valuable lessons across industrial and geographical boundaries, develop the best and next digital practices to tailor their needs, set the right priorities to achieve high performance, and build a solid digital brand, with the goal to accelerate digital transformation.
101 The “Art of Possible” can only be achieved through visionary IT leadership, as well as the art and science of modern IT management.102 Communication, collaboration, and creativity are the keys to run IT as a better business partner.103 The best way to promote IT is to communicate proactively with critical thinking and creative thinking.104 High-mature IT has a high trustful business-IT relationship, it is highly responsive to changes and proactively manages innovation.105 The best or next digital talent management practices should encourage innovation, inspire learning, take a structural approach to make the digital transformation.106 Hire mindset and capabilities, train for specific skills.107 Don’t be afraid to look above, below, and outside of the talent pools that you are see, to explore the alternative digital talent pipeline.108 The nonlinear capabilities and unique competency-based on the cohesive set of capabilities will give the digital professionals the advantage to compete for the future.109 Digital business becomes always on, borderless, more hyper-connected, and interdependent than ever.110 Figuring out what employees are not saying might be the start point to greater retention and a more engaged workforce. 111 The business leaders must work with the right mindset to create an inclusive organization with every dip in the business life cycle.112 Workforce performance improvement must take the long-term view and require a core DNA transplant.113 The effective vehicles for retaining the top talent are effective leadership, agile mindset, the culture of learning, robust processes, and cool technology tools.114 A high-mature digital organization is shifting from “pushing” stuff to the digital channel into “pulling” resources up for problem-solving.115 You should always leverage performance and potential, look at the overall success of the company for the long run.
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Digital Organizational Design vs. Business Changeability

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business both horizontally and vertically. The very characteristics of digital is the increasing speed of change and hyperconnectivity. Forward-looking organizations leverage the latest technologies to fine tune the organizational structure and improve the business changeability. Organization design is the vehicle through which the business strategy is executed and defines the business environment in which the digital organization can reduce the change friction, improve the business adaptability, and unleash its full potential.
Digital workplace is fluid, live, informative, creative and productive, flatter structures will help to speed up organizational response to changes: The goal for optimized organizational design is to get the cross-functional communication, mass collaboration, bold innovation through less hierarchy, cross-functional collaboration. So large groups of people can interact and be able to divide and conquer a complex challenge to accelerate the solution in forming collective capabilities. The workplace needs to be designed to help employees at all levels within an organization, from top leaders to front-line employees, understand and develop their creative capacity to solve problems and exploit opportunities in new and innovative ways. Everyone has a valuable contribution to make at whatever level in the formal hierarchy they happen to be placed, and adopt the robust processes designed for improving responsiveness and harnessing communication, and improve business efficiency via reducing process redundancy or resource wastes. Organization structure and its impact on efficiency could play either positive or negative impact. The bottom line is how well the organizational structure is being influenced by factors such as communication effectiveness, information fluidity, customer centricity, etc. Limited hierarchy works best in a creative environment where the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of success.
Digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes via self-adaptability, self-renewal, and maintain the digital balance: 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. Self-adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational change, without just making "big plans" or "blueprint,” but starting from relations between people. It is possible to see what enables a self-adaptive organism is an information-driven process and the capability to sustain it. It is important to turn organizational “theories” into tangible management processes that use “relations between people” as the loom on which to create management structures and processes that support self-adaptive problem-solving and build “recombinant” business capabilities. The challenge for organizations is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational interdependence with the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements, engaging digital talent and balancing effectiveness and efficiency. Or to put simply, maintain the right level of digital balance. In fact, maintaining the digital balance is a never-ending business life-cycle.  
Digital organizations need to continually fine-tune a successful structure for improving people-centricity: Digital blurs the functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays. Traditional hierarchical lines will phase out and a collective of business partners will emerge working collaboratively to set strategy and achieve organizational goals. The challenge for any business is to find a successful structure that helps to empower people, enforce iterative communication, and harness cross-functional collaboration to deliver better business results and unleash the full digital potential of the organization. New generations of digital technologies such as social platform or other collaboration tools are enabling not only the structured processes of the past but also the unstructured processes of the digital enterprise.Because digital technology is highly powerful but nimble and lightweight, as the “superglue” to weave all necessary business elements into the building blocks of business capability and highlight the characteristics of “Changeable Organization.”
Organizations need to have an in-depth understanding of gains and pains of organizational design and development. Very few of organizations understand all the gains they will enjoy from such initiatives in their organizations. Gains in profitability, changeability, new learning, business growth, and innovation. Digital transformation won’t happen overnight, and organizational structure optimization takes planning, experimenting and scaling up. But it is the journey worthy the effort to improve the business’s performance and maturity.




