Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1261

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 1/13/ 2017

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.6 million pageviews 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”  1/13/2017Well-Prepare the "Digital Storms" to Accelerate Business Transformation: Digital storms are like the nature rainstorms, could be welcomed in one place and becomes overwhelmed at the other places. Whether it is perfect or not is circumstantial. The emergent digital dynamic is about hyper-connectivity, hyper-diversity, and hyper-dynamism. The exponential growth of data causes information storms; the increasing speed of changes leads to “business transformation storm”; the fierce competitions and people-centricity drive innovation storm. Moreover, these “digital storms” do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways. They act as a complex and unpredictable way. So, how to well prepare for them and reap significant business benefits through them?
The Book "Digitizing Board Room" Monthly Tuning: An Insightful Boardroom Jan. 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 insight to set leadership tones, agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals.. Crafting a Digital IT Roadmap in the New Year: Organizations large or small are on the journey of going digital. Building a digital-ready IT roadmap is a proactive approach to well prepare for the digital transformation. And the history reveals that IT needs to be understood and harnessed by all stakeholders, to fulfill its potential and highlight the strategic importance as a differentiator of companies. After the new year resolution, how to craft a high achievable and comprehensive IT roadmap to fulfill the digital vision
Three Aspects to Achieve Decision-Making Premium Decision making is a daily challenge for most business leaders and professionals because organizations become over-complex, hyper-connected, uncertain and ambiguous. What is more important to effecting good decisions within your organization? A sound process? The relevant information? Or a High-intelligent decision-maker?  And how to achieve decision-making premium?
CIOs as “Chief Inquisitive Officer: A set of Q&As (V) Dealing with IT Innovation Dilemma: 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 Quality Gaps in Running a High-Mature Digital Organization

Quality is defined by a number of factors, such as performance, manageability, operability, reusability, reliability. Many say, quality attracts quality, and to effectively lead an organization into good practices to focus on quality attributes takes work and a level of credibility within the organization. Many organizations still operate and get stuck at the lower level of maturity due to the quality management gaps. Quality is not just the task of one single department or function, it is one of the management disciplines which needs to be taken in a systematic way. The quality gaps are varying, how to identify and close them and improve the overall business quality?
Where there is ineffectiveness and inefficiency in business management, there is the quality gap existing: Quality (Efficiency + Effectiveness = Q) is doing the right thing right, the first time, with no backlog and wastage and highest customer satisfaction rate. Efficiency means a way to measure how good you are in what you are doing in terms of available resources or money. Generally, you have to have effectiveness first, and then make the effect more efficient. Then it is a good way to measure the effectiveness and bottom line is the economy. Efficiency is to do what is effective, achieve high customer satisfaction with less operating cost, and achieve productivity and satisfaction for employees using good team work, to improve the quality of business management.
When the moral is low and employee engagement and productivity decrease, there is the quality gap in people management: As a degree of quality is in everything people do and experience. People are always the weakest link in organizations. What is required is clarifying the purpose and engaging all the people involved working together as a team to excel in the delivery of product/service, as quality management is to help them in doing what they are doing better, easier and so on. Therefore, high-quality people should also improve the quality of products, services, and overall organizational maturity. Quality employees are the ones who can work independently, have excellent problem-solving skills, well disciplined, have a "customer focus," and bring positivity and wisdom to the workplace. Quality people management means that finding someone who is not doing her/his job correctly. That does not mean that these individuals are lazy or any other negative characteristics. Then, the quality team checks how far this individual from doing his/her job correctly.
When customer is not delightful, there is the quality gaps in products/service/process and overall management: Quality Management is basically the fundamental purpose of serving the customer and meeting or exceeding their expectations. The rest of them are the tools, which can be used as the situation warrants. All the factors raised in the discussion are to address some of the aspects, which eventually influence the customer's satisfaction. Without human interaction, quality is not possible. How quality is defined and measured is crucial. It’s about putting profound knowledge, processes and tools actually used into action and delivered it, and the most important thing is that you need to define quality as management and quality as leadership. This can be the basic quality of the product/service, attracting new customers, retaining customers and so on.
There is the data/information/insight gap when people cannot get the right information to make the right information on time: Information Management quality means quality data, quality management, and quality measurement. By “quality data