Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1245

Practicing Digital Leadership with Continuous Deliveries

The substance of leadership will never change, it is the vision to make the positive influence, to lead forward, not backward. We all lead at the different level as digital is the age of people. And the emerging digital trend is the constructive disruptor for broadening leadership touch point and deepening leadership cognizance. Digital leadership is no longer just a status quo with command & control style, but a journey of continuous learning and influencing via continuous delivery.
Digital leadership is the state of mind via continuous connecting dots and practicing multidimensional thinking: The quality of your thinking decides your leadership effectiveness and profundity. Creative leadership is in demand as digital is the age of innovation. Creative leaders will build up the working environment to nurture creativity, enable dot-connecting activities such as cross-functional collaboration, and encourage the freedom of thinking and action. It's essential to have people who can generate lots of original ideas, and it's equally important to have people who can evaluate and implement these ideas! So it's important to build a culture where creativity is not just accepted but encouraged. Creative leaders are forward-looking, to connect today and future and accelerate digital transformation.
Digital leadership is the capability via continuously strengthen leadership strength: Leadership is complex, and although it has many facets, at its core, the foundation of leadership is based on authenticity. Leadership strength is different from leadership style, the style is often at the skin level, but strength is built underneath, the strength is both innate and can be strengthened further by practicing. Therefore, it’s important to dig through your innate ability, discover and enforce your own leadership strength, unleash your leadership potential and build your own unique set of leadership capabilities. Focusing on leadership style alone to attract the followers is, at best, a short-lived adventure. An effective leader needs to have both broad business acumen and digital fluency and deep expertise in the specific field, transdisciplinary knowledge, cross-functional experience, to practice expert power and enforce leadership influence.
Digital leadership is the journey of continuous learning and making leadership influence: Digital leaders are lifetime learner with a thirst for knowledge, insight, and wisdom. What keeps leaders successful is their intellectual curiosity and ability to continuously be open to learning and applying these learning as they move forward. Leaders not only learn themselves but also advocate a culture of learning. They need to be innovative and really consider where there are value and real learning within an organization. Coach, mentoring, on the job hands-on experience are the best forms of learning. You need to both learn from similar-minded mentors and the opposite minds as well: to read, listen and associate with those who think and act the way you want to be and share the learning.
Leadership is not just the soft skills such as communication. Leadership is the state of mind and a set of hard capabilities to make a continuous delivery and maintain a consistent reputation. The hard core of leadership capabilities strengthens leadership effectiveness and highlights leadership substance. The high influential leadership keeps positive energy flows around, encourage both individuals and organization as a whole practice autonomy, discover purpose, and achieve its higher level maturity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Running IT as a Digital Business Capability Builder: Threshold Capability vs. Distinctive Capability

