Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1243

Make a Leap of IT Digital Transformation via Healthy Debating

Due to the exponential growth of information and disruptive nature of digital technologies, IT is also at the crossroad: Should IT continue to be run as an “isolated function” to keep the lights on, and become irrelevant? Or should IT reinvent itself to become the change department of the business? It is the time to spur healthy debating because debating is a style of critical thinking activity. Critical thinking is a basic form of organized thought specifically used to frame the right questions, identify the real problems or discover better ways to do things.
The healthy debates, in fact, help the business and IT do more reflection via pondering deeper and understand things from multidimensional angles: From IT management and innovation perspective, there’re quite a few classic IT debates last decades-long:  Does IT still matter? What will happen to the CIO role? What is the real business value of IT?' Business vs IT': Where do you stand for? Is IT/business siloing a chronic problem in many organizations? When should IT lead, when should IT follow? Etc. The more salient points of the "ongoing debates," are to brainstorm the better way to do things and run a high mature digital IT organization. Whether it is a debate, argument, interview, investigation or chess game, critical thinking will apply. The debate, when used properly, can be a way to explore critical thinking from a non-biased perspective, re-examine the root causes of IT ineffectiveness, reimagine the digital potential of IT, and reinvent IT as a digital business engine.
Critical Thinking plus healthy debating streamline IT leadership journey from good to great, from “command and control” to innovativeness: Critical thinking is asking questions and debating answers from all perspectives. The CIO is a digital business leader, a strategic decision-maker, not just a tactical IT management. A good CIO would keep everyone involved and foster an environment of creative thinking and critical thinking, and spur healthy debates for innovation.  The CIO needs to be able to recognize areas of deficiencies and inefficiencies, then ask the open questions such as, “What if?” or 'How can we...?" to throw the challenges for IT teams to solve them creatively. Great CIOs are multi-dimensional thinkers and versatile digital leaders. It's about having the right blend of leadership skills, business knowledge, and technical knowledge. IT leaders must show that they are interested in both the bottom line efficiency and the top line business growth. Technology is the means, not an end in and of itself. Business functions are at odds with IT when they feel that IT isn't solving problems. Great IT leadership can run IT from an outside-in business and customer perspective and improve the overall organizational maturity.
The debate is a critical thinking activity which helps to build the culture of openness: Albert Einstein’s wisely pointed out: “We can’t solve the problem with the same thinking we used when we created them.” The art of debating is much more about the open communication, brainstorming, and understanding things via different angles. We all desire to seek and participate conversations. The effective debating is tough and direct, needs to practice critical thinking, logic and the reasoning. In order to win the debate, you would need to deepen your understanding of the subjects, and you would need to plan strategies and tactics to win the debate which would require applied critical thinking in order to discover and execute things effectively. It does help to build the culture of openness and innovation.
Many think we are still living in the era which is information-rich and insight poor. The real critical thinking and healthy debate and argument are missing from businesses and society as a whole. In reality, we all bring our own biases and judgment to arguments. Having a debate where people are forced to uphold a view or belief that isn't necessarily their own, enforces critical thinking principles - increased perspective, less prejudgement and looking at another belief from a little less emotional perspective. At today’s digital dynamic with “VUCA” characteristics, either running IT, business or the society as a whole, it is the time to spur innovation and make a leap of digital maturity via healthy debating.


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Running Digital IT with Triple-Speed

Traditional IT organizations are often perceived as the controller which is slow to change and gets stuck in the lower level of maturity, as a reactive order taker. The type of speed issues in these IT organizations come from gaps created between IT and the rest of the company and IT leadership focus - being transactional or transformational? With the exponential growth of information and increasing pace of changes, IT simply cannot sit still, it has to adapt to changes with the multitude of speed, run, grow, and transformation accordingly. IT effects in radical digital to reach digital premium is to become the business solutionary and change agent for driving digital transformation and achieving the ultimate goal of building a high-responsive, high-effective, and high-performance digital organization.
Stability, efficiency and operational excellence: Keep the lights on,” is always fundamental for running IT smoothly. Quick-fixing the handy issues is also necessary to build a good reputation. An effective CIO has to first stop the pain, take care of chronic operational issues and deliver much-requested upgrades and tactical solutions. Establish credibility, demonstrate that you understand the business, and you can act, not just planning. Traditional IT organizations have a controller’s mentality and sometimes lag behind the changes, as the result, the gaps between IT and business are enlarged. With the increasing speed of changes, keeping steady doesn't mean to be static or slow to change. It means IT has abilities for managing risks and opportunities with the balancing act along a continuum of risks and reward.
Agility, changeability, responsiveness: Digital means flow, digital IT has faster speed. So, you also have to strike the right balance between stability and agility. Digital IT is a business integrator in knitting all important business factors, to improve business changeability, responsiveness, agility, and flexibility. The leading IT organizations now explore the consumer based model -running faster, nimble and resilient, with digital speed, to focus on IT agility via building the right set of capabilities. Be agile is not just about process, practice, procedure but about culture, attitude, guidelines, and principles. Agility allows the CIO to consider ways to drive more ROI, integrate services and any number of additional IT value-added components which can be provided. Because IT can no longer feel like it has a monopoly on delivering solutions to the business. IT should play a strategically critical role in building up agile enterprises which can succeed in combining two distinct but interconnected elements: strategic responsiveness and organizational flexibility, with the combination of an innovative culture that advocates creative problem-solving and achieves business ability throughout the company.  