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The Monthly “Leadership Master” Book Tuning: Creative Leadership Apr. 2017

Digital is the age of innovation.
Leadership is complex yet simple: Complex in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. Simplicity in that the substantial of leadership never changes, it’s all about future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation. The purpose of the book: Leadership Master - Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity is to convey the vision of digital leadership, share the insight about leadership maturity, and summarize five emergent digital leadership trends Here is the monthly tuning of digital leadership.
      Creative Leadership as the Digital Trend
“Leadership Master” Book Introduction Chapter 2: Creative Leadership: Digital is the age of innovation. And creativity is the #1 wanted skill in the 21st century. Therefore, creative leadership has also emerged as one of the most important digital leadership trends to improve leadership effectiveness and accelerate business & society advancement. But more specifically, what is creative leadership all about, and who are creative leaders.
Blogging, Thinking, Brainstorming, Envisioning, and Innovating? It’s the time to celebrate the 3700th blog posting. The intention of creating the “Future of CIO” blog is to sow the innovation seed, share knowledge & insight, make continuous communication, and create a unique digital landscape for accelerating business transformation and leadership maturity.
Innovative Leadership: Three Elements in Innovative Leadership Creativity is the most wanted skill for digital professionals today, and innovative leadership is also in strong demand to bridge cognitive gaps, amplify collective creativity, inspire the culture of learning, and accelerate digital transformation. What are the top traits in innovative leadership, and how to cultivate more world-class innovative leaders?
Is Digital Leadership Constructively Disruptive? Many think digital is the age of innovation. Digital is a disruption with rapidly increasing speed and hyperconnectivity to break down silos and rigid hierarchy. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that simply adopting a new digital technology may be insufficient. You have to transform the company's underlying processes, cultures, and organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed. Otherwise, companies may begin a decline from its previous high performance. Digital border is not made of sharp lines, but cursive dots need to be widely connected to spark the next level of innovation. And in order to lead more effectively, does a digital leader have to be constructively disruptive.
Practicing Digital Leadership with Continuous Deliveries: The substance of leadership will never change, it is the vision to make the positive influence, to lead forward, not backward. We all lead at the different level as digital is the age of people. And the emerging digital trend is the constructive disruptor for broadening leadership touch point and deepening leadership cognizance. Digital leadership is no longer just a status quo with command & control style, but a journey of continuous learning and influencing via continuous delivery.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.8 million page views with about 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. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; 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 your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.




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The New Book “Digital IT - 100 Q&As” Quote Collection IV