Generally speaking, a capability is an ability that an organization, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of people, processes, and technology to achieve. In today’s business dynamic, digital capabilities are a fundamental building block in digital transformations with which companies can transform operational processes, customer experiences, and business models, to reach the high-level business agility and maturity. To adapt to the increasing speed of change and continuous disruption, it’s not sufficient for IT organizations today to be only a commodity service provider or a back office support desk, the high mature digital IT needs to become the dynamic business capability builder. IT is there to provide whatever technology services/solutions the business needs to serve its customers; mix all important business ingredients to build both threshold capabilities for the business’s survival, as well as distinctive business capabilities which generate differentiated value for their business’s long-term growth.
There are many "ingredients" in the business capability: Among them, capability encapsulates Process, People and Technology and other intangible and tangible resources which are important for a business capability to be effective. The enterprise consists of a set of capabilities. The capability is the ability to achieve the desired effect under specified (performance) standards and conditions through combinations of ways and means (activities and resources) to perform a set of activities. The organization then uses these capabilities to understand the markets/environment, create new products and services and then deliver products and services to improve the business efficiency, effectiveness and profitability. Capability can "contain" many services, processes, and functionality in which IT as one of the most critical elements in weaving them together and building up business competency. Information is useless if it cannot transform into the business insight or foresight, and technology by itself is the means to the end, not the end itself. Applying technical capabilities to business opportunities is where the magic happens. Therefore, IT capabilities directly make an impact on business capabilities, and IT maturity is proportional to overall organizational maturity.
Distinctive business capabilities are the key differentiator: Enterprise success is dependent upon few core and differentiating business capabilities. Business capability defines "What" a business does or can do by encapsulating all organization resources (tangible, intangible or human resources). The often described business capability attributes include such as robustness, speed, comprehensiveness, responsiveness, agility, improvement, sensitivity, optimization, resilience, etc. A firm's capabilities today are result of its history and this history constrains what capabilities the firm can perform in the future. Due to this reason, business capabilities cannot be bought in the marketplace. To acquire a business capability, one has to acquire the company owning the capability as well. One capability may be implemented by multiple business processes for multiple products and services. IT is an important glue to integrate all important business elements to differentiated capabilities. The focus area for building IT-enabled capabilities include: Effectively leveraging the existing and new technologies to shape dynamic digital capabilities; help innovate business via the process optimization and capacity building; and recombine capabilities to the new distinctive capabilities to  stay ahead of competition and industry.
The processes and capabilities as opposite sides of the same coin: Business processes are the actions that provide desired capabilities as outcomes. Evaluating process is an important step in making an assessment of capability. It would be probably best to bracket processes with a capability and then analyze it for redundancy and complexity later. Start with a mapping of processes to capabilities, do the process assessments, and infer from that with the resulting capability perspective. There are a couple of conditions to evaluate a capability, such as: Is this capability valuable? Is this capability rare? Is this capability costly to imitate? Is this capability non-substitutable? Any capability which fulfills all these conditions (and very few would) lies pretty close to the core competency of that enterprise and thus is valuable. In today’s business environment, IT enabled business capabilities are a fundamental building block in digital transformations with which companies can transform the customer experience, operational processes, and business models, to reach a higher level of business agility and maturity.
Both threshold capability and distinctive capabilities are abilities that organizations have and are closely related to competencies. The business is then designed around the experience. A business capability is the abilities needed by an organization in order to deliver value. It’s the ability of an organization to do things effectively to achieve desired outcomes and measurable benefits and fulfill business demand. In any case to monitor or seek disruptive opportunities requires businesses’ transformational capability with agility to adapt to changes, ride above the learning curve and build the core competency to stay ahead of competition.








Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Monthly “Leadership Master” Book Tuning: The Visionary Digital Leadership 2017

Leadership is complex yet simple: Complex in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. Simplicity in that the substantial of leadership never changes, it’s all about future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation. The purpose of the book: Leadership Master - Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity is to convey the vision of digital leadership, share the insight about leadership maturity, and summarize five emergent digital leadership trends Here is the monthly tuning of digital leadership.
         The Visionary Digital Leadership
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.
Vision as a Guide Light? Vision is not the “Nice to have,” but “Must have” quality for top leaders today in order to direct the organization toward the uncharted water in today’s “VUCA” digital dynamic. Vision provides insight into where an organization needs to go and is future oriented. A vision is how you see the future unfolding, how you dream about what the future will look like from your standpoint, and how to direct people and business toward the destination you envisioned??
Independent Thinking as Differentiator of Authentic Leadership Leadership is simple because it’s all about future and change. Leadership is complex because there are so many variables you have to leverage in identifying leadership authenticity and improving leadership effectiveness. If developing leadership is like growing a tree, then the root is the mindset. The deeper you can think, the more significant the leadership influence could be. Independent thinking is extremely important in the digital era in which information only clicks away, but the true insight has inundated with out of dated knowledge, and the real signal is mixed with a lot of noises. A leader without independent thinking is a lack of authenticity; a digital worker without independent thinking is a lack of creativity. Independent thinking is a differentiator of authentic leadership, but more specifically, how to think independently and innovatively?
Visionary Leadership? The substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about making a positive influence, providing direction, both for oneself and others. At the Digital Era with “VUCA” characteristics -Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, visionary leadership is in strong demand to navigate through uncharted water and blurred digital borders to guide businesses towards the right direction. Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today. A visionary mind has the ability to think the past, perceive what is now and foresee the future.
Three Dot-Connections in Leadership Vision: Vision is to zoom into the future as if it were closer. Top leaders are supposed to be the guiding force in the organization or even with a broader scope, envisioning and leading it towards its future. Every C-level leader must participate in creating and shaping a company's vision. A visionary change the course of business by seeing beyond what all other see or by charting new revenue or growth through the creation of a new product or market; or share their perception of future trends of business such as digitalization, innovation, or globalization. Here are three dot-connections in leadership vision.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.7 million page views with about 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. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.



Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Innovation vs. Rules

Innovation is to transform novel ideas and achieve its business value. Innovation is doing something better than it currently is. Hence, it requires a sound and competent understanding of what is currently being done. Innovation is not serendipity, it's a mindset, a process, and the strategic business capability nowadays. From innovation management perspective, should innovation break rules, or does innovation need rules, and how to improve innovation success rate?
Innovation should break some outdated rule, but needs a level of guidance: Innovation has to deliver business objectives, the innovation leaders need to become a master at persuasive communications through proposals, pitches, scenarios, analysis and stories that might resonate with the company. You can only do as much as you are "invested" in the company. It's complicated. Innovation is doing something better than it currently is.  It's a mindset. To become creative, one would have to break down some old rules. After breaking the outdated rules, you are "outside the box." Thinking outside the box is all about "rule breaking"; the more "unruly" you are, the more creative you are. However, being "unruly" incurs risk, you need to set the updated rules for managing the innovation and mitigating the risks. Although breaking the rules is an important part of innovation, ‘business creativity’ such as using creative thinking for business goals, does require certain ‘rules.’ Rules are about safeguarding the status quo. Consequently, too rigid rules, will stifle creativity and thus innovation. The innovation challenges the status quo and that is important in a healthy, innovative organization.
To get the best results, you need to structure the creative process, integral, but not overly rigid: Innovation needs the certain level of guidelines and rules. To get the best results, you need to structure the creative process.  It seems that the more integrated and culturally based innovation or imagination is, the more sustainable and productive such initiatives are. For instance, depending on where you are in the process, you might want to ‘force’ people to rephrase a challenge, let them view an idea from different perspectives, temporarily forbid criticism, set time limits, apply thinking techniques, each with their own ‘rules’ etc. An organization that has a lightweight process which allows creativity and innovation to flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process.If an innovation department operates without being an integral part of every other department, it certainly could be counterproductive. Therefore, the right level of guide and process is important, but the overly rigid process or too ‘pushy’ goals will stifle innovation. A defined structure is essential to managing innovation in a corporation, but there's no single structure that will work in every organization. More precisely, you don't structure innovation. You apply principles of approach and vary the resource and tool mix by the ever changing environment, day to day through the year to year.
Create a disciplined, managed space for idea management: Ideas are crucial to an innovation program. You need to make sure, that your company has a steady flow of fresh ideas floating in your innovation pipeline, and, therefore, you need a methodological mainframe that allows you to do that,developing and testing new models, products, and business approaches, shielding innovation teams from the organization’s dominant logic and established standard operating procedures. Some highly innovative organizations fail to capitalize on their great ideas because there was no structure in place to manage the ideas. However, keep hierarchy as low as possible, cut the politics. The rigorous innovation structures are supported by the right policies and programs. The process to support the creation of sustainable, systematic innovation can be structured, but innovation per se is like composing a symphony, lot of planning, but the music will come from the musicians, not the director. Innovation management requires the highest risk taking at a strategic value chain; including organization, investments, and assets.
Innovation is risky by its nature, the effective leadership, risk-tolerance culture, and well-established framework, a set of principles, and best/next practices, etc are all crucial to improving the success rate of innovation and learning the valuable lesson for keeping innovation blossom in the organization.

Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

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, 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 multidirectional 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.  
Broaden the outlook to strike the balance: Traditional organizations were run in silos at the industrial age, due to lack of information and scarce of knowledge, often management has a too narrow view of changes. Today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the segregation or silo of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other. Each business function brings a unique perspective and set of skills to the table. Business unit must each lend this view to the executive office and participate in decisions about business strategy. It is strategic imperative to broaden the outlook and envision the bigger picture about digitalization. This is particularly important for IT because it is an integrator to glue silos to the whole. Because IT is in a unique position to have an oversight view of enterprise processes. To make the link strong and the outlook clear is to empower the IT team and make them think through the business world while working on the solutions. Where the technologists aren't just "IT people," but instead are business partners with IT skills. It also means that the technologists have to take an interest in the business, step away from behind the computer monitor and understand the business issues. This is a small step but a much-needed step to bridge IT and business gap, and strike the right balance of stability and speed, standardization and innovation, management and governance, centralizing and decentralizing IT. People need to stop doing things in silos, with collaborative platform framed by IT, businesses can all be more productive in terms of delivery timelines, meeting management, business, and client expectation.
Deepen the business insight to deal with conflict: Digital era is volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous, to get into the deep, deep digital reality, businesses today must bridge the insight gap to both frame problems and solve them effectively. Because often information is the lifeblood and technology is the backbone of the business, there are times when IT will be the only party in the room with an in-depth understanding of the business and capture the customer insight and business foresight.IT should be the part of business decision making for dealing with conflict, in order to arrive at an optimal decision for the benefit of the company.  IT using its business sense can help business analyze information unearth unknown benefit, as it is often difficult for non-technical people to understand the incredibly broad scope of solutions that technology can provider to business problems. So IT needs to use such knowledge and experience to identify, sell, and pilot new processes and platforms that can give business leverage in its domain and sector. This is the dimension in which IT is really almost given 'gifts' every day.
Make a leap to achieve digital equilibrium: Digital equilibrium is achieved via the harmony of strategy, structure, people, and business performance. Building consensus requires bringing all parties together at the beginning. When you look at defining an issue, constructing a solution, and then communicating that; you should also seek to involve the people that will do the work or will have to support the solution. There is a key difference between digital and industrial organizations, in industrial organizations, the structure is rigid and hard to change. In an environment where change is constantly happening, that handicaps the organization. Hence, in the emerging digital organizations, the business leverage digital technologies and tools in enforcing holistic thinking, cross-functional collaboration and dynamic processes and case management. Digital IT acts more as an ‘orchestrator,’ to conduct an ongoing, information-mature, customer-centric digital organizations. Success is far more likely if CIOs and IT professionals are seen as integral team players whose efforts add real value to the deployment of collaborative team structures within the organization and achieve the high level of digital equilibrium.
Digital transformation is the journey for solving problems caused by "Conflict," "Out of Balance," "Far from Equilibrium."  Digital Paradigm means hyper-connectivity, interdependence, and integration. The new age of digital thinking attributes value and purpose to the ecosystem. The information and technology group could be very useful in terms of looking at things differently, contributing ideas, offering new methods and capabilities, and so on. The focus of IT needs to get back to its root--the big "I" as Information, Intelligence, Innovation, Integration, and Improvement, in order to reach the higher level of maturity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Monthly Performance Insight: All Sorts of Digital Management Scoreboard and Dashboard Mar. 2017

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

All Sorts of Management Scoreboards and Dashboards
Scoreboard vs. Dashboard? The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a strategy performance management tool - a semi-standard structured report, supported by design methods and automation tools, that can be used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by the staff within their control and to monitor the consequences arising from these actions. In management information systems, a dashboard is "an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance. ?
What is on your Digital Transformation Scoreboard Forward-looking organizations are on the journey of digital transformation. How would you calculate the digital maturity score of your organization? Which management metrics should you apply to measure the progress of changes? Proactive or reactive? On the track or too slow? Healthy or sick? The balanced scorecard is a strategy performance management tool that can be used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by the staff to monitor the consequences arising from these actions. So, what are on your digital transformation scoreboard?
What’s the First Step in Building a Great Performance Dashboard A performance dashboard is a useful tool to improve management effectiveness and efficiency? But what’s the simple first step enables you to implement useful Performance Dashboards, that ‘ideally’ from day one delivers high-quality performance management information?
An Innovator’s Scoreboard Innovation is about transforming novel ideas into business values. Innovation score means an attempt to measure innovation; so the factors included in any scoring system will depend on what you are looking to evaluate (individual vs. organization? potential vs. past performance?), this is usually done through innovation indicators. What’re the pros and cons of measuring innovation and score innovators?
The CIO's Dashboard  A well-designed dashboard is an effective management tool to enable business leaders to make a better decision, from IT management perspective; a dashboard should present the topics that you manage. CIOs shall ask themselves what are IT business objectives towards your organizational strategy. Then, translate it to smart KPIs. Smart is in a sense of how to cover all important business objectives, but not too many KPIs, to measure the progress, and not only the final result, to show the status at a glance without the need to drill down too much and so on. Typically, CIOs would need to remain on top of various parameters such as costs, production Issues (especially business critical applications), risks, technology, customer, long-term business transformation, etc. A comprehensive CIO Dashboard should include the IT management quadrants with a combination of following aspects.
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 #3500 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.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Bridging Digital Gaps to Catalyze Business Maturity

