Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1244
March 14, 2017
The Art and Science of Defining Business Capability
Business capabilities enable strategic communication and execution; it's part of art and part of science.
A good definition for a capability is the ability of the business to consistently deliver an expected result to the marketplace. A "business capability" describes what is a business entity in the organization, what is their purpose and output to the enterprise. That output is generated by applying their internal business processes, and can also be combined at the macro level to construct the wide business competency
A business capability is the ability to do something well in a consistent way: Having demonstrated the ability to perform those activities, it now has that capability to do them again. In this case, an ability the corporation or company has to do a specific set of functional activities. A capability management is to manage 'capacity +ability.' Business processes are then a succession of activities that define and support business capabilities. The sequence within which functional activities and decision points are conducted. For example, if you take "customer acquisition" as a business capability, it evolves many business processes, like "lead-to-customer", that support the "capability." At the same time, this ‘customer acquisition’ capability might also make part of wider business processes at the organization. A business capability is underpinned by business processes. The process brings clarity around the rhyme and reason for activities being performed in a predetermined order, illustrating dependencies, and the effect if certain activities are not done. The processes also show how capabilities are related.
Defining your enterprise business capability is part art and part science: Working with your business and leveraging business models is the most effective way. A capability is comprised of people, process, technology, resource, and assets. This is a holistic and strategic definition and balances the various components of the capability. Business processes are enabled by technology and people within the framework of a capability. Capabilities can be an enormous help in understanding and prioritizing the changing business/IT are attempting to create. The business capability is, therefore, at a higher level than a business process and is in the conceptual layer. It represents a conceptual service that a group of processes and people, supported by the relevant application, information and underlying technology, will perform.
Business capability concept enables strategic level communication: The problem is that many business people are practical, pragmatic, process-driven or results focused, and they have difficulty in understanding abstract discussions, the idea of business capabilities to business is a useful way to talk at a higher, conceptual or more abstract level about what the business can or wants to be able to do, and it enforces strategic level communication. The capability represents the WHAT, whereas the process and people represent the how. Also, organizations can look at both process and capability maps and decided that capabilities are much more accessible and thus aid the conversations between IT and its stakeholders. So the capability oriented business conversation provides a clarification that brings visibility, enablement, compliance, reduces errors and avoids cost, all important elements to the survival of an enterprise.
Digital enterprise capability is dynamic The business capability coherence is the decisive factor for the success of strategy implementation. The right set of unique Dynamic Capabilities directly decides the overall organization’s competency and growth potential.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
A good definition for a capability is the ability of the business to consistently deliver an expected result to the marketplace. A "business capability" describes what is a business entity in the organization, what is their purpose and output to the enterprise. That output is generated by applying their internal business processes, and can also be combined at the macro level to construct the wide business competency
A business capability is the ability to do something well in a consistent way: Having demonstrated the ability to perform those activities, it now has that capability to do them again. In this case, an ability the corporation or company has to do a specific set of functional activities. A capability management is to manage 'capacity +ability.' Business processes are then a succession of activities that define and support business capabilities. The sequence within which functional activities and decision points are conducted. For example, if you take "customer acquisition" as a business capability, it evolves many business processes, like "lead-to-customer", that support the "capability." At the same time, this ‘customer acquisition’ capability might also make part of wider business processes at the organization. A business capability is underpinned by business processes. The process brings clarity around the rhyme and reason for activities being performed in a predetermined order, illustrating dependencies, and the effect if certain activities are not done. The processes also show how capabilities are related.
Defining your enterprise business capability is part art and part science: Working with your business and leveraging business models is the most effective way. A capability is comprised of people, process, technology, resource, and assets. This is a holistic and strategic definition and balances the various components of the capability. Business processes are enabled by technology and people within the framework of a capability. Capabilities can be an enormous help in understanding and prioritizing the changing business/IT are attempting to create. The business capability is, therefore, at a higher level than a business process and is in the conceptual layer. It represents a conceptual service that a group of processes and people, supported by the relevant application, information and underlying technology, will perform.
Business capability concept enables strategic level communication: The problem is that many business people are practical, pragmatic, process-driven or results focused, and they have difficulty in understanding abstract discussions, the idea of business capabilities to business is a useful way to talk at a higher, conceptual or more abstract level about what the business can or wants to be able to do, and it enforces strategic level communication. The capability represents the WHAT, whereas the process and people represent the how. Also, organizations can look at both process and capability maps and decided that capabilities are much more accessible and thus aid the conversations between IT and its stakeholders. So the capability oriented business conversation provides a clarification that brings visibility, enablement, compliance, reduces errors and avoids cost, all important elements to the survival of an enterprise.
Digital enterprise capability is dynamic The business capability coherence is the decisive factor for the success of strategy implementation. The right set of unique Dynamic Capabilities directly decides the overall organization’s competency and growth potential.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
March 13, 2017
A Board with High Changeability
Contemporary corporate boards play a critical role in overseeing strategy, management advising and monitoring performance. They also set the tone for digital leadership and business transformation. Many well-run and governed organizations often fail to change or innovate and we are seeing the world where challenging change and innovation is a constant threat to established organizations. So, how can the digital BoDs advocate changes and build a digital board with high-changeability?