Acceleration, innovation, transformation: Speed matters for businesses surviving and thriving. Up to the next level, IT not only needs to adapt faster but needs to accelerate, innovate and speed up digital transformation. An accelerating IT separates the exploitation of the existing methods and technologies from the exploration of the new way to do things via leveraging the emergent digital trends. Enterprise leaders are increasingly looking to the IT function to introduce beneficial change into their business models to improve strategic performance, enforce customer intelligence and to position the enterprise for future industry leadership, etc. IT now plays a pivotal role in digital transformation, so IT needs to focus on the fastest speed available because that is where the main threat is to competitiveness. IT acceleration also means to speed up the organizational vehicle as well, to build the business competency for the long-term growth and prosperity. There is no one size fits all, every organization has to take the right pace, walk the talk and explore its own sets of best practices and next practices for acceleration, innovation, and digital transformation.

Even the speed of change is increasing, businesses still do have contexts of relative certainty, while simultaneously having contexts reflecting both complexity and chaos. Each of these contexts requires a different management approach with the match speed. But overall speak, organizations rely more and more on information and technologies; the IT department has more and more to overcome in running at digital speed. IT must SPEED UP because speed matters for businesses to adapt to changes; to grasp the opportunities for marketing expansion; speed matters for building the new capabilities and gaining competency for both the business’s continuous improvement and leapfrogging transformation.

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High-Mature Organizational Capability as the Digital Business Differentiator

A business capability is a specific ordering of people, processes, resources, Information, and technology, aimed at creating a defined business outcome; capabilities are often developed reactively to competitive threats, strategic opportunities, and environmental changes, so all businesses have certain capabilities, what matters is maturity, the high-mature set of business capabilities can make organizations more adaptable to fulfill their strategy, as the key business differentiator.
Create the mapping between capability and strategy:  It is a process of progressively elaborating a set of capabilities through conceptual, logical and physical states, informing decision-making at multiple levels, and helping to maximize the business value. The executive teams must have a clear understanding of the link between organizational capabilities and business strategies, in order to capture the potential value of their capital investments. Business architecture can be taken as a mapping tool in providing the visibility and defining the roadmap for strategic alignment. It is also a discipline that helps organizations define and deliver organizational capabilities aligned with their strategic goals and objectives. Prepare the strategic plan points the company in a direction where it can maximize its market position and reap as many benefits as possible. This direction must allow for economic, market or customer change and let business adapt smoothly. A good strategic planning helps organizations extract the maximum value from their portfolio of organizational capabilities by their ability to inform decision-making at multiple levels, and to drive strategic alignment and optimization.
Modular business capabilities enable flexible strategic planning and execution with agility:  It's about breaking down the business capability blocks, there are the variety of hard and soft business elements such as skills (ability), knowledge (internal/external), policies/routines, business processes, any type of tangible/intangible resources, assets, culture, and forms of communications. These modular business capabilities can be recombined into dynamic digital capability with much shorter building cycle. The capability-based strategy is not only leading to a destination (business vision) but also cultivating and optimizing the set of mature enterprise capabilities on the way proactively, to further improving the business competency. Most of the enterprise capabilities need to be woven cross-functionally, it takes seamless communication and collaboration for the business as a whole, so it has to bridge the functional silos and fine-tune key business processes for crafting a set of high-cohesive and high mature organizational capabilities.
Leverage the capability-based strategic plan to drive budgets and prioritization, and improve the success rate of strategy management: It helps stakeholders to articulate what they need in their natural language (and not be hung up about methodologies). This will get reluctant stakeholders to want to contribute in the next iteration and gives business functions enough time to develop good strategies to deliver them. The capability-based strategy is to well bridge ‘as-is’ and "to-be" state. The multitude of organizational capabilities expands the business horizon to take a different path for reaching the “to-be” state. Hence, organizational capability maturity is an important digital business differentiator to improve the effectiveness of strategy management. Alternatives and adaptation are the keywords to survival. You know where you come from but you are not sure where you’ll arrive or how you get there precisely, so be well prepared for surprises and take the adventure more confidently.As capability is an acquired and organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place, it can therefore not be completely transferred because of the degree of organizational learning and organization that goes with it. So, the high-mature organizational capability is the digital business differentiator, to keep the business unique, competitive and innovative, and improve the business maturity as well.
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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 3/17/ 2017

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.7 million pageviews with 3500+ 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” 3/17/2017Running IT as a Change Agent: At the industrial age, IT is often perceived as the department which is slow to change, acts as a controller only, and gets stuck at the lower level of maturity. However, nowadays, with increasing speed of change and exponential growth of information, IT is like the business's digital engine, CIOs are accountable for critical part of the business that is constantly changing and evolving and IT is also in a position to dig through underlying functions and processes of the businesses. Therefore, it is imperative to speed up IT and run it as a change organization of the business for accelerating digital transformation.
A “Balanced” Digital Board: Contemporary corporate boards play the critical role in strategy oversight, business advising, and governance practices. The directorship in forward-thinking organizations must have the capability to guide, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goal, set the leadership tones to influence digital “mindset,” and drive digital transformation. Yin and Yang balance also needs to be considered in the boardroom in regards to making sound strategic decisions that deliver the real sustainable competitive advantage for an organization. But more specifically, how to build a “balanced” board to fulfill its duty effectively as well as setting the culture tones to achieve digital equilibrium?
Leaping Innovation via Overcoming Roadblocks: Digital is the age of innovation. From the management perspective, innovation is how to transform novel ideas to achieve its business value, and innovation is what leads to differentiation. Due to the hyper-complexity of modern businesses, innovation is essentially about reducing the unnecessary business complexity to tackle the complexities of business dynamic. Innovation management has an overall very low success rate. So, what are the roadblocks to cause innovation failure, and how to overcome them in achieving the high-expected result from innovation management?
Running a High-Performance IT with Digital Balance In today’s digital dynamic and technical environments where IT is being used more and more around the globe for revenue generating initiatives and the business is becoming IT. IT organization plays a significant role in both keeping the business bottom line and contributing to the top line business growth; leveraging the latest technologies to catalyze innovation as well as setting the standard for risk management. IT is also crucial to fix the handy, urgent business problems, and digitizing the touch points of customer experience for the business’s long-term transformation. Hence, the impact of IT organization depends on how it can strike the digital balance right and make the leap of digital transformation.  
“Digital Master” Book Monthly Tuning: The Philosophy, Capability, and Status of Digital Transformation  Mar. 2017 Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. At the heart of digital, it is people and how to build a customer-centric organization. But how to assess the digital fitness of your organization for such a paradigm shift.
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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Three Insight about Digital ADVANCEMENT

The most ADVANCING thing in the world is the advanced mindset.
Human history is an evolutionary journey to keep advancing economically, technologically, and sociologically. Advancement is about forward-thinking, progress, improvement, fresh knowledge, modernization while the opposite of advancement is primitivity, outdated concept/tradition, static mindset, negative behavior, etc. The modern society is a dynamic continuum with collective human progress. Real societal advancement is made through the work of progressive minds, update knowledge, and progressive activities. When the world is catching up with the most advanced mindsets, stepping into the further-looking perspective, aligned with a positive attitude, and integrating into upward movements, it makes a LEAP of collective human progress. The true advancement is about QUALITY, DELIGHT, SIMPLICITY, BRIGHTNESS, and INTELLIGENCE.
The most ADVANCING things in the world is advanced mindset: The most advanced things in the word are not hard things such as fancy gadgets, but the soft stuff - the mindset that can think forward, positively and creatively. It comes with the clear vision and precious insight. Vision is a future state of being, vision makes you feel passion about what is going to happen - the opportunities, it is a clear choice among future scenarios that advocate advancement and promotes positive behaviors. The most advanced mind with great vision is one which relates itself to a purpose greater than itself which contributes to the common good and the collective human progress because the visionary mind has the ability to think the past, perceive what is now and foresee the future in pursuit of advancement. The vision if understood in this perspective becomes a comprehensible dream beyond words and an achievable reality. The advanced mind presents sound judgment based on profound understanding and timeless wisdom. It is through identifying the "destination" for all, charting the route for all from their own respective positions toward the destination.
High-maturity is the ADVANCING stage from Function-Firm-Delight: The advance scenario is to improve the maturity from functioning (could still have a lot of redundancy) to firm (work solidly), to delight - the stage presenting the level of elegance and delight. When things or people are mature, they are not aged, they are in the advanced stage - ripened and delightful. When eating is not just about surviving, dressing is not just about warming up, and working is not just doing about mechanical and repetitive work; when being innovative becomes a state of mind to discover authenticity and take adventure; and when life is shifting from surviving to striving and thriving, people are becoming more progressive, and the life is in the most advanced stage, and the society as a whole is becoming more advancing. Delight is reflected in the expression of joy that overflows with aesthetic appreciation and abundant gratitude to NATURE- Nature is delightful!
We are in the ADVANCING journey when we move from information scarcity to knowledge economy to creativity economy: Many say we are still in the era of information-rich and insight poor. The advanced journey starts when you climb the knowledge-insight-wisdom pyramid, the higher you reach, the more advanced view you can perceive; the advanced journey gets the inflection point when you do not just absorb knowledge, but co-create new knowledge, and share fresh perspective, you are in the advanced stage; The advanced journey reaches the turning point when you are in the right spot to see the two sides of coin, and capture multidimensional views via the right angle; when your sight is not limited to black or white, but embrace the full spectrum of color; when you have the ability to identify the true signal from background noises; when you have the courage to brighten the surroundings, and when you have options to take alternative paths, untap creativity, and make continuous adventure, to enjoy different scenes.
ADVANCEMENT can be accelerated when you follow the most advanced mindsets and evolve into advanced activities and movement. The digital world is hyperconnected and interdependent. The advancement can become more reachable when we appreciate each other’s strength, complement each other’s capability; understand each other via mind connection, set principles to build common ground, and lift each other via the mutual trust. Only through continuous improvement, human advancement can be sustained and the world can move forward with solid speed.
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CIOs as “Chief Improvement Office”: IT Performance Quadrants

Forward-looking IT organizations are transforming from a cost center to a value creator, from a support desk to the “digital brain” of the business, and from a back office function to an innovation engine. IT should also shift from inside-out IT lens to measure performance to outside-in business and customer lens to manage the stakeholders’ expectation which is the key to the success of IT. So, depending on which stakeholder and what the role of the CIO is to your organization, metrics can be created that show effectiveness, efficiency, and maturity of IT. Plus, IT measurement should be focused on what is relevant to the target audience with a clear purpose as to what is being measured and why. Here are the IT performance Quadrants.
A: Provide transparency into IT: Digital technology makes the world more open and transparent than ever, at both individual and organizational level, businesses are always on and hyperconnected, there is no shortcut, transparency is a must. Hence, transparency with LOB leaders is a must and non-negotiable if the CIO needs to be successful. From IT performance perspective, transparency can help IT leaders tell a story of the journey from current state to future state, of improvements, of accomplishments, of enablement with business strategies, etc. It's definitely a great core competency to leverage. And at the strategic level, the well set of IT metrics need to be available to present at the big table for business communication performance. The intent behind transparency should always be connected to business performance. CIOs will spend time with executives one on one to explain the shift in thinking and ask for their help and guidance. IT should understand the main KPIs that the business uses to measure their performance. While these are not IT metrics, understanding them will enable IT to have a better business conversation about what we are doing and how it will drive business.
B: Aid setting direction for IT: The performance metrics are not just number but tell stories, and the good measurement aids setting direction for IT. Digital is the age of customers. The end-user continues to be the key component of any customer-centric business. IT metrics should get focused on the end-users.  This is where the metrics for a CIO should rest – the end-user experience. Digital is the age of innovation, to measure innovation, you choose those KPIs by deciding which are seen as critical to making progress on in order to deliver more innovations. An effective CIO is a true business partner! Placing a higher priority on the development needs and customer relationship management skills that align with the organization's strategy helps to drive people (customers, employees) engagement throughout the enterprise. Once the KPIs are selected and finalized, decision-making based on the results of the KPIs is of utmost importance.It is not the measurement that is important; it is what you do with the data obtained from the measurement. If the decisions are not made correctly, the performance metrics do not contribute for setting directions for IT or help in improving the business result.
C: Drive performance of IT: It is important to track the right metrics and know what to do with them to see improvement. Tracking KPIs and benchmarking are essential to IT transformation. But you need to do it wisely. There’re always two sides of measurement. The measures to motivate teams to achieve more and the measures to distract management from the ultimate business goals. The performance measure setting should focus on achieving the ultimate goals of the organization as a whole, not just the individual or the one team’s performance or even IT performance, to ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.IT needs to expand the capacity and capability by improving operation efficiency & effectiveness with the KPIs to resolve problems, increase in the number of problems successfully resolved and increase project success rate. IT’s scalability and change capability will directly impact business growth.  
D: Communicate the business value of IT: IT Metrics has to evolve from being a cost center to becoming a revenue generator. The only way to do this is to show a clear link to the top leadership team between IT efficiency and either productivity or top-line revenues. Historically, performance measurement systems for most businesses have been financing driven. However, in many business situations, financial indicators only cover part of the story. The right sets of metrics are those used to inform the business of IT value and performance. These should all be presented in business terms such that they are directly aligned with operational factors. Your measures should cover all areas that contribute to value creation including service quality, employee engagement, customer satisfaction and financial outcomes. CIOs need to be trusted experts who understand a lot about the performance dynamics of the tech sector to be seen as value added participants in conversations regarding the need to increase profit, market penetration, reduce risk, and to increase the velocity/effectiveness of every dollar spent. Hence, measure what it matters, to reflect the business value, also make sure IT and business are always on the same page.
Performance metrics are numbers in context, results related to your strategic GOALS. The fewer the better, but they have to be credible and relevant also in the eyes of the stakeholders.  IT needs to build the measurable metrics around these key focus areas. The CIO's metrics should clearly define how they are contributing to business success. Always keep in mind, people matter, achieve progresses by measuring the key objectives.The metrics have to accommodate IT investment outcomes that have a higher level of business value for the long run, IT must contribute or facilitate and accelerate organizational performance and speed up digital transformation.

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The Monthly “Decision Master” Book Tuning: Digital Decision-Making Pitfalls. Mar. 2017

Decision Masters refer to the digital leaders or professionals who can leverage multidimensional thought processes, information and intuition, take a step-wise scenario for making effective decisions consistently. Decision Masters also refer to the businesses or organizations that follow a set of well-defined principles, leverage fine-tuned decision processes, efficient information management system, decision frameworks, tools, and metrics to enable people across the organization making effective decisions collaboratively. Digital Decision-Making Pitfalls
The New Book “Decision Master” Introduction Chapter IV: Decision Pitfalls? Making decisions is one of the significant tasks for digital leaders and professionals today. However, the high ratio of strategic decisions has been made poorly and even cause the catastrophic effect. What are key factors contributing to poor quality decision-making, where are the blind spots, and how to avoid potential decision-making pitfalls?
How to Overcome Decision Fatigues?One significant effect of digitization is increased velocity, complexity, unpredictability, and ambiguity. Therefore, there is a need for a faster response to changes in business and industry based on effective and efficient decision making. In fact, decision-making is one of the most important activities for today’s digital leaders and professionals. Often people rush up to make so-so decisions or are too procrastinated to make timely decisions. Statistically, the high ratio of strategic decisions has been made poorly and cause the catastrophic effect. What are the root causes of those decision failures, and how to survive from decision fatigue and improve overall business decision effectiveness?
Three Effects, Three Decision-Making Pitfalls? The majority of leaders and professional spend a significant amount of time on making large or small decisions in the work and life. At today’s digital new normal with “VUCA” characteristics -Uncertainty, Complexity, Velocity, and Ambiguity, the capability to make effective decisions becomes a crucial leadership competency and professional capability. There is fuzziness in the decision because there is fuzziness in conflicting criteria, and there are hidden barriers on the way. Here are three effects which lead three potential pitfalls in decision-making?
How important is it to Identify Decision Bottlenecks? Either at the individual or corporate level, people have to make decisions, strategic or tactical, large or small even at daily basis. The business and the entire world become over-complex, hyper-competitive, unprecedented uncertain and ambiguous, what is the best scenario to make effective decisions, and how important is it to identify decision bottlenecks?.
Anti-Digital Mindset: Group Thinking and Abilene Paradox: Group Thinking or peer pressure is a term first used in 1972 by social psychologist Irving Janis that refers to a psychological phenomenon in which people strive for consensus within a group. In many cases, people will set aside their own personal beliefs or adopt the opinion of the rest of the group. In an Abilene paradox, a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group. You can see it at work when nobody wants to admit that the project is doomed, so they keep working on it, even though each person on the team knows it is futile. Why is it human nature to go along with what we believe the rest of the group wants to do without taking the time to actually check out if we are all taking a trip to Abilene?
The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.7 million page views with about #3600 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. 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.

Decision Master Book SummaryDecision Master Amazon Order LinkDecision Master B&N Order LinkDecision Master iBook Order Link
Decision Master IntroductionDecision Master Chapter 1 Decision IntelligenceDecision Master Chapter 2 Decision PrinciplesDecision Master Chapter 3 Digital Decision StylesDecision Master Chapter 4 Decision PitfallsDecision Master Chapter 5 Decision Maturity Decision Master Conclusion Five Pillars in Achieving Decision ExcellenceDecision Master Quotes Collection 1Decision Master Quotes Collection 2
Decision Master Quotes Collection 3
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A “Balanced” Digital Board

Contemporary corporate boards play the critical role in strategy oversight, business advising, and governance. The directorship in forward-thinking organizations must have the capability to guide, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goal, set the leadership tone to influence digital “mindset,” and drive digital transformation. Yin and Yang balance also needs to be considered in the boardroom in regards to making a strategic decision that delivers the real sustainable competitive advantage for an organization. But more specifically, how to build a “balanced” board to fulfill its duty effectively as well as setting the culture tones to achieve digital equilibrium?
The balance of multiple viewpoints to avoid group thinking, and make effective decisions at the strategic level: As to Board performance and competence, the challenge facing organizations these days is related to increasing complexity, unprecedented uncertainty & ambiguity, and increasing rate of change. Hence, digital BoDs need to be multidimensional thinkers who can reflect and offer diversified insight into such situations, to see things from a different angle and come out multifaceted viewpoint. The Board is responsible for ensuring an appropriate mix of thought processes, capabilities, skills, knowledge, and experience are present or available for it to fulfill its function. Applying deep insight and rubber stamping are such counter-propositions. All of these require thinking, requiring asking questions, to complement each other’s strength and balance of multiple viewpoints, to avoid group thinking or extreme thinking, in order make the sound judgment and improve decision maturity.
The balance of performance and compliance: Boards need to perform and conform at the same time. Conformance without performance adds very little to the firm value. Performance without conformance is not genuine. To some degree, conformance is inherent within the value-driven performance. However, the current model is still skewed by too much emphasis on compliance, too much "hands off." Some suggest that a new conception of corporate governance is required. The Board's role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization. It’s important to structure the agenda so strategic and performance related issues come first and compliance issues towards the end.  More specifically, this "performance" oriented board agenda should be focused on the maximization of business performance and potential, business capital allocation, shareholders’ value. The board should also strike the right balance between logic and intuition. Logic and rationalism keep business on track, but standard businesses are not viable. Businesses must perform and perform well compared to their peers to be successful in the long run, and it takes some form of emotive connectedness by the board to touch the heart and lead effectively.
The balance of setting digital principles and advocating innovation - to practice innovation governance effectively: Boards need to advocate, steer, and sustain innovation.  Innovation needs a level of guidance, it has to deliver business objectives, but it needs the right kind of governance to thrive. Governance is to steer, oversee, and monitor business management, including innovation management. Look at innovation and governance as a continuum. The leverage point is to frame innovation and keep focused, but not adding too much complexity. Innovation cannot be separated from a specific business purpose and in a broad context, governance is critical for meaningful innovation. Innovation and governance seem to be the opposite practice. When you say innovation, you could really mean maximizing value to the business, when you say governance you could mean minimizing risk. So they are complementary to strike the right balance and achieve a premium business result. Governance isn’t just about putting restrictions on what you can do, it is also about monitoring and knowing when things are not going to plan so that you can take appropriate action at the right time.
Digital board should learn how to “balance” well, the capability of striking the digital balance can differentiate a digital leader from a follower; a change agent from a laggard; an innovator from a mediocre. and lead changes as well as digital transformation seamlessly.

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What are the CIO’s Top Priority to Overcome Challenges in Digital Transformation?