Digital is the new paradigm shift to deeply connect the business with the nature ecosystem. At the high maturity level, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation, in order to adapt to the new world of business: Fast, always “on,” highly connected and ultra-competitive. On one side, the idea of digital lenses is to "seeing the whole," or helping people reach a shared understanding of the whole. On the other side, digital enlarges the gaps because different organizations, functions, and individuals evolve with varying speed. In reality, many organizations are still operated with the traditional management discipline with the silo mentality. So, how to bridge multiple digital gaps to catalyze business maturity.
Bridging the collaboration gap to enforce harmony: Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual harmony between humans (not clones): It is a system that is not scalable so easily. Digital transformation is an inevitable journey even though it is not often recognized. Driving digital change isn't always sexy or groundbreaking. It involves hiring the right talent, setting up the crucibles to allow for greater innovation within the teams that are close to the product development/ marketing/sales/ distribution teams. Collaborating strategically across lines of business, understanding and speaking the common business language, while having the technical chops and understanding to keep the organization moving are all required, plus that something more that is often hard to put your finger on. A common challenge for many digital leaders seems to be learning the progressive skills. Most managers do not realize that they are change agents in their daily functions. For scaling collaboration, some companies have created institutional platforms that focus on building longer-term relationships. Sustaining long-term collaboration allows participants to develop subject knowledge over time and focus more directly on business objectives to digital business strategy and digitally enabled innovation and transformation.
Bridging resource gaps for harnessing innovation and maintain the digital balance and flow: Hyper-connectivity can foster innovation. Innovation is the multi-disciplinary effort. In other words, try to digitally connect key resources/assets in their vicinity/context to the resource-rich innovation hubs/clusters across the business ecosystem. In doing so, you can create the collegiality and "shared context for learning," to keep information flow and digital balance. That, in turn, should lead to "inspirations," that will further fuel more collaboration in innovative projects/portfolio to their communities/environments. In addition, the innovation collaboration teams embrace multiple disciplines and understand how systems work, and this yielded competitive advantage. Also, don't expect your collaboration to be the same, and find your own balance and you will find your innovation flow.
Bridging insight gaps to improve decision effectiveness and cultivate the culture of learning agility: Digital era is volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous, to get into the deep, deep digital reality, businesses today must bridge the insight gap to both frame problems and solve them effectively. Digital leaders and professionals need to embrace the diversity of thoughts, and practice out-of-the-box thinking for developing multidimensional thinking capability. Diversity in thought’ is the gold nugget to be found in embracing diversity at the digital era. In conventional mind, people think diversity is only about race or gender. If you categorize people on any superficial criteria, and then you are putting them in silos, or type-casting, and setting up boundaries and hurdles. Especially, at the command-control industrial era, when conformity to expectations is very highly valued, and independent thinkers are seen, by default, as trouble makers. However, digital is the age of innovation, and inclusiveness must become the part of your business DNA, to avoid group thinking, bridge insight gaps, improve decision maturity, and cultivate the culture of learning agility.
Digital ecosystem provides unprecedented opportunities to leapfrog the business world up to the next level of maturity. Bridging multiple digital gaps helps discover the alternatives to problem-solving; create the digital synergy of orchestrating talent, process, and technologies; enforce deep understanding of the necessity of systems awareness and harmonics, and accelerate digital flow and business transformation.


Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Information Management as a Core Digital Capability

Compared to digital laggards, high-performing organizations can manage two most invaluable assets in business well: People and information. Nowadays, organizations large or small, process an enormous amount of data, information becomes the lifeblood of businesses. Information Management is all about having the right people to have the right information to make right decisions at the right time. Given this assertion, there is no limit to the value of information in running a high mature digital organization. Information Management is, in fact, become the core digital capability of the business.
Unleash information potential is to unleash the full potential of digital businesses: Information potential directly impacts the business's potential of the organization. In this digital information age, there isn't really much of an enterprise without the massive oceans of data and information that flow through the enterprise, at any given split second. Data is a raw material, information is processed data, information only has a value when it is needed. Managing the information life cycle is to manage the massive volumes of data and information that is collected, persisted, categorized, mapped, sliced, diced, reordered, related, transformed, abstracted, and made meaning of. Information is useless without extracting value from it. The enabling value of information can be captured and an information lifecycle developed from it – different information is required at different points in the decision and operational delivery chain. Information Management is to connect people with the right information at the right time and location, to ensure that accurate information is accessible and shared within relevant business units. The art and science of information management are to optimize its usage and achieve its value and full potential.
Information driven innovation management: Information and technology catalyze today's digital businesses. The abundance of data and information bring both significant opportunities and enormous risks in businesses today. Information brings about business ideas; business ideas generate lots of information. And organizations can harness the power of data to provide the emergent business trends with a more fact-based vision of where to aim and how to get there, through identifying the right data, validating it and communicating it to right people at the right time. When information has been used to make an informed management decision to develop the right product, enter a new market, exploit a new channel or having the information to be able to conduct day to day operations (which have an output value) etc. Information becomes the true lifeblood of the business. Organizations can capture business opportunities for growth or delight customers via transforming information to the customer insight and business foresight. And information-driven innovation management is more science than art, it can abstract business and customer insight from explosive information, and bring to the table innovative solutions that meet customers’ needs.
Information Management as a core business capability to enable digital strategy: Perhaps organizations should first work to identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of our businesses; products and resources. Information is a key enabler to help you achieve your strategic business objectives, having the right information to make an informed management decision to develop the right products for serving the right customers, while reducing the cost to market, without the sacrifice of strategic goals and strategies invoked on it by its business partners. Organizations need to have Information Management as a core capability to enable business strategy. It determines the strategic objectives, their risk appetite for achieving them, identify and assess the risks and make sure it’s all joined up. If Information Management is effective, it will achieve high business value.
Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses, thus, the value of information is not isolated. It directly impacts on the breadth and depth of the digital transformation of the business. Information Management becomes the core capability of the digital organization. And information Management is the key differentiator between digital leaders and laggards, high-performing organizations, and mediocre companies.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Monthly Foresight: Tuning lT Organization to Get Digital Ready