Change capability is a strategic skill on leadership qualities: While there are many components of leadership, one of the most important ones is the ability to adapt, model and influence change. The leadership team such as board must push this agenda, but pull the resources to achieve it. We live in a world where change is the norm and if we don't embrace it, accept it, roll with it or make it happen, we're not going to be successful. It also makes it possible for everyone to be on the same page speaking the same language and fosters an atmosphere of accountability. Change leadership concerns the driving forces, visions, and processes that fuel large-scale transformation. Leadership is all about change management and also the ability to take initiative (change leadership). Change isn't always in our control, but it is amazing how much control we have in adapting to it. So accepting and embracing change has put leaders more at ease because of its consistency. It's also given digital leaders confidence because you know you are able to positively adapt to any given situation.
BoDs set policies and principles for changes and digital transformation: Change/Culture management is an interdependent ecosystem that includes many business factors: The company goals, policies, internal control requirements, customer experience improvements / customer satisfaction, etc., all should be synchronized without compromising the need for any item, staff want to be involved in developing policies and procedures to achieve the organization’s goals, but this has to be meaningful involvement and be seen to be meaningful. The systems, processes and so forth are the clear manifestation of the leaderships' culture. It is the culture that clearly impacts how those policies, procedures, and rewards that drive behavior. The visionary leadership is in demand to take strategic responses towards change management which restructures business strategy, functional strategy, and operational strategy; to move things in a new direction and to do that without cultural awareness would just cause the leader to likely run into the same brick walls past leaders have encountered. Hence, a digital board with high-changeability can navigate the business toward the uncharted water and drive change more confidently.
Digital boards should oversee Change Management because it often goes hand-in-hand with Strategy Management: Change Management is an overarching concept while the transformation is a business leapfrogging. A crucial lesson to know is that simply rolling out changes and expecting success is wildly naive and generally doomed to failure. "Change management" is the overarching umbrella that encompasses extensive planning, outreach, communications, discovery of concerns / objections / potential points of failure, addressing fears and resistance, developing a shared vision, communicating valid and compelling reasons for cooperation, recognizing sacrifice and incremental success. Change can flow on the surface whereas transformation needs to permeate into business vision strategy, culture, communication, processes etc. It is also important to measure change outcomes in a shared and mutually understood and agreed upon fashion, being able to declare an end-point and successful conclusion. The modern digital board has many responsibilities, also gets a lot of distractions. It has to laser focus on the most critical things to steering the business toward the right decision. Nowadays, the speed of change is increasing and digital transformation is an inevitable journey, BoDs should set the tones for change and proactively drive change to ensure the organization is moving toward the right direction with an accelerated speed. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Five Focal Points of Digital Transformation
Today’s business is dynamic and complex, many organizations are on the way for radical digital transformation. To stay competitive, companies must move from “Doing Digital” -experimenting digital technological tools to “Being Digital” -Commit to transforming themselves into a fully digital business powerhouse. But more specifically, what are the focal points, and how to manage change and transformation in a structural way?
The human touch will become more central to build competitive advantages: Digital is the age of people. People-centric change methodology is evident reinforcement and proof of "best practice" of digital management. By having an empowered workforce that is able to respond to changing conditions, using its own initiative can truly make a business nimble. Change is usually required when an organization is expanding its business, its mission or updating processes or technologies. For the large changes or digital transformation, vision and strategy are the most critical elements for the organization. There are two elements that are critical to bringing in the human element in a change management program: These are fairness and communication. The employees’ input helps get to the point of change.For any type of changes, communication is critical. Once the employees feel fully invested in the change and they see upper management is fully invested in the change, then the likelihood of the change being made more smoothly exist. It also makes it possible for everyone to be on the same page speaking the same language and fosters an atmosphere of accountability.
Doing more with innovation which leads to business differentiation: In order to survive and thrive, innovation is “must have,” not “nice to have” approach in running a business today. For every initiative, you work closely with clients to articulate their important needs; define the most compelling and unique approach to addressing their needs; analyze the benefits per costs of that approach, and quantify why the chosen approach is better than the competition and alternatives. Digital innovation has broader spectrum which includes both hard innovations and soft innovation. There are many components in an effective innovation environment or ecosystem: Each component by itself may not cause a good environment, but collectively they can and weave an innovation ecosystem such as innovation leadership, innovation culture, innovation capability, practices, tools, recognition system measurements, risk management. The stepwise methodologies -Needs, Approach, Benefit per Costs analysis, helps organizations manage innovation in a more systematic way to improve innovation success rate.