The purpose of “Digital IT-100 Q&As “ is to summarize 100+ classic and emergent digital debates about digital IT leadership and management, brainstorm how to run a holistic digital business from multidimensional lens, share digital holism and strategic insight, keep IT digital fit, deal with both IT management dilemmas and innovation paradoxes effortlessly, guide today’s digital leaders and professionals to learn the valuable lessons across industrial and geographical boundaries, develop the best and next digital practices to tailor their needs, set the right priorities to achieve high performance, and build a solid digital brand, with the goal to accelerate digital transformation.
79 Keep in mind, measurement is not just numbers, but stories.80 IT assessment is a great way to help identify what is right and wrong in your IT environment.81 IT metrics need to evolve to something that matters to the business audience, at the same time that “business sentiment” needs to get put into something more tangible.82 The successful enterprises have IT systems that are not cumbersome but enabling.83 IT leaders must keep in mind which KPIs best measure IT ability to deliver business value.84 IT metrics have to evolve from being a cost center to becoming a revenue generator.85 Each organization has specific, measurable goals and objectives they have to hit through investing in IT. 86 First, measure the right things, and then measure them right. 87 IT is a key enabler to build almost all differentiated digital capabilities nowadays. 88 The software can be measured in the “hard” way accordingly.89 People do what you inspect, not what you expect. 90 Enterprise Performance Management is an overarching umbrella for the variety of management discipline. 91 Metaphorically, if the enterprise is a vehicle, Enterprise Performance Management is like the gas pedal with speed scoreboard.93 Enterprise Performance Management is an overarching umbrella for the variety of management disciplines. 94 The key challenge of IT branding is to demonstrate what your provide can help customers achieve some critical purpose of theirs.95 To reimagine IT, IT branding needs to be part of IT transformation effort. 96 Today IT is so integral to the business that it is the part of the business. 97 IT brand identity should be supported by the message you create and how to distribute to your customers.98 The data shows a disturbing gap between IT perception of itself as reasonably innovative and effective, and non IT’s lukewarm view.99 Business and IT need to focus more on being objective in approaches and allow for the ever-changing markets and the environment.100 In order to demonstrate IT value, organizations need to first know wherein lies the IT value.
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The Digital Board’s Inquiries about IT

Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. All forward-looking organizations claim they are in the information management business, it seems the industry sector is already the outdated concept. Hence, to gain digital insight and lead business transformation effortlessly, the BoDs also need to become more information savvy and IT-friendly. The Board's role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organizations. BoDs are perhaps not interested in data itself, but surely they would be interested in the V factor -VALUE it can bring to the table. They also should concern about the potential opportunities and risks the digital technologies could bring to the company. Here are a few digital board’s inquiries about IT.
Are information, functional or business silos likely to be hurdles as we strive to become more digital? Information grows exponentially, organizations shouldn’t just response to them in a reactive way. The aim of modern Information Management has often been described as getting the right information to the right person, in the right format and medium, at the right time, in order to make right decisions. Information abundance can bring new ideas; ideas have always driven business success. Technology is an enabler of any great ideas. Hence, BoDs as key strategic decision makers in the organization need to understand the information potential and become the IT advocate for accelerating changes. The volume of information collected is used for market evaluation, customer experience management, and strategy management coupled with the real world requirements that support and facilitate the overall operational management. Information is also something that can hinder the achievement of strategic objectives. Functional silos often hurdle information flow and stifle innovation. Unstructured data based decision-making by senior managers has been poor because of the intrinsic value of information reduces decision effectiveness. The value of information technology is a crucial success factor for the digital organization. However, consider many businesses which make a huge investment on sophisticated technology tools that are greatly wasted, because the appropriate processes to leverage those tools are not implemented or adopted. Hence, the board’s oversight of information management can make a significant impact on both business’s bottom line survival and top line growth.
Do we have an incentive structure that promotes collaboration to streamline information flow and achieve its business value? Information potential directly impacts the business's potential of the organization. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. To gain business insight, the information management is the business competency of aligning the use of information through the management, assurance (accessibility, reliability, etc.) and exploitation (Collaboratively enabled and fully support the business objectives). The board’s oversight of information management can highlight the importance of information flow, set the tone for building the culture of information-based decision-making, also empower IT leaders to co-create business strategy. IT should first work to identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses; products and resources; like information flows in processes, and leverage the latest digital technologies to optimize business processes and structures that promote collaboration and streamline information flow to unleash the full digital potential.
Are our information processes and systems compatible with each other and the technologies enabling digital? Information and technology catalyze today's digital businesses. Information brings about business ideas; business ideas generate lots of information. Information Systems are the backbone of the digital business. IT also shifts from monolithic hardware based to mosaic information oriented. Today’s digital technologies are more powerful, also lightweight. Information is growing exponentially, and it is humanly impossible to explore all of the "art" out there around a subject or technology. And IT plays a significant role to add those critical pieces properly. IT organizations need to switch from “keep the lights on” survival mode to “doing more with innovation” thriving mode. The BoD’s IT oversight would help to shrink the gaps between business and IT, ensure IT systems compatibility and technology enabling digital, catalyze IT maturity from a back office support center to the digital engine of the company.
Technology is often the disruptive force of the digital transformation. Information could be one of the most time intensive pieces to innovation puzzles. The value of information is qualitative, measurable, and defined uniquely to an organization. If done well, information can unleash the business’s full potential and maximize its multidimensional values. Hence, digital boards today should put IT management oversight on the agenda. Great boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential, they have to focus on both performance and compliance.All of these require thinking, learning, asking questions, to sharpen “directorship” for getting digital ready.






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The New Book “Digital IT - 100 Q&As” Quote Collection III

The purpose of “Digital IT-100 Q&As “ is to summarize 100+ classic and emergent digital debates about digital IT leadership and management, brainstorm how to run a holistic digital business from multidimensional lens, share digital holism and strategic insight, keep IT digital fit, deal with both IT management dilemmas and innovation paradoxes effortlessly, guide today’s digital leaders and professionals to learn the valuable lessons across industrial and geographical boundaries, develop the best and next digital practices to tailor their needs, set the right priorities to achieve high performance, and build a solid digital brand, with the goal to accelerate digital transformation.
56 Organizations today are inundated with the sea of information. Prioritization starts with a right mindset. 57 The requirement management is a good starting point and one of the significant step in managing IT initiatives effectively to achieve its business value.58 By setting the right priority and focusing resources and budget on the most critical areas, IT has the opportunity to not only be responsive but ultimately be the strategic business partner.59 Reimagine IT via doing more with innovation, and rebrand IT via building the solid IT value proposition.60 The challenge for the IT leader si to set the right priority, manage the limited budget and resource, to “Do more with innovation.”61 A value driven IT needs to understand stakeholder’s expectation and propose a service/solution portfolio that corresponds to both demand and cost drivers with a focus on business priority. 62 Setting priorities to leverage limited resources and talent to maximizing business value is an important step in climbing the organizational maturity. 63 The priority has to be set for lifting IT and overall business maturity from efficiency to effectiveness to agility.64 It is time to “align IT to the customer” rather than “align IT with the business.”65 Building a digital-ready IT roadmap is a proactive approach to well prepare for the digital transformation.66 A digital-ready CIO is a visionary and transformational leader, not just a transactional manager, for the long term.67 Bridging the gap between IT and the business are really issues of all about change.68 The “artificial gap” between business and IT can be bridged via effective leadership, profound understanding, continuous learning, and improvement.69 Silos build the wall in people’s minds and tie the knots in their heart.70 More transparency in the IT value proposition to the business plus more engagement partnership with the business is needed for running a high mature digital organization.71 IT and business must be partners, must be able to speak the same language, finish each other’s sentences, to solve the well-defined business problems.72 The “disconnect” is the single largest problem in the business-IT world today.73 IT is part of business, and business is becoming IT. 74 Metaphorically, IT is the nervous system of the enterprise body.75 Organizational success comes when IT and business act from “IT vs. business” to IT is business” - a true partnership.76 People tend to have a high expectation of digital flow, very little patience with technology issues.77 The true IT-business partnership is not only possible but the “most have” goal for building the high-performance organization.
78 Trust means how to strike the right balance upon what IT can give up control, and what IT needs to control.
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The Multifaceted Creativity

Creativity is the most needed skill in the 21st century, because digital is the era of innovation. Creativity is both innate and a skill. Developing creativity requires both internal motivation and self-awareness. Being original and being yourself is the first step, breaking down the convention thinking box, and practicing out-of-the-box thinking are the mental activities to stimulate creativity. Here is the further understanding about the multifaceted creativity.