Digital provides significant opportunities for business growth, also brings unprecedented risks to cause business fall. Never before has IT and business been so closely tied together. Never before has technology moved more quickly and missteps have larger trajectory impacts on every aspect of the business. Forward-looking companies across the industrial sectors empower their IT organization to drive changes, what are the CIO’s top priority to overcome challenges in digital transformation?
IT as a strategic partner: The digital CIOs must move away from pure IT manager,  and be a true business partner and strategist. Especially as more and more enterprises are leveraging IT for revenue generating initiatives; what some refer to as IT "is the business." IT will not "be the business" if it does not focus on the top prioritized business initiatives. To improve maturity, IT organizations need to be assertive in preparing and engaging effectively and efficiently with their business partners in these strategic initiatives. With the growth in enterprises leveraging IT for revenue generating initiatives, but IT has the history/tradition of being a very expensive cost center, often with the little demonstrable value that typically misses its commitments. What is the next action to enable the organization's strategies? CIOs have to overcome the challenges to maintaining and empower such a role as business’s strategic partner, and technologies, the source of funding, competition, will better sustain the current competitive advantages or being sources for new ones. Digital CIOs should set and communicate the forward-looking vision, and enable the business to achieve strategic goals.
Speed up to adapt to the rapid change: IT is only increasing in importance and relevance with each passing day. Business expects IT to figure out ways to make the business agiler. The biggest IT challenge is the pace at which the IT executive's responsibility for business operations, effectiveness, efficiency, agility, and continuity is outpacing his or her authority to make those areas a success. Can the current IT system handle a shock in the business tomorrow? The shock could be both positive and negative, such as, strategic business transformation, a new large customer, new vendor relationships, loss of business and need to scale down, M&A activities etc. So it forces IT leaders to get really creative on how they architect and implement change, to ensuring IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next while, at the same time, being so tactically pinned down by existing legacy infrastructure and inefficient/outdated business processes. In the industrial age, many organizations still get stuck with the lower level of maturity, the business is struggling with overly restrictive hierarchy and bureaucratic mentality, the silo walls and infighting are all the cause of business frictions. There are many instances where IT managers and risk management experts are in positions to play politics for the budgets rather than a focus on organizational matters. The CIO can provide holistic business insight via effective information management. And IT should be run as the change department of the company to break down silos and keep information flow as well as business flow. IT can leverage the emergent digital technology trends to optimize business process and organizational structure for harness cross-functional communication and collaboration, speed up the business to adapt to the rapid changes.
Innovation Management: Digital opens the new chapter of innovation, it provides the opportunity to think the new way to do things. Isn't that what innovation is all about: do it better, differentiate yourself from your completion, run, grow and transform the business. Innovation is not just about technology, Innovation is not always equal to the latest gadget, it’s about people, culture, partnership, manners, etc.  So educate IT team on the business and encourage them to engage with business counterparts in a value-oriented manner.While nowadays, technology is more often the business disruptor regardless of sectors, and IT needs to become innovation engine to catalyze their business growth. Being able to become innovative or close is being able to think, and create new things based on its own needs, true knowledge is the optimal solution. IT is uniquely positioned to observe processes across the enterprise. Sometimes when one business area has a new product that can be used by another, IT leaders can connect the dots to come up with new innovative solutions. IT should enable business innovation with disciplines and the right tools (such as collaborative platform, analytics tools., etc) at the organizational scope. CIO is also in a unique position to align process, technology, and people, from generating ideas on applying technology and data assets to drive value, the oversight is needed in managing innovation life cycle.
IT and Customer alignment: Since the biggest challenge to business success is IT and IT's biggest challenge is understanding the business expectations. IT system will fail and people will make a mistake, the biggest challenges for IT leaders would be the inability to effectively communicate the importance of delivering to expectations vs. requirements, to transform IT organization from a cost center to value creator. Digital is the age of people, digital IT should be run from an outside-in customer perspective, to move from IT-business alignment to IT-customer alignment and IT-business integration. Perhaps it is time to "align IT to the customer" rather than "align IT with the business" to put one ahead of the change curve and look to leverage the amazing cross-generational digital professionals’ innovation and drive. Customer experience is being the main driver for differentiation and in the end profitability. Customer experience isn't about improving things for the customer at any cost. It's about having the real insight to make confident business decisions that result in unambiguous ROI.
IT Project portfolio and investment management: IT is the business. There should be no such thing as IT projects, each level of business transformation management -portfolio, program and project management should focus on different business objectives but works cohesively to deliver business value with effectiveness and efficiency. Nowadays, IT investment can either leap or break a business, hence, it is important to make the right business justification for running IT as the business.  Turn the costs from IT to the business (demand spend), create a group in the business,  let them determine IT spend, take the burden from the CIO. Once you start treating projects that way and measure success of business project portfolio as a whole, rather than keeping technology ones separate with silo thinking, ensure that all business units required for the success of the project have requirement clearly defined with engaged stakeholders and with senior business leaders on the steering committee, you will see success of all projects increase and keep running the healthy IT portfolio to make continuous delivery.How IT leaders today overcome these digital transformation challenges depend on their ability to think, adapt, proactively plan and execute, with a sense of humor. Digital CIOs are born to change. Digital means flow, digital IT has faster speed, and they also have to strike the right balance between stability and agility. With the multitude of manageability, IT can deliver the best solution to the business problems which meet business’s requirement or tailor customer’s needs. IT can also proactively work as an integral part of the business to capitalize on opportunity via driving changes and leading the digital transformation,
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Five Aspects to Run a High-Mature Digital IT Organization

We live in a technology world and every day more and more technology affects the way we live, think, and work. Great opportunity, danger, and disruption are around every corner. Based on the fact that most of IT organizations still get stuck at the lower level of maturity, IT organization has to move from a reactive order taker and back-office support function to a strategic business partner. IT is about leveraging information and technology to lower costs, improve operations, and increase revenue. The IT leader of the future and the exemplars of today must move away from pure IT manager, and be a trustful business partner as well as an insightful strategist; especially as more and more enterprises are leveraging IT for revenue generating initiatives; what some refer to as IT "is the business." Here are five aspects of running a high mature digital IT organization.
Operation Excellence: The CIO must be concerned as to whether the operational ecosystem will function as expected. IT is the lubricant to a well-designed business system, hence, IT management needs to achieve operation excellence through consolidation, modernization, integration, and optimization. IT should be in the continuous tuning modes for streamlining IT processes and tighten coordination and collaboration with the business partners. Many IT organizations suffer from overloaded tasks and overwhelming information, prioritization brings transparency and aligns IT portfolio management with the strategic business goals and objectives. Only keeping the lights on is not sufficient to achieve operation excellence. IT organizations need to focus on value and capability building. Both information and technology become the key ingredient in building business capabilities that differentiate the company from its competition in enabling strategy implementation and supporting the company objectives. Hence, the more important thing is to work on the activities and considerations that need to be addressed to enhance the IT-business relationship to help organizations become agiler and proactively adapt to the changes, moving up from efficiency, effectiveness to agility; from functioning to firmness to delight.
Product/Service Innovation: CIOs also need to become Chief Innovation Officers to run IT as a digital innovation engine; otherwise, you will become Chiefly Irrelevant Officers. IT can achieve the innovation excellence if IT is regarded as a strategic business partner and given the role in catalyzing innovation and driving the business transformation. There are both incremental innovation and radical innovation. IT is often the driving force for both. To manage innovation in a structural way, you need to frame the creative process and leverage limited resources to keep focus, set time limits, apply varying techniques for managing innovation portfolios in a more productive and sustainable way. The role of the CIO should be able to envision not only where a company believes it is going, but how it will get there, and how it might be missing out on opportunities because of limitations on understanding of disruptive technology and information value. More specifically, the understanding of what information technology can help companies achieve and running IT as an innovation hub. Performance Dynamic: CIOs are trusted experts who understand a lot about the performance dynamics of the tech sector to be seen as value added participants in conversations regarding the need to increase profit, market penetration, reduce risk, and to increase the velocity/effectiveness of every dollar spent. IT should measure its performance via outside-in business and customer lens, not just inside-out operation lens.  Companies are recognizing that IT is roughly coupled to the business strategy, and it is a very good sign about how the companies will deliver value. Put the framework in place to map the strategic objectives into KPIs and then determine what technology investments will accelerate the changes you want to see in your KPIs. IT executives and departments need to work out how they affect the business output measures, such as "Margin Contribution," "Sales win percentage," "Yield on investment." And what they can do to improve them using the means at their disposal. Once they do that and make a unique, valuable, independent contribution to the business outcomes that they can demonstrate in these terms, they will gain credibility as a strategic business partner. They also have to advocate for "departmental immersion" and other strategies to help IT become more integrated and aware of the organization as a whole.
Customer Experience: IT has two sets of customers. Besides internal customers, end customers should also be IT focal point, CIOs must go out and talk with customers to understand business and understand their tastes and current and future needs. Now technology can improve every touch point in customer intimacy, it provides a significant opportunity for IT to influence customer experience directly. Deploy a range of technologies that focus purely on improving the customer's experience and perception of the business, showing the customer that you are makin a significant investment to deliver to them products / services which more closely meet their needs than competitors. And you can enthusiastically present, directly or through marketing, the investments in such technologies to customers and prospects. IT also needs to empower internal customers with efficient digital tools and help them do their work better. And you can enthusiastically present, directly or through marketing, the investments in such technologies to customers and prospects.
Employee Satisfaction: IT talent gap is the reality, not a fiction. And the overall employee engagement/satisfaction rate is very low both in US and globally. From people management perspective, the challenge is about how to encourage IT professionals stepping out of comfort zone, continue to learn, continue to innovate, and update performance management practices by assessing both quantity and quality result. There are many different views of employee engagement and improving employee satisfaction. The very goal is to well align corporate goals with employees’ career goals, encourage talent growth, create synergy by putting the right talent in the right position with the right capability to solve the right problems. Unleashing talent potential is a great human capital investment and business investment, engagement is assured, and excellence in performance is guaranteed when people know their unique gifts are appreciated. It is the time to refine digital talent management in order to adapt to the fast-paced business new normal.
To run a high-mature digital IT organization means that business as a whole has fine-defined objectives, processes, and indicators with clear accountability and responsibility to deliver business objectives and implement business strategy steadily. And IT becomes a strategic business partner that make a significant impact on the business growth, doing more with innovation, and helps the business achieve high performance business result for the long term.

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