Collaborative relationships will multiply and intensify: Hyperconnectivity is one of the great characteristics of digital transformation. Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment. It is the responsibility of the leaders to initiate his or her team to break the silos to realize the common goals or strategy which are far more important than the personal and departmental goals. Silos are reservoirs for homogeneous thinking, limiting the organization's creativity and innovation. Creative collaboration via integrative diversity can overcome silos. The least effective culture at fostering a digital workplace is traditional command and control environments. Fostering collaboration is the key to creating a seamless organization when in pursuit of digital strategy. The most effective digital workplace is one where collaboration and sharing are the norms.
Technology spending will shift to enabling knowledge workers to do their job better and delight customers: All of IT spending must be looked at through an investment lens, provide a framework for thoughtful and informed decision-making. Etc, for improving both bottom line efficiency and top line business growth. Some organizations apply the technique, either being called touch point analysis or another term – for identifying and tracing through the manner by which an IT initiative impacts an organization’s bottom line such as productivity and top line such as innovation. Such analysis traces through the manner by which the organization’s business processes are ‘touched’ by an IT initiative. What returns are you expecting? When do you expect them? What risk levels are you taking on? Scrutinize every expenditure and ask if it can be done more cost effectively; leveraging demand-side analysis with TCO shifts from technology budget to business budget discussions, to ensure that technology spending is in line with the business strategies and objectives. By identifying and visually portraying these touch points, the data and knowledge held by others can be tapped in monetizing an initiative’s benefits flows.
Organizational structures will change to break down bureaucracy and improve business collaboration, effectiveness, and innovativeness: The higher state being is the collaborative interdependent one. Limited hierarchy works best in a creative environment where the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of success. A flatter organization is more about collaboration: It's worthwhile to explore new models and be congruent with the words "change management"; and actually consider changing the model to meet what the future may be bringing. Many say the digital organization is the living thing to keep growing and fulfill its purpose. The nature design allows the organization to morph as life conditions and organizational capacities change to allow better fit for the purpose. And, when that purpose is fulfilled, or a more compelling purpose appears, then the organization can morph again and move on to the next great purpose. This requires that you start with a complete and accurate diagnosis of the organization's current state, identifying any barriers to excellence that may exist, then developing strategies for lowering or removing those barriers.Change is not for its own sake, digital transformation is the journey. A clear vision, a systematic thinking and effective communication, the logical processes and exemplified change leadership are all the key success factors to overcome the challenges, manage changes smoothly, and make a leap of digital transformation.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
March 12, 2017
“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.The Philosophy, Capability, and Status of Digital Transformation Mar. 2017The Philosophy, Psychology, and Technology behind Digital Transformation? Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity, Transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a differentiated capability to accomplish a defined goal. It is important to leverage multidisciplinary knowledge as well as taking a structural approach to making radical changes in the underlying processes and functions. Here are philosophy, psychology, and technology behind the digital transformation. ?
Five Dimensions of Digital Capability Business Capabilities are the abilities to produce specific goods or services for serving customers, gaining market shares, and building business competency. They are essentially underpinned by business processes that are embodied in the knowledge capital of a digital organization. Organization’s capabilities are business competency to execute its strategy and deliver value to its customers. There are both utility capability and differentiated capability which make the different level of impact on the business growth and maturity. Here are five dimensions of digital capability.Monitor the Digital Pulse of Organizations The multidimensional digital transformation provides impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivering solutions and ability of adapting to changes. The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital businesses nowadays are fast, always “on,” highly connected, interdependent, and ultra-competitive. Digital transformation is not a one-time project or a stand-alone initiative; it is a continuous journey to adapt to the new normal of the business world. As the business executive, how can you monitor the digital pulse of your company in order to lead changes steadfastly and manage the business effectively?
Is your Organization in the Progress, Plateau or Stagnation of Digital Transformation? Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology both horizontally and vertically. However, businesses evolve changes at a different speed because they are at the different stage of the business life cycle, as well as they are in the different level of business maturity. Hence, in order to lead change effectively, business leaders should do the check-up continuously: Is your organization in the progress, plateau or stagnation of digital transformation? And how to create the momentum and lead change more effortlessly?
A Dozen of Key Ingredients of Digital Philosophy: Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, communication to process and capability both horizontally and vertically. Digital is the age elevated by the fast growth of information and lightweight digital technologies. Both science and technology are grounded in philosophy. Philosophy is a Greek portmanteau of the love of wisdom. Understanding digital philosophy is to better understand the evolution and harness its power to serve human purposes, and design the institutions and societies to be a well-balanced digital ecosystem with the abundance of energy and sustainable advantages. Here is a dozen of key ingredients of digital philosophy.The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.8+million page views with about #3600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.
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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 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?
Push and pull: Digital drives all sort of innovations, proactively pushing ideas on how to leverage creative thoughts (soft) and the latest technology (hard) to drive revenue growth, increase business productivity, flexibility, and agility. There is the time you need to push forward for reaching the predefined business goals or objectives on time; there is also the time you should pull all necessary resources for creating the business synergy. It's possible you may have a hybrid centralized vs. decentralized approach; quick win vs. long term and push vs. pull for managing a smooth digital transformation. A centralized team focuses on long term strategic questions, as well as small focused teams in specific departments tackle pressing business problems. The quick wins solve handy business issues, but the well-defined digital road-map focuses on building long term differentiated business capability, so the result of short term interests controlling assets are needed to prosper in the long-term strategy. The process of running a high-performance IT is adaptively rational, it has to strike the balance of ‘push forward,’ and pulling all resource for orchestrating a seamless digital transformation.
Visible vs Invisible digital forces: Digital transformation is driven by both visible (hard) and invisible (soft) forces, from multiple directions. Often the emergent digital technologies are imposing hard forces of digital disruption and change drivers. With the advance of the SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) technologies, organizations can build integrated business platforms and the recombinant business capabilities more seamlessly, to shape products, services, and customer engagement. However, the high percentage of business transformation failure is often due to the “invisible force,” such as the culture - the collective mindset and attitude of the company. Metaphorically, change is like the iceberg, In order to move up to the next level of organizational maturity, the culture needs to be changed as well to adapt to the emerging digital trends and pulling strategy execution towards the right decision. To fine-tune “invisible” business elements for striking the right balance, learn to seek divergent views before developing a convergent conclusion; work to see issues from multiple points of view. Then identify tradeoffs; make choices, while continually remaining open to discovering errors in one’s reasoning. If you only take the visible business factors such as process or technology alone as an element of the strategy execution, you may miss the point and head to the troubles. Because the invisible and larger part underneath, is the decisive factor for the success or failure of digital transformation.
Effectiveness and efficiency: Efficiency is doing things right with minimum inputs and resources (do it right the first time) and effectiveness is doing the right thing by following the principles and leading in the right directions. Leaders focus on effectiveness, to ensure business having the vision and well defined goals to reach it; while managers focus on efficiency, which is the relationship between how much time (or labor) you expected or planned to expend, versus what the actual was. The optimal internal structure, autocratic or democratic of the enterprise is the one which provides the greatest effectiveness and efficiency, and depends, in large measure, on the nature and purpose of the enterprise. At some point in the enterprise evolution, business effectiveness and efficiency are also correlated specifically when the organization reaches its capacity. The next level should be on effectiveness of improving effectiveness, which could implicitly involve efficiency of improving effectiveness, and ultimately strike the digital balance for the enterprise to thrive, rather than just surviving.
IT is moving up its maturity from functioning, to firm to delight, running full speed with less friction, and strike the right balance to get digital ready. IT can weave all necessary business elements, either hard or soft, visible or invisible, “push & pull” accordingly to orchestrate a digital symphony. A digital-ready IT is a thresholding competency of the organization for unleashing its full potential via improvement, and improving its maturity via effectiveness & efficiency, intelligence and innovation.
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March 11, 2017
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 expected result from innovation management?
Innovation lip service: Nowadays, many people and organizations are talking about innovation, but very few practice creativity and manage innovation well. People consciously or subconsciously protect their status quo which is the very obstacle to stifle innovation. There is innovation friction. Once people get into a routine at work, they typically do not like to hear about how things could be done differently to make the work more productive, fun, effective, error-free etc. It is likely that if you are creative, you will challenge the status quo as you push through. This does have the effect of upsetting some people for whom the status provides a safe construct. People are naturally averse to appearing to make a fool of themselves, yet creativity demands consideration of the absurd when convention fails.
Poor innovation culture: To be truly creative means challenging conventional wisdom. Innovation nowadays more often are driven by pulling power of people, process, and technology, to not only make progressive or breakthrough products or services but also enforcing creative communication and culture. The silo thinking, bureaucratic business setting or inflexible management style, are often the root cause of poor innovation culture. People generally like creativity, but don't want ideas imposed upon them. If you have or develop the right culture, through change management or more sophisticated and comprehensive incentive and reward structures, if necessary, then everything else can be connected. And, if you get the culture -the collective mindset and attitude right then people feel they have the freedom to try and even to fail. Or people see things being implemented and making a difference, confidence increases, and they are inspired to be innovative.
Innovation novices: Innovation means to solve old or emergent problems in alternative ways. It takes practices to be fluent for innovation. Innovative leadership relates to multidimensional intelligence, empathy, idealism, process understanding, communication skills, cultural understanding, influence, and definitely - understanding what is wrong with the status quo. Creativity becomes significantly important in the age with the advanced technologies because the leaders of the future will not be mere automatons, but continue to discover, explore, and improve the surroundings. Looking at innovation from the perspective of developing business-wide innovation capabilities: Innovation has three phases: discovery of a problem or new idea, designing a prototype solution and the ultimate delivery of a commercially astute outcome. To improve innovation effectiveness, it is critical to identify and develop innovation practitioners who have high capabilities and potential to innovate.