The new paradigm that is emerging is one as a Living Organization or Digital Workplace, which is organic, alive, holistic, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, creative and innovative, in a relationship with its environment/customers/ suppliers, and above all enhances and supports the dignity of the creative human spirit. Three Digital Tuning to Rejuvenate IT Organization: With the increasing speed of change and exponential growth of information, the overly restricted  hierarchical organizations are no longer effective enough to adapt to the changes and keep information flow seamlessly, because speed is a key imperative these days and “silo” mentality as a product of rigid hierarchy hinders flexibility and agility. People, process, and technology, how to fine-tune those key business elements to rejuvenate IT and the company as a whole to improve its effectiveness, responsiveness, and maturity?
A Hybrid IT: IT plays a significant role in modern businesses today, touches almost every key business processes, especially with the trend of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud), IT consumerization and internet of things. The effectiveness of IT can be derived best when overall IT Organization reflects on how the business is structured for responsibilities and accountabilities of key decision makers. In other ways, IT can not architect itself in isolation. So to effectively deliver IT capabilities, centralized, decentralized, or hybrid IT, which is the right way?.
Running a Future-Driven IT Organization to Catalyze Growth Organizations large or small are at the digital journey, corporate IT needs to shift from a back office support center to a future-driven growth engine. Because more often information is the lifeblood and technology is the disruptive force of digital transformation.
How do you know when it's time for an Organizational Re-Design? Dysfunction, infighting, overlapping roles, and inefficiencies are not always easy to uncover. It takes processes, methodology, and practices to identify the causes of IT ineffectiveness and inefficiency, CIOs as Chief Improvement Officer: How do you know when it’s time for an organizational re-design?
Three Considerations in Reinvent IT Organizational Structure? Many IT organizations or enterprise as a whole intend to reinvent their “stale” working environment with 20th culture such as bureaucracy, inertia to change, reward mediocrity, homogeneous leadership & talent team, over-complex business processes, inefficient communication pipelines, etc. However, reinventing organizational structure is not an easy task, it takes both strategic planning and operational alignment to make it work and improve organizational maturity.
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 #3500 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.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Enforcing Digital Acumen in the Board

Digital Acumen = Digital IQ + Strategic Acumen + Information savvy
Modern corporate boards as the top leadership team play a critical role in overseeing strategy, advising management and monitoring performance. At the dawn of the digital era, the forward-thinking boards also set the tone of changes in their organizations, and insightful BoDs are the mastermind behind the digital transformation.
Strategic Acumen: Digital organizations are complex systems that are dynamic, self-evolving, self-adaptable, and self-perpetuating. The fact is that change is happening at a much faster pace than ever before, requiring a much more rapid response in order to survive and thrive. The strategy is definitely a different beast nowadays because the speed of change is accelerating. The traditional strategy is the view via considerably narrow frames with static timelines, but digital strategy view is broader to oversee the business ecosystem and has to embrace the emergent digital dynamic with continuous disruptions. Hence, digital BoDs with strategic acumen are in demand for helping the business in strategy development. Because they often present the in-depth knowledge about the business and expertise in multiple domains. So they can see things from different angles and provide invaluable feedback to business management teams.
Digital IQ: The digital IQ of IT organization depends on the BoDs and top leaders’ "digital IQ." The contemporary BoDs with high digital IQ should focus on the information aspect of the role in the context of the business. Digital leaders are more comfortable with leveraging data and intuition to make the decision right. The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in term of the speed of delivery, the quality of information for decision making, and the wisdom of digital workforce. BoDs with high digital IQ can both drive changes and adapt to changes effortlessly. To improve their “Digital IQ,” it is also important for digital leaders including BoDs to thinking the digital wholeness. If the majority of organizations at the industrial age are manipulated by silo thinking and hierarchical style, and then digital organizations mean holism and interconnectivity.  It’s about seeing interrelationships rather than isolated things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static or mechanical parts.
IT Savvy: With fasting growing information and emergent digital technologies, the board should become more IT friendly and informative. While directors bring many competencies to the table, most do not have access to information about innovation and its potential related to the businesses they oversee. Therefore, companies should establish on-going avenues to information which will regularly feed BoDs understanding about trends and potential innovation for their businesses. A high performing board has the solid capability to govern the changing tide of technology and its impact on business. An IT-savvy board should change the perspective to understand the power of information and the potential of technology. A tech-savvy board will have the advantage of pulling enough resources and pushing the business model of technology, trustworthiness, prepare, and launch change, innovation, and ensure what happens next. The IT savvy Board presents the spirit of collaboration and puts the serious effort on bridging the business and IT for improving the overall organizational effectiveness, responsiveness, scale, and governance. It is at the heart of that mantra regardless of industry and business size.
Great boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential. They also continue to add the new blood for enforcing digital acumen in the boardroom. As boards look to identify new director candidates, those with leadership potential and extensive experience in the twenty-first-century drivers of change such as digitization, global savvy, and business innovation can add significant value and bridge multiple gaps. Sharpening “directorship” for getting digital ready is imperative for setting the top leadership tone to run a high mature digital organization.


Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu