Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1258

CIOs as “Chief Inquisitive Officer: A set of Q&As (IX) for IT Innovation

Modern CIOs face many challenges, it is not sufficient to only keep the lights on. Regardless of which industry or the nature of organization you are in, being a digital leader will need to master the art of creating unique, differentiating value from piles of commoditized technologies and take advantage of the emergent digital trend as well; digital CIOs also have multiple personas, “Chief Innovation Officer,” “Chief Insight Officer,” “Chief Improvement Officer,” “Chief Information Officer,” and here, we discuss CIOs as “Chief Inquisitive Officer,” with a set of Q&As to lead digital transformation.
How do you define “Digital Fit”? People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. “Hiring the right person for the right position at the right time,” is the mantra of many forward-thinking organizations. The question is how would you define the right people? How do you define wrong, average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person? Or put simply, for what should they be right? How do you define “Digital Fit”?
Is IT skills Gap Fact or Fiction?  There’s always a debate regarding IT talent supply and demand, does IT skills gap really exist? Or is it due to any management issues such as misunderstanding or miscommunication upon talent value chain? What is the root cause and how to solve the problem?
How to Unlock the People’s Creativity Potential In recent years, creativity has become a very highly valued skill, and many think it is the #1 wanted professional capability in the digital era. Creativity is innate with many special ingredients; and creativity can be developed if the conditions are right and there is love, inspiration, encouragement and permission, Creative people combine existing possibilities to reach more often unexpected solutions. Creativity can be abundant. Creativity is a long-term endeavor. It must be unlocked to maximize its potential.
Is Self-Assessment a Digital Way for Managing Talent Performance?  Many organizations still have an old-fashioned view that the employee's self-assessment is irrelevant to the overall review and only serves to create conflict when there are discrepancies in perception. However, digital makes business more transparent & less hierarchical, inspires authenticity and growth mind, is self-reflection, self-assessment, and self-improvement scenario becoming the “healthy” digital cycle for talent growth and management?
CIOs as Talent Master: How to Mind Gaps and Measure Human Capital Effectively? People are always the most invaluable asset to the organization but often turn to be the weakest link in strategy execution. Unlike the other tangible value of business assets which are more easily measured in a quantitative way. The true value of people, especially today’s high professional knowledge workforces include many tangible and intangible factors because people are not just the cost or the resource to be managed, but the capital to be invested in and their potential if unleashed can bring the quantum leap in the business growth. So what are the premium approach and methodology to measure human asset & capital? What KPIs would you recommend to determine the value an employee adds to their department and ultimately to their organization, and how would you implement it?
The digital CIOs need to reimagine IT as the business growth engine and lead changes via inquiries. They need to keep asking open-ended questions such as, "Why? Why not? What If?" They have to focus on guiding the company through the digital transformation, and create unique business value because IT is the significant element of any differentiated business capability and the defining factor for competitive advantage.

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IT as the Digital Business Capability Builder

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 organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve. How to run IT as a business capability builder via integrating all those elements into the differentiated business competency.
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: 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 business is then designed around the experience. In any case to monitor or seek disruptive opportunities requires businesses’ transformational capability with agility to adapt to changes. IT plays a more important role in such a digital paradigm shift.
IT capabilities directly make an impact on business 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. To improve overall competency, digital organizations shift from process-oriented practices to capability-based strategy management. Digital IT is the integrator and superglue to recombinant dynamic business capabilities, without them, strategy execution can not be sustained, and IT maturity is proportional to overall organizational maturity. Strategies fail either because of improper execution or more likely because the strategy was flawed. It implies the potential organizational capabilities would play the crucial role in setting or resetting the strategic direction of the business in order implement strategy effectively.
A business capability maturity should be measured by how well it builds the competitive business advantage to build a people-centric organization: Since a capability is made up of people, processes, and technology, you can use overall process maturity as one part. With a maturity attribute like "adoption," you can measure the percentage of business units engaging the capability on a year by year basis. As it increases, the maturity rises. The organizational capability can be assessed via how well it does for the management of projects and multi-project programs that translate strategic direction into real changes within the organization as well as maintain strategic fit. One way to measure capability maturity is by assessing the capability's effectiveness in achieving the desired outcome. This can also be accomplished by measuring how technologies impact on capability effectiveness as well as how processes impact on capability effectiveness. Overall speaking, the capability maturity can be measured against achievement of desired business or customer outcomes.
Defining your enterprise business capability is part art and part science, and building your business capabilities is more science than art. Business capabilities are fundamental pillars to achieve the corporate strategy, the capability-based strategy management has much higher success rate statistically. As IT is in a unique position to oversee the underlying processes and functions, It needs to become the digital capability builder of the organization via weaving all the important business elements, to orchestrate digital transformation seamlessly.

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The Monthly “Leadership Master” Book Tuning Digital Transformational Leadership Jan. 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.
          Digital Transformational Leadership
Three Leadership Shift to Catalyze Digital Transformation Fundamentally, leadership is all about future and change. Leadership is also situational and unique. Leadership comes in all shapes and sizes. The practice of leadership differs from individual to individual based on their character, strength, thinking processes, temperament, behavioral style, gifting or talent and, of course, their personality. From an agricultural society to the industrial age, and now we slowly but steadily move into the fast-paced digital era, what are digital leadership traits in demand to catalyze change, inspire innovation and accelerate digital transformation?
Three Traits of Transformational Leader? Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today. Leadership is about creating a powerful future that is compelling in the present, utilizes the best talents, capabilities, and resources of their people and organization to drive changes and produce meaningful and valuable results. Change is a vital element for the contemporary organization to stay competitive, and transformation is a radical change. Transformation is the momentum from quantitative accumulation to the quantum leap. What are the unique traits of transformational leaders, though?
Three Differentiators in Digital Leadership Leadership is about future and change, innovation and influence. The intention of becoming a leader is to inspire and innovate, to improve and advance, to facilitate and encourage, as change is often uncomfortable, yet necessary part of reaching the future and maintaining success. Digital makes everything so transparent, and dynamic, it raises the leadership bar as well. The digital leadership effectiveness is not based on how loud you can speak, or how skillful you can control, but how profound you can influence, and how insightful you can perceive, to touch both hearts and connect minds. Here are three differentiators in digital leadership.
Digital Leaders’ three “Unconventional Intelligence”  Leadership is all about future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation, to set the direction for both oneself and others to follow. Today’s digital business ecosystem is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous; today’s digital workforce is cross-functional, cross-cultural and cross-generational, thus, the digital leadership bar is indeed raised, in order to lead effectively and effortlessly. Digital leaders today not only need to show solid conventional intelligence such as “IQ” and “EQ,” but also have to present a set of unconventional intelligence for dealing with over-complexity and hyper-competition of the digital new normal and handling unprecedented uncertainty & ambiguity seamlessly.
Accelerate Digital Leadership Shift Leadership is about change, the substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about making positive influences, and providing direction, both for oneself and others. However, the journey of great leadership is never going to be smooth, with numerous obstacles on the way. No friction, no authentic leadership. You have to make continuous influence via envisioning and innovating. Blogging is not about writing, but about brainstorming the digital way to lead effortlessly. Imagining the blog is the knowledge power made of 3000+ building blocks, mightier than the magic bullets, to remove the barriers and overcome obstacles not for winning, but for progression, to advocate innovative leadership and accelerate digital leadership shift.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.7 million page views with about 3300+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.



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The Gaps Caused by Silo-Thinking

Silo thinking builds the wall in people’s mind and sets barriers in human's heart.
Silo is a universal problem facing businesses, especially for large mature organizations or our society as a whole today. And most people don't realize which gaps it is causing, how much pain it is bringing or the cost to the organization. Nowadays, businesses are moving into the hyper-connected, accelerated digital continuum, how to break down silo thinking, and embrace holistic thinking in building a high-performing organization?


Silo causes functional gaps: The industrial organization with silo functional setting is to achieve the certain level of efficiency. However, it creates the gaps and often causes unhealthy internal competitions. Many think silo happens when the business operates from a fear standpoint,  fear of rejection, fear of invisibility, fear that other peoples' accomplishments will somehow diminish your own, etc. It reduces a sense of belonging and connection to your organization's larger mission. At the business level, silo creates barriers that surface between departments within an organization, causing people who are supposed to be on the same team to work against each other, and it is one of the most frustrating aspects of life in any large mature organization. So, people will focus inward protecting budgets and power structures rather than focusing outward on customers and problem-solving thinking. Managers tend to respond to silos by reorganizing, but this is hardly ever the most important aspect or the place to start. What you need to do is change thinking. At their heart, silos are not a structural issue, they are the result of poor thinking; or lack of holistic think, system thinking, and strategic thinking. At the individual level, Silos might make you feel insulated and “powerful,” but they form a very insecure base for the ego which is why it never really feels good to work in an environment like that.
Silo causes communication and collaboration gaps: A company is made up silos called functions, and the functions rely upon company/cross-functional strategy, process, and communication. Silo causes cross-functional communication and collaboration gaps. Silos can start, and flourish, under the poor leadership thinking. Silos cause slowness and small-thinking: They are the result of poor strategic thinking and organizational design. Silos will always exist. Isolation of teams limits creativity as well as duplication of efforts resulting in wasting valuable resources especially when you are always facing tight timelines. This is definitely a reflection of poor leadership thinking. There are top leaders accountable for the business and it depends on their desire/ vision/ ability to collect their team’s input and commitment to define and implement a 'business plan on a page" as a unified team. To breakdown silos, digital leaders have to not only provide clear process guidelines but also see that the teams are embracing cross-functional collaboration and taking customer-centric effort as well. The solution to breaking down silo is to apply bigger thinking, to implement an effective cross-silo strategy, better integral processes, and collaborative communication.
Silo causes motivation gaps: Outdated performance management would encourage silo thinking and enlarge collaboration gaps. Silos will be inevitable as long as the rewards for collaboration are outweighed by the rewards for competition. If a manager sees his/her success measured against the manager in the next office ( another silo), rather than sharing expertise to the overall benefit of the organization, then he/she will be inclined to erect barriers to stop collaboration. Leveraging "self-interest" can be very powerful in unifying silos –or WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) thinking. Take functionally tailored approaches, such as apply incentive compensation for employees in revenue-producing functions, internal digital forums for customer service, and social networks as a mechanism for cross-functional/ cross-silo unification. The mitigation (not a solution) is to leverage the self-interest that causes them and undermines the silo mentality by fostering social / business networks of "self-interest" or common interest across silos.
Silo thinking builds the wall in people’s mind and set barriers to organizational communication and collaboration. Great organizations are supposed to maximize the individual and the group potential. Only through effective digital leadership, dynamic business processes and the latest digital social collaboration technologies and tools, the silo can be crossed over and bridged through, the business can be running at full speed, and human society can move forward in harmony.



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Three “Don’t” in IT Digital Transformation

With the increasing pace of change and overwhelming growth of information, the IT role is becoming far more than simply keeping the lights on, but is transforming to significant business enablement. As the CIO continues to become more critical and integral member of the C-suite, IT leadership holds the keys to making the company more efficient and effective, implement processes and build capabilities that drive the company to the next level; keep eyes on what happens today, pay more attention to the potential pitfalls, also be focused on what is next. Here are three “Don’ts” in IT digital transformation.  
Don’t try to solve the wrong cause of problems: Either for individuals, organizations, or society as a whole, the problem-solving capability is crucial to surviving and thriving. A solution is nothing if the problem is not perceived, therefore, creating the awareness of the problem is the first step to making a solution be understood and accepted. Often times, people have a tendency to try to fix a symptom which results from the actual cause of the problem. The wrong cause of the problem will perhaps grow new or larger problems and create the disconnect between IT and the business. Also, when they do this, they allow problems to grow under the surface, out of sight, out of mind, make it worse, or until it’s too late. So trying to fix the wrong cause of a problem will waste time and resources, increase anxiety and lead ineffectiveness. The better way to frame the problems that cross all industries is to keep peeling back the layers to find the root cause through asking five WHYs, or taking systematic approaches to discover the real cause, address it and solve it smoothly.
Don’t get the traps of solely focusing on quantifiable benefits or short-term result: Digital transformation is a long-term journey, to move up the IT maturity level as the strategic business partner, IT needs to shift from transactional mode to transformational mode. IT leaders shouldn’t just spend all resources on gaining some short-term result. CIOs need to keep collecting feedbacks from the business upon how to improve IT services and satisfy customers, manage a healthy “run, grow, and transform”  IT portfolio in calibrating IT growth with the steadfast pace, and spend more time on how they can deliver ‘competitive capabilities” to the business as many businesses will plateau without IT. Thus, to avoid the trap of short-sightedness, the long-term plan needs to be a cross-functional collaborative effort, not something the IT team does alone in a corner. IT needs to discuss with the business on how it can facilitate, enable and catalyze the business growth. Discuss timelines and set goals, identify metrics and KPIs that will be shared across teams, and talk about funding and resource commitments, to strike the right balance of quick gain and long term perspectives.
Don’t make silo design and technology for its own sake, or measure IT from inside out lenses: Every IT project is the business initiative; it needs to be hand-crafted to suit a specific need. Dated or silos of technique knowledge or lack of resilience or reuse in the design of things will add more burdens on keeping IT on the maintenance mode. To keep digital fit, IT needs to weed out the waste, and manage application consolidation, rationalization, modernization, integration, and optimization lifecycle effectively. Another sign of a poorly run IT department is the way in which the business leaders choose to measure them. If IT measurement too much focuses on IT operation and controlling cost, and then it fails to show the business value that IT brings. This can lead to a lack of trust from the business towards IT and IT is perceived as the cost center and support desk only. Thus, it is important to define how you will measure success in meeting that purpose and vision, ensure that these measures are qualitative, quantitative, and persuasive to lift IT as the equal business partner and contribute to building business competency.
Managing a “Do”s and “Don’t”s list helps IT leaders set priority right, clarify the principles, and prevent IT from failing to achieve the expected result.  It takes visionary leadership, solid IT management discipline, talented people and the latest technologies to climb up maturity and build up a high-performance IT for achieving the premium business value.


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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 1/19/ 2017

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.7 million page views with 3300+ 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”  1/19/2017Running IT as the “Light Power” to Navigate Digital Transformation: IT is shifting its reputation from a reactive help desk and support center behind the scene to a proactive innovation engine and change agent leading at front. A CIO must be able to add value to an organization through strategic thinking involves being visionary. Traditional IT in the industrial age is often blamed as the controller to slow down the speed of change. Digital IT is running at much faster speed, and being elevated to the “light power” for navigating digital transformation via identify obstacles and reaching the destination more confidently.
The Further-Looking Board: The digital enterprise consists of an amalgam of socio-systems, techno-systems, bio-systems, and Econo-systems. BoDs as the top business advisor role need to have sufficient knowledge to understand the business ecosystem and sense that the digital transformation is multifaceted; they should have the business vision to predict the emergent trend of business, technology or industry. Therefore, to make the role highly effective, digital BoDs not only need to be forward-thinking, they have to be further looking, thinking longer term, guide the executive team toward the right direction and play the management advising role effortlessly. Likability vs. Respect vs. Trust: Respect is based on being trustworthy and authentic. Likeability is subjective, people often like people who are similar to themselves, or have a certain charisma. Being likable or popular does not always earn you the respect. Trust starts with respecting. There are differences between likeability vs. Respect. Vs. Trust.
Digital IT Improves Business Visibility and Maturity Traditional IT organizations act as an invisible back office and the support function of the company, to keep the lights on, thus, often IT has been perceived as the cost center in the industrial age. Nowadays, information is one of the most valuable business assets, and technology is often the disruptive force of digital innovation. Perhaps the biggest value adds from IT is VISIBILITY for itself and for the business as a whole, to improve transparency, effectiveness, and maturity.
A set of Q&As (IX) for Dealing with IT Management Dilemmas: Modern CIOs face many challenges, it is not sufficient to only keep the lights on. Regardless of which industry or the nature of organization you are in, being a digital leader will need to master the art of creating unique, differentiating value from piles of commoditized technologies and take advantage of the emergent digital trend as well; digital CIOs also have multiple personas, “Chief Innovation Officer,” “Chief Insight Officer,” “Chief Improvement Officer,” “Chief Information Officer,” and here, we discuss CIOs as “Chief Inquisitive Officer,” with a set of Q&As to lead digital transformation.
Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.
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The Gaps between Linear Thinking and Nonlinear Thinking

In the real, physical world or business world, most relationships are nonlinear.
The digital business and the world has become over-complex and hyper-connected, in the industrial setting, business management often practices linear thinking, and talent builds linear skillset, it perhaps works in the considerably static and silo business environment. However, digital means increasing the speed of changes and the high degree of uncertainty, the interconnectivity as the digital nature is nonlinear and dynamic, what is the gap between linear vs. nonlinear thinking, what are they about, and how to differentiate them?
“Straight line” thinking vs. Circular thinking:  In the real, physical world or business world, most relationships are nonlinear. Linear thinking is viewed by many as being simply the opposite of closed loop thinking (thinking in a straight line rather than circularly).  At linear often implies cause & effect with no feedback. Some thought linear thinking is a type of logic thinking and non-linear thinking in an out of box thinking. But dig deeper, non-linear thinking is an emerging type of systems thinking to understand the interconnectivity of things.  One characteristic of nonlinear systems is that small changes can have large impacts. A small error, inconsistency or change in a system specification can totally ruin its performance. Similarly, achieving the desired impact can sometimes be as the result of a very small initiative or decision, this is the magic of nonlinear systems thinking. If you pick the right thing to alter, you can sometimes achieve enormous outcomes at little or no expenditure of effort on your part. This approach requires great insights and knowledge.
Arithmetic thinking vs. problem-solving thinking: The linear thinking implies the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, which is not effective from a business perspective as well. Linear systems are those that follow a generalized superposition principle (doubling the input doubles the output, adding two inputs together leads to adding their two outputs.) This attribute leads to powerful analysis tools that allow you to break any input into simple pieces and compute the output due to each piece separately, then add the results. The whole is equal to the sum of its parts, it is the core concept of reductionism which is the dominant management philosophy in the industrial age. The reason linear thinking is in many cases, not so effective for solving many business problems, because there is always a temptation to use simple linear models to understand highly complex, nonlinear scenarios. The applying of non-linear thinking has to do with complex problem-solving. It just turns out that, as human society gets more and more complex, the very natural attempt of humans to take the very powerful techniques of mathematics, such as techniques of linear mathematics or non-linear mathematics, and apply it to the world very quickly come up against insurmountable difficulties.
Reductionism vs. holism: There are two different philosophical approaches for managing businesses; one is called reductionism (break a problem into parts, solve each part separately, add up results) vs. holism (the whole is different from the sum of the parts.) The reductionistic approach comes from attempting to isolate and understand the dynamics of the individual functions in the enterprise, some of which for the time frame will be as good as linear, but more often, the organization as a whole has to function more holistically and coherently. When systems are not linear, they are defined as nonlinear. And ultimately, organizations need to integrate their interdependencies and ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.
From linear to nonlinear thinking could be evolutionary. Bridging the gaps between linear and nonlinear thinking can significantly help improve business effectiveness. At the beginning, you often make a one-dimensional, linear, list of things to do. At the end when you have gone through the mufti-dimensional analysis or process, when everything else is in place you again have a list of what you need to do, to practice nonlinear thinking and holistic problem-solving.



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A Systematic Board

The Board provides an “outside-in” view of businesses and multi-dimensional lenses to oversee and advise business strategy management to steer the business to the right direction. The important board activities include advising, monitoring, deliberation, moving the enterprise forward, ensuring the organization makes sense and it is on the right track to achieve business goals and fulfill the vision. How to run a systematic board and manage so many crucial activities in a structural way?
The systematic thinking about the board composition: The board as the top leadership team sets the sound digital leadership team for the entire business or even across the business ecosystem. The best fit for the board depends on the Board’s current makeup, culture, and which “gap” needs to be filled. A systematic board building, in fact, needs to have heterogeneous team setting, to ensure an appropriate mix of skills, knowledge, and experience are present or available for it to fulfill its function. So the Board composition needs to embrace both cognitive differences, functional difference, and other experience/capability difference, the BoDs need to be diverse by industry background, mindsets, skill, experience level, and perspective for helping them close blind spots and practice the board duty in a systematic way. This diversity along with deep knowledge of the business will allow them to be real "thought partners" with senior management as they consider the longer term goals beyond quarterly earnings. Statistically, the forward-thinking businesses with heterogeneous boards outperform organizations with homogeneous boards due to the unique insight and differentiated skills/capabilities they can bring in to improve decision maturity and leadership influence.
The systematic way to focus on performance without ignorance of compliance: Boards need to perform and conform at the same time, and they have to achieve both in a structural way. Because conformance without performance adds very little to the firm value, and performance without conformance is not sustainable. Conformance is about the bottom line of “Keep the Lights On,” and performance is about business growth and achievement. It is an almost universal finding that the Board spends too much time on compliance or operational issues at the expense of the future. Some suggest Board should spend 20% of their time in the past (compliance), 20% on the present (operational and tactical) and 60% in the future.The real BoDs dilemma is that driving the business forward is extremely difficult. This means looking into an unknown future and attempting to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities. It also means taking control of the softer issues such as setting policy, strategic thinking, setting risk appetite, etc., and dealing with both hard matters and softer issues systematically.  The Board needs to be engaged at the most senior levels to help influence and shape the business of the future.
The systematic way to monitor multifaceted business performance: The Board has to have a good understanding of the organization’s strategic direction and its strategic alternatives, as well as taking the systematic approach to keeping track of the business performance. The business KPIs can be taken into general categories, such as business /stakeholder, operational industry.While developing and implementing the KPIs, businesses always wanted a roll up model around Finance (Top line to Bottom line across all segmented verticals). Customer (Customer satisfaction, loyalty). Operations (Strategies focused largely on IT, HR, Productive processes, GRC etc.) Within each of these areas of accountability, there should be a considered set of KPIs that are identified as business orientated and outcome focused. The Strategic scorecards can also provide a systematic view for covering capability building, performance-based culture, organizational integration and leadership development.
Building a high-effective board is not an easy task because the board plays a crucial role to direct the business to the right direction via dealing with a lot of uncertainty and unknowns. Hence, a digital-ready board has the advantage of pulling enough resources and pushing the business model of technology, trustworthiness, prepare and launch change, innovation, and mastering with digital fluency systematically.
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Digital CIO’s Mindset, Skillset and Toolset

The CIO role is perhaps one of the most sophisticated execution positions in modern businesses because they have to play multiple personas and adapt to changes all the time, due to the exponential growth of information and change nature of technologies. They need to be both business strategists and hands-on manager; advocate innovation and set policies; drive changes and manage risks, etc. Overall speaking, CIOs are the leadership role, not only do they need qualities and skills to transform their IT organization, more importantly, they should have altitude, aptitude, and attitude to be an influencer, a change agent, and a talent master in the enterprise and its expanding business ecosystem; and they should get mindset, skillset and toolset ready for driving changes and leading digital transformation effortlessly.
The digital CIO’s mindsets: If digital business is the living entity which continues to grow and thrive, people are like the cells, and functions are like organ, and then IT is more like the digital brain of business, to collect, retrieve, and process information in order to run a high responsive and high-intelligent business. CIOs as IT leaders need to be multidimensional thinkers for gaining an in-depth understanding of both technology and business via different lenses; CIOs should master at critical thinking and strategic thinking, have business acumen and knowledge for IT to be the trusted advisor of the business and CIOs need to  have a clear technological vision, and have genuine empathy with the users of technology and end customers as well. CIOs need to be fluent at innovative thinking as well, creativity is one of the most important thinking processes to connect the dots between IT and business, information, insight, and innovation as well. One of the most appropriated personas for digital CIOs is to become the “Chief Innovation Officer” who focus on the business growth and customer delight and move up IT maturity from IT-business alignment to a game-changer. Systems Thinking is also critical for CIOs because it is the thought process to understand the interconnectivity between parts and whole. IT is in the unique position to have an oversight of the underlying business functions and processes, Systems Thinking helps IT leaders to discover the interconnectivity and interdependence of the digital business ecosystem. This is particularly important for IT leaders to bridge IT-business gaps, improve business processes and optimize business capabilities.
The digital CIO’s skillset: Today’s IT organization needs to make an overarching influence on the entire business, from the business model to the enterprise competency, it is no longer sufficient for just keeping the lights on. Hence, digital CIOs need to develop a broad set of skills beyond technology and have differentiated leadership competency and recombinant professional capabilities to lead the organization up to the next level of the business maturity. CIOs need to build hardcore expertise and develop skills beyond technology, based on the understanding of their particular organization's current and potential corporate structure, senior management style, and strategic plan, to practice the expert power, with the ability to understand both “tech-talk” and “business chat,” move from one conversation to the other seamlessly, without “getting lost in translation.” Among other skills, they need strong business orientation and a proven ability to bring the benefits of IT to solve business issues. Ideally, CIOs should be part of the board in order to directly understand what's going on and be able to advise, inform and influence if strategic business decisions needed. And they should also be good at motivating, engaging and building trust and the culture of learning and innovation in the whole organization.
The digital CIO’s toolset: IT is often perceived as the technology/tool/service provider of the business to improve staff productivity, efficiency, and engagement, but what are inside the digital CIO’s toolbox? Besides hands-on IT management tools or performance measurement or monitoring tools such as scoreboard or dashboard, CIOs as business strategists need to spend a significant amount of time for contemplating strategy-related activities. For example, As a big-picture tool, a SWOT Analysis provides a starting point for evolving strategic reasoning and  provides big-picture views with limited (3-5) possibilities in each analysis point(Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat). Also, for digging into the root causes, “Five Whys” is the simple technique to enable you making logical reasoning, clarify thinking and deepen understanding. Digital CIOs should also collect the tailored decision-making tools, innovation management tools, talent assessment tools, etc, in order to improve leadership effectiveness and maturity.
Modern CIO is a complex leadership role, which needs to have both intellectual inquisitiveness and the good combination of high IQ + EQ, get ready for having the advanced mindset, high-capable skillset, and handy toolset. As a forward-thinking CIO, one must practice leadership principle, possess a great work ethic, be comfortable with paradoxical thinking and practice multifaceted thinking, be knowledgeable, be decisive, be respected, be available, be a negotiator, be an innovator, be learning agile and be wise.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

CIOs as “Chief Inquisitive Officer: A set of Q&As (IX) for Dealing with IT Management Dilemmas

Modern CIOs face many challenges, it is not sufficient to only keep the lights on. Regardless of which industry or the nature of organization you are in, being a digital leader will need to master the art of creating unique, differentiating value from piles of commoditized technologies and take advantage of the emergent digital trend as well; digital CIOs also have multiple personas, “Chief Innovation Officer,” “Chief Insight Officer,” “Chief Improvement Officer,” “Chief Information Officer,” and here, we discuss CIOs as “Chief Inquisitive Officer,” with a set of Q&As to lead digital transformation.
How to Take a Structural Approach to Handle Unstructured Digital Disruptions: Digital disruption is frequent and unstructured, businesses just have to get used to the new normal and learn how to deal with them proactively. Obviously, there is no one size fits all solution, and "boil the ocean" approaches seldom deliver expected results. So how to take a structural approach in dealing with digital disruptions, and what’s the logical scenario to manage digital transformation seamlessly?
How to Strike the Right Balance between “Keeping the Lights on” and Growing your Business?  Due to the limited budget and resource, most of the organizations, especially those legacy companies always struggle with keeping the light on and changing or transforming their business. Is “running a business” always your first priority,  when is strategic execution more important than keeping the lights on? Optimally, how to strike the right balance between “keeping the light on" and growing your business?
The CIO’s Tough Choice: Should IT Be Proactive or Reactive, and When?  Organizations large or small on the journey to digital transformation, IT plays a critical role as an enabler to drive changes. From IT leadership perspective, why are some CIOs reactive, rather than proactive in trying new technologies? Are they just reluctant to changing a working system, or are they not empowered enough?
Why Has IT Been Perceived as the ‘Weakest Link? IT plays a more important role in the digital transformation of the organization. It is the superglue to connect both the hard elements of the business such as processes, platforms, technologies and soft elements of the organization such as information, knowledge,  culture and integrate them into a set of business capabilities, which underpin the business strategy. However, there is the perception gap between IT looks at itself and the business perceives IT. IT is often seen itself as a business enabler and change agent, but business often thinks that IT is slower to change, and even be one of the “weakest links” for the business transformation. So why is IT not getting enough respect despite all good work and huge efforts were undertaken? Where does it link to improve IT brand? To deal with such a "He said, she said" dilemma: What are the different perspectives from each party, how to integrate them into a holistic IT view and reinvent the tarnished IT reputation?
Does Anyone Ever Appreciate the Cost Savings in a Problem that Never Happens? From Wikipedia: "Quality Assurance (QA) is a way of preventing mistakes or defects in manufactured products and avoiding problems when delivering solutions or services to customers". Some say that nobody ever appreciates the cost savings in problems that never happen, is it true? From the strategic perspective, where does the quality fit in, how to maximize its value and sustain business prosperity?
The digital CIOs need to reimagine IT as the business growth engine and lead changes via inquiries. They need to keep asking open-ended questions such as, "Why? Why not? What If?" They have to focus on guiding the company through the digital transformation, and create unique business value because IT is the significant element of any differentiated business capability and the defining factor for competitive advantage.

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