Creativity is all about change: To be creative, you must do something different, To be creative, to re-frame, first, you need to embrace the unknown (think outside the box). Second, you need to challenge the known (probe the paradoxes). Many people always live with the conventional wisdom - the box they are familiar with. Fundamentally, the "box" is the set of "rules" you are abiding by at any moment in time. There are likely multiple "boxes" that you try to stay within. Working within multiple sets would create an "intersection of sets." The complexity of life comes from the myriad of intersecting boxes you try to live within. But being creative require you to break down the outdated rules or concept. Fundamentally creativity is about changes, to pursue a progress or make a leap of changes. Thinking outside the box is all about "rule breaking"; the more "unruly" you are, the more creative you are. After breaking the outdated rules, you are "outside the box." Or more precisely, creating a new box that could be used for thinking inside the new box, but out of the old box (for one or more class of problems). You step out of your logical thinking minds to create something new; or more often, you blend different types of thinking processes to see things differently, stimulate creativity, and reach the “Aha” moment.
Creativity is a process: Creativity is a thinking activity. Most creativity theories, see creativity as a process through which the individual finds a relationship with the environment. The reason creativity is serendipitous because it is the nonlinear multidimensional thought processes, and it evolves conscious, subconscious, and even superconscious activities. There are interdisciplinary approach to articulate creativity: For psychoanalysis, this is a neurotic function; for humanistic psychology, it is a sign of health. Creativity needs a balance of divergent and convergent thinking, the latter isn't valued enough. Creativity encounter with, and merging of divergent information. Without divergent thinking, perhaps your box is just not big enough to connect all important dots. With this wide divergence, the only seemingly obvious conclusion is that the substance and source of creativity still elude discovery. Creativity is a talent and learning helps shape up creative ideas; creative process fusion. Creativity process could be sophisticated, but creativity is never for making things complicated, the opposite is actually true, creativity is to advance, but also simplify things. When pioneering and solving problems, initial solutions are often more complex than required, and then adoption and progress come with simplification. Progress is in simplification, which often follows complexity. We are able to see creativity's effects, feel its inspiration, and use it in a myriad of ways.
Being creative is about how to solve a problem in an intelligent manner: So, every person has the ability to be creative, just tearing down the mental barriers they have and tapping in their inherent abilities. There are times when we feel driven by forces that we don't understand, creativity is just like the fountain flow from the within.  The ideas come and go and, above all, we must instead leave them free, do not be afraid to say what we think or make a fool, do not let that stop, be fooled if we must. But ultimately, creativity needs a problem to solve. To nurture creativity, it is important to get out of the  "fear" that blocks our own genius, learn how to liberate the imagination and come up with a new approach to the world. Therefore, it is important to create conditions so that the creative potential can manifest and being creative is about how to solve a problem in a fresh way and an intelligent manner.
Digital is the age of innovation. Organizations starve for creativity. Creativity converges with the concept of innovation that is the management discipline to transform innate ideas and achieve its business value.Creativity has many forms and manifestations. And by manifesting creativity from an individual endeavor to a team activity and a collective effort, the horizon of creativity is expanded and the collective creativity potential can be unleashed to solve complex problems or overcome the common human challenges.


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CIOs as: “Chief Insight Officer”: What are the Digital Aims of the Organizations?

Digital makes a profound impact from the specific function to the business as a whole. Transformation is a leapfrogging change when the final result is not fully defined at the beginning of it and with the expectation to reach the next level of progression. IT plays a crucial role in digital transformation because it is in the unique position to oversee the underlying business processes and functions. Hence, in order to clarify the digital aim and lead change more effectively, CIOs as “Chief Insight Officer” should continue ask: “Why do you need to change?” “What is your digital aims of the organization?” “Who are your change agents?” “Have you reached the inflection point of change yet?” And“How to get there with faster speed?”
The purpose of such radical digitalization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of achieving high performing business result: Digital transformation is a long-term journey, it has to be clearly understood in the map's vision to satisfy both short term gratification and long term high performance result. Digital transformation starts with the realization that where you are currently no long can deliver the business goals and the long term vision of success for your company and your shareholders. The digital aims of the organization are to determine what the future needs to look like (what the transformation must look like), overcome the roadblocks, and change inertia.  if you want meaningful change in an organization, it will not really happen until you get buy-in and sponsorship from senior management and participation from bottom up. Without this, you will get chaos and some temporary change, not nature and smooth digital transformation which can make a leap of the business forward!
Digital transformation is not a single dimensional technology adoption only, but a multidimensional expansion to make a leap of the business maturity: Digital transformation isn’t just an extension of continuous improvement of the current business, but a quantum leap with radical change. So thinking outside the current constraints and comfort zones requires a different vision and the courage to pursue it. From the business management perspective, it is the journey to expand toward all different directions. So the first best factors to the “transformational change” and its further “championing” have been the endless self-exploration and self-transformation in the material, emotional, intellectual dimensions that need to co-evolve together.  Hence, setting achievable goals and measurable objectives help the business management keep focus, and ensure the business transformation is on the right track. The objectives of digital transformation are basic tools that underlie all planning and strategic activities. They serve as the basis for creating policies and evaluating performance and changes.
The digital aims of organizations are to take the holistic approach for problem-solving, and build an innovation ecosystem: Transformation takes a holistic approach, to leverage their various environments, or ecosystems, to manage innovation and accelerate performance. The dynamic digital organization needs to be an innovation powerhouse in which creativity is encouraged, and innovative problem-solving via cross-functional collaboration is the new normal. A solution is nothing if the problem is not perceived. Therefore, creating the awareness of the problem is the first step to making an innovative solution being understood and accepted. The hyper-connecting nature of digital offers particularly fertile ground for cross-functional communication and collaboration, developing cross-industry ecosystems and innovation opportunities, in part because ways of doing business and customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age, and companies need new ecosystem partners to pursue them, and focusing on discovering the better way to do things.
To manage a seamless digital transformation, it is important to define your digital aim as the first step. And determining what the future needs to look like. Doing digital is about taking a few actions, and being digital is the fundamental shift from the mindset to behavior. Consider digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced environments, and humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions. At the high maturity level, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation, in order to adapt to the new world of the business: Fast, always “on,” highly connected and ultra-competitive and innovative.
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The Monthly Performance Insight: Take a Holistic Approach to Performance Management Apr. 2017

Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy till shop floor. "If you can't measure, you can't manage," legendary management guru Peter Drucker once asserted. He was right Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions to ensure it happens. It takes multifaceted approaches from multidimensional perspectives.

Take a Holistic Approach to Performance Management
Business Performance Measurement: How to Take a Holistic Approach? As Drucker wisely pointed out, “you can only manage what you measure.” The purpose of defining performance metrics is to monitor the business progress and performance. But there are two levels of performance measurement: at the strategic level, organizations concern about the long-term business result, business capability building, customer satisfaction and employee engagement; at the operational level, business needs to take care of quarterly financial result, employees’ weekly report, customers’ purchasing transaction and more. So how shall you not only measure right but measure the right things right??
The Performance Quadrants of Running the Digital Organization Forward-looking organizations are on the journey of digital transformation. Digitalization is not a single dimensional effort to using the cool digital technologies, but a multi-dimensional pursuit to embed digital into the very fabric of the business, and run a high-effective, high-responsive, and high mature digital organization.  The dynamic digital organizations today need to get away from letting things fall through and start creating an “integrated wholes” by utilizing the dynamic processes to build the differentiated business competency, bridging the chasm between strategy and execution, and achieve the high-performance business result. If you can only manage what you measure, here are the principles to set performance quadrants for assessing the status of the digital transformation of the business?
Three Aspects of Measuring Organizational Maturity Organizations today are over-complex and hyper-competitive, management continues to keep the business running, but the lack of insight on how well their organization is doing for the long term. Is it functioning well or dysfunctional? Which management metrics shall you apply to measure organizational overall health and maturity? Who and what tools are being applied to measure if an organization is healthy or sick? Proactive or reactive? Intelligent or dumb? Customer-centric or operational driven?
What are the Characteristics of a Robust Performance Management System (PMS) Although almost all organizations understand how crucial their people factors are for the ultimate business success. Still, many of them treat their talent as cost and resource only, their performance management is process driven and out of dated to assess, motivate and measure staff performance objectively. What are the characteristics of robust performance management system (PMS) more specifically?
Going Digital Systematically Going digital is a no brainer. If so, then why are so many companies still hesitated to go radical digital? Why are there so many companies not taking advantage of customer-facing opportunities to digitize interactions with digital technologies? Even during the journey, shall you continuous check: Are you doing the right things? Are you doing them the right way? Are you doing them well? Are you achieving the desired outcomes? Are you transforming to be ready for the future? Are you shaping the good digital strategy about the future and positioning appropriately for your place within it? Do you have enough resource to implement the digital strategy? Are the assumptions and risks understood and manageable
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