Focus on operations in a low-risk territory and incremental enhancements only: Solely focus on quantifiable benefits or short-term result stifles innovation. Many disruptive opportunities are brought to life with new thinking on how to monetize them. A disruptive product or innovations is a breakthrough in the existing solutions, something that has a potential to disruptively challenge all existing solution. To disrupt you must hear the whispers of customers, contexts, inner worlds, outside worlds. The most important thing is to focus on end-user need gaps - even looking beyond your product category. It's about what's going in consumer's mind, that's the key. You can create a roadmap for disruptive innovation because they are macro trends and patterns that give clues and there are unmet needs. These innovations can be defined as offering an initially lower performance while at the same time bringing some new attributes to the market.
Lack of high mature innovation management capability: Innovation is not serendipity, but an ongoing business capability. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking and solutions to allow this to develop into its potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative, advantageous ways. Innovation ecosystem or the methodological environment should cover the whole innovation process, from processes in managing ideas or idea handling systems to idea implementation and promotion. There are many components in an effective innovation environment or ecosystem. Each component by itself may not cause a good environment, but collectively they can and weave an innovation ecosystem such as innovation leadership, innovation culture, innovation capability, practices, tools, recognition system measurements, risk approach.
In the rapidly evolving businesses and economic systems, the creation of new innovations is very complex but critical for firms survival and thriving.ultimately there are many roadblocks and hidden pitfalls on the way. The business growth is accelerated by innovation, and their innovation is enabled by their ability to orchestrate people, process, and technology, to catalyze and scale up with a new capacity to sustain business prosperity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Innovation lip service: Nowadays, many people and organizations are talking about innovation, but very few practice creativity and manage innovation well. People consciously or subconsciously protect their status quo which is the very obstacle to stifle innovation. There is innovation friction. Once people get into a routine at work, they typically do not like to hear about how things could be done differently to make the work more productive, fun, effective, error-free etc. It is likely that if you are creative, you will challenge the status quo as you push through. This does have the effect of upsetting some people for whom the status provides a safe construct. People are naturally averse to appearing to make a fool of themselves, yet creativity demands consideration of the absurd when convention fails.
Poor innovation culture: To be truly creative means challenging conventional wisdom. Innovation nowadays more often are driven by pulling power of people, process, and technology, to not only make progressive or breakthrough products or services but also enforcing creative communication and culture. The silo thinking, bureaucratic business setting or inflexible management style, are often the root cause of poor innovation culture. People generally like creativity, but don't want ideas imposed upon them. If you have or develop the right culture, through change management or more sophisticated and comprehensive incentive and reward structures, if necessary, then everything else can be connected. And, if you get the culture -the collective mindset and attitude right then people feel they have the freedom to try and even to fail. Or people see things being implemented and making a difference, confidence increases, and they are inspired to be innovative.
Innovation novices: Innovation means to solve old or emergent problems in alternative ways. It takes practices to be fluent for innovation. Innovative leadership relates to multidimensional intelligence, empathy, idealism, process understanding, communication skills, cultural understanding, influence, and definitely - understanding what is wrong with the status quo. Creativity becomes significantly important in the age with the advanced technologies because the leaders of the future will not be mere automatons, but continue to discover, explore, and improve the surroundings. Looking at innovation from the perspective of developing business-wide innovation capabilities: Innovation has three phases: discovery of a problem or new idea, designing a prototype solution and the ultimate delivery of a commercially astute outcome. To improve innovation effectiveness, it is critical to identify and develop innovation practitioners who have high capabilities and potential to innovate.
Focus on operations in a low-risk territory and incremental enhancements only: Solely focus on quantifiable benefits or short-term result stifles innovation. Many disruptive opportunities are brought to life with new thinking on how to monetize them. A disruptive product or innovations is a breakthrough in the existing solutions, something that has a potential to disruptively challenge all existing solution. To disrupt you must hear the whispers of customers, contexts, inner worlds, outside worlds. The most important thing is to focus on end-user need gaps - even looking beyond your product category. It's about what's going in consumer's mind, that's the key. You can create a roadmap for disruptive innovation because they are macro trends and patterns that give clues and there are unmet needs. These innovations can be defined as offering an initially lower performance while at the same time bringing some new attributes to the market.
Lack of high mature innovation management capability: Innovation is not serendipity, but an ongoing business capability. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking and solutions to allow this to develop into its potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative, advantageous ways. Innovation ecosystem or the methodological environment should cover the whole innovation process, from processes in managing ideas or idea handling systems to idea implementation and promotion. There are many components in an effective innovation environment or ecosystem. Each component by itself may not cause a good environment, but collectively they can and weave an innovation ecosystem such as innovation leadership, innovation culture, innovation capability, practices, tools, recognition system measurements, risk approach.
In the rapidly evolving businesses and economic systems, the creation of new innovations is very complex but critical for firms survival and thriving.ultimately there are many roadblocks and hidden pitfalls on the way. The business growth is accelerated by innovation, and their innovation is enabled by their ability to orchestrate people, process, and technology, to catalyze and scale up with a new capacity to sustain business prosperity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Running IT as a Change Agent
At the industrial age, IT is often perceived as the department which is slow to change, get stuck at the lower level of maturity. However, nowadays, with increasing speed of change and exponential growth of information, IT is like the business engine, CIOs are accountable for critical part of the business that is constantly changing and evolving. Therefore, it is imperative to speed up IT and run it as a change organization of the business for accelerating digital transformation.
Bridging the gap between IT and the business is the issue about changes: Change is a decision, you must think harder to take this decision; change is the process, you must work harder to improve. The disconnect between business and IT not only causes miscommunication but even worse to fail the business. IT is an integral part of the business, thus, bridging the gap between IT and the business is the issue about changes. The business and IT are inextricably linked in the 21st century, they need to work in concert together to ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces, a “Change Agent” IT can orchestrate the processes, tools, and products that organizations use to effect the transformation from strategy to deployment. Change with improvement in mind is a proactive approach that allows for planning and supportive considerations to be made and, therefore, is much more likely to turn into a smooth and successful collaborative transition.
IT is empowered to run change management due to its unique position to capture the oversight of the business: The IT department has been left to run change projects (people change, process change, and technology change), to have a good understanding from a strategic perspective of the organization (structure, processes, locations, drivers, objectives, goals, applications, data, technologies.). To be flexible you need to be able to change and you can't make effective change decisions if you don't know where you are. IT is not only the superglue but also the integrator to weave all important change elements effortlessly and make change sustainable. IT is also in a unique position to well align people, process and the latest technologies to empower talent, enforce communication, enhance governance, and enable cross-functional collaboration, to retool organizational culture for achieving high business performance potential. The inevitable range, breadth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations mean constant fine tuning for change circumstances is essential.
IT as the backbone of the business also plays a crucial role in digging deeper to diagnose the root cause of the problem and make the change sustainable: The root must change for the fruit to change.‘Change Management' itself has become a subject of self-sustaining change, due to the evolution of social media and rapid advances in communications management/ empowerment of the masses. By peeling back the layers after the layer, individuals and organizations can discover why they think, feel and operate the way they do. The range of technologies have emerged that can help foster a deeper sense of connection and purpose in employees, ignite latent worker passion and bring together disparate parts of the organization. Be a Change Agent to retool the organizational culture. Set clear perspectives on how IT change management efforts affect customers and corporate brand as well. There should be enough collective experience in any organization these days on change management to take the changes with systematic steps and measure the results accordingly.
Change Management is a journey, not just a one-time project, riding ahead of the change curve takes strategy and methodology, people are the weakest link, also the best reason for any changes, so make people as your CORE focal point of changes.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
March 10, 2017
The Monthly “Dot Connections”: Leadership vs Management
Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, and creativity is all about connecting the dots.
The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most wanted trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Creativity is all about connecting the dots. Which dots shall you connect between leadership and management in order to improve business effectiveness and accelerate digital transformation?Management vs. Leadership? In most human endeavors, leadership and management skills are not mutually exclusive but mutually enforce with each other. Leadership is a combination of nature, nurture, and circumstance. Leadership and Management are activities performed by people. These activities are two sides of the same coin; you can't get an organization to perform by using one side. Unfortunately, too many employees say they are over managed and under led. This does not mean that you can skip management and only do leadership. It means that you have to balance them better. Leader vs. Boss “A boss is someone who has formal authority over you based on an organizational hierarchy. A leader is anyone capable of positively motivating an individual, team or group even in the absence of formal authority.Leadership vs. Followship? Digital is the age of people, either being customer-centric or unleashing talent’s potential, the digital dynamic is all about adaptability, flexibility, and growth. Leaders no longer only refer to the one who has a formal title or in an authoritative position, but the one with advanced digital mindset, who can make positive influence into the broader business or social environment; and due to the digital abundance of information flow, people may not always come to leaders for getting the right answers, but good leaders frame the right questions, amplify signal from noise, solve problems large or small via creativity; and follow the heart or listen and learn from others all the time. Leadership Sparkle II: Influencing vs. Motivating? The words "influence," "motivate," "persuade" and "inspire" are often used interchangeably without much thought as to their accurate meaning. There’s subtle difference between the words, understanding them deeper may improve leadership skills and scenarios, as an effective leader needs to be both influential and motivational, better have them all.?
Leadership vs Position The managers at industry paradigm practice command-control through their 'positioned" authority power to achieve the management goal of efficiency, as talent are treated as resources or second priority while information is scarce. However, such leadership style is stale at the age of digital with the abundance of information, as business is hyper-connected and over-competitive than ever, innovation and effectiveness are key factors in business leadership to drive changes, so, what’s in-depth understanding about leadership vs. position?The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.7 million page views with about #3500th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes 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.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most wanted trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Creativity is all about connecting the dots. Which dots shall you connect between leadership and management in order to improve business effectiveness and accelerate digital transformation?Management vs. Leadership? In most human endeavors, leadership and management skills are not mutually exclusive but mutually enforce with each other. Leadership is a combination of nature, nurture, and circumstance. Leadership and Management are activities performed by people. These activities are two sides of the same coin; you can't get an organization to perform by using one side. Unfortunately, too many employees say they are over managed and under led. This does not mean that you can skip management and only do leadership. It means that you have to balance them better. Leader vs. Boss “A boss is someone who has formal authority over you based on an organizational hierarchy. A leader is anyone capable of positively motivating an individual, team or group even in the absence of formal authority.Leadership vs. Followship? Digital is the age of people, either being customer-centric or unleashing talent’s potential, the digital dynamic is all about adaptability, flexibility, and growth. Leaders no longer only refer to the one who has a formal title or in an authoritative position, but the one with advanced digital mindset, who can make positive influence into the broader business or social environment; and due to the digital abundance of information flow, people may not always come to leaders for getting the right answers, but good leaders frame the right questions, amplify signal from noise, solve problems large or small via creativity; and follow the heart or listen and learn from others all the time. Leadership Sparkle II: Influencing vs. Motivating? The words "influence," "motivate," "persuade" and "inspire" are often used interchangeably without much thought as to their accurate meaning. There’s subtle difference between the words, understanding them deeper may improve leadership skills and scenarios, as an effective leader needs to be both influential and motivational, better have them all.?
Leadership vs Position The managers at industry paradigm practice command-control through their 'positioned" authority power to achieve the management goal of efficiency, as talent are treated as resources or second priority while information is scarce. However, such leadership style is stale at the age of digital with the abundance of information, as business is hyper-connected and over-competitive than ever, innovation and effectiveness are key factors in business leadership to drive changes, so, what’s in-depth understanding about leadership vs. position?The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.7 million page views with about #3500th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes 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.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The Evolving Path to be a Digital CIO
Due to the changing nature of technology and overwhelmingly growth of information, the CIO role continues to be shaken up, refined, reinvented and re-energized and many IT organizations are at a cross road to either being transformed to be a more value-added digital engine for their business growth or being irrelevant as a cost center only. Hence, today’s IT leaders must wear multiple hats and practice situational leadership to bridge IT and business gaps, and take a more proactive role in leading digital transformation of the business.
CIOs have to become business savvy: Every CIO is different and whatever the management team needs or wants at the time out of the CIO will also be different, and by the type of business needs will be different as well. Like any C-suite members, they have to participate in forming the organization's strategy, its implementation, and assessing its performance. They need to be learning agile and gain business acumen and make sure that all IT investments are aligned with the organization's strategy and the approved priorities. CIOs should always stay focus on the big picture of business, ensure doing right things, leveraging and prioritizing, won't get lost or burned out in continuous IT overload. The evolving path to be a digital CIO is to gain the seat at the big table, within their business understanding, they are responsible for highlighting evolving IT technologies to the board members and their impact on the organization and its strategies. The true focus of a digital CIO is the strategic vision, a prioritized IT agenda to run a balanced “Run, Growth, and transform” portfolio effortlessly, and make leadership influence via daily grinding.
The CIO needs to be fluent in both IT and business, become a digital interpreter to avoid “Lost in Translation” symptom: The role of the CIO is taking the goals/vision of the business and translating it into the technology requirements. CIOs need to speak business language, while business executives need to gain more knowledge about IT. The importance of the CIO having an active seat at the "C-table" (& board interaction as appropriate) is to build trust, transparent relationship with peers, and avoid the “lost in translation” symptom. The key to enhancing understanding is that 'technical' knowledge is only one of those facets. So, the whole senior executive team has much better opportunities to stay on the same page, and each executive can also share their own vertical expertise and T-shape knowledge,
The CIO needs to become the “Chief Improvement Office” for improving IT effectiveness and efficiency: "Continual improvement" is IT mantra in the digital era; there is never an "enough" to optimizing operations. CIOs should have the measurement systems in place that drive continual improvement. An effective CIO should lead leveraging metrics that substantiate the ROI. Without a full understanding of upstream and downstream impacts, inefficiencies across operational silos won't be addressed. Senior managers need to own process within their area with the CIO office facilitating the end to end business process mapping, assisting in defining appropriate owners and hand off points across the business. CIOs need to keep a measure and periodicity at which the measure is reviewed against setting targets. Then ensure IT raises the bar on a continual basis to ensure the stakeholders get a real picture of how well the optimization efforts are bearing desired results. The CIOs should understand the focus/goals of the company to ensure IT is focused on those goals.
There’re many key traits in CIO leadership, there’re many talents in modern CIOs, there’re many capabilities CIOs should cultivate. The evolving path to becoming a Digital CIO is to practice multidimensional thinking, accumulate the variety of experience, adequate skills, willingness to learn and do it and so on to be more proactive, influential, and transformational.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
March 9, 2017
The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 3/10/ 2017
Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking, brainstorming, and innovating.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.7 million page views 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” 3/9/2017CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”: Practicing Entrepreneurship in IT: Contemporary CIOs have multiple personas, "Chief Innovation Officer," and “Chief Intrapreneur Officers,” are the most pertinent titles for CIOs to fit the digital leadership role in running IT as a business. Companies are recognizing that IT is roughly coupled to the business strategy as an innovation engine. With increasing pace of changes, CIOs generally have greater opportunities to stand out and practice digital leadership in driving innovation across their companies. Being entrepreneurial is first the mindset, then an attitude and skills are the easier part to be developed. More and more forward-looking IT organizations are practicing entrepreneurship and running IT as a software startup to play the niche and make continuous deliveries.
The Monthly Book Tuning "Digitizing Boardroom": Setting the Digital Tone from the Top Mar. 2017: Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses toward the right direction and achieve expected business results. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals.
The Monthly “Unpuzzling Innovation” Book Tuning: Open the New Chapter of Digital Innovation Mar. 2017 Digital is the age of innovation. And innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. Talking of innovation is not new nowadays, everybody, every organization now is talking about innovation. It's been at or near the top of the business or economics agenda for a long time. However, there’re a lot of confusions about innovation and there is no magic sauce to guarantee its success. Back to basic, what is innovation, the more you look into this topic, the more difficult to give a definition of innovation, as it is such a broad topic? One of the good definitions of innovation is: "to transform the novel ideas into commercial success.” In essence, innovation is, "intentional novelty bringing sustainable benefit.".
Three IT Stretches to Leap Digital Maturity Digital IT plays an omnipresent role in catalyzing business digital transformation via managing information, leveraging internal and external resources, integrating business processes & capabilities, enabling, innovating, and optimizing the consumer-driven technology that’s going viral in the enterprise. Digital transformation is not a one-dimensional change, but a multi-directional expansion. IT has to dig into the underlying business processes across functions and stretch up on the horizon to expedite changes and make a leap of digital maturity.
Three Clarities about Visionary Leadership? Leadership is about setting directions, making positive influences and inspire innovation. At its core, leadership is the journey for problem-solving. Visionary leaders are always the rare breed and in strong demand. Because leadership vision is like the light tower to guide the organization to the uncharted water and blurred digital territories. In fact, vision is one of the most critical digital leadership traits to lead today's business with "VUCA" characteristics. There are a lot of misunderstanding about vision and being a visionary, here are three clarity.
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.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.7 million page views 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” 3/9/2017CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”: Practicing Entrepreneurship in IT: Contemporary CIOs have multiple personas, "Chief Innovation Officer," and “Chief Intrapreneur Officers,” are the most pertinent titles for CIOs to fit the digital leadership role in running IT as a business. Companies are recognizing that IT is roughly coupled to the business strategy as an innovation engine. With increasing pace of changes, CIOs generally have greater opportunities to stand out and practice digital leadership in driving innovation across their companies. Being entrepreneurial is first the mindset, then an attitude and skills are the easier part to be developed. More and more forward-looking IT organizations are practicing entrepreneurship and running IT as a software startup to play the niche and make continuous deliveries.
The Monthly Book Tuning "Digitizing Boardroom": Setting the Digital Tone from the Top Mar. 2017: Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses toward the right direction and achieve expected business results. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals.
The Monthly “Unpuzzling Innovation” Book Tuning: Open the New Chapter of Digital Innovation Mar. 2017 Digital is the age of innovation. And innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. Talking of innovation is not new nowadays, everybody, every organization now is talking about innovation. It's been at or near the top of the business or economics agenda for a long time. However, there’re a lot of confusions about innovation and there is no magic sauce to guarantee its success. Back to basic, what is innovation, the more you look into this topic, the more difficult to give a definition of innovation, as it is such a broad topic? One of the good definitions of innovation is: "to transform the novel ideas into commercial success.” In essence, innovation is, "intentional novelty bringing sustainable benefit.".
Three IT Stretches to Leap Digital Maturity Digital IT plays an omnipresent role in catalyzing business digital transformation via managing information, leveraging internal and external resources, integrating business processes & capabilities, enabling, innovating, and optimizing the consumer-driven technology that’s going viral in the enterprise. Digital transformation is not a one-dimensional change, but a multi-directional expansion. IT has to dig into the underlying business processes across functions and stretch up on the horizon to expedite changes and make a leap of digital maturity.
Three Clarities about Visionary Leadership? Leadership is about setting directions, making positive influences and inspire innovation. At its core, leadership is the journey for problem-solving. Visionary leaders are always the rare breed and in strong demand. Because leadership vision is like the light tower to guide the organization to the uncharted water and blurred digital territories. In fact, vision is one of the most critical digital leadership traits to lead today's business with "VUCA" characteristics. There are a lot of misunderstanding about vision and being a visionary, here are three clarity.
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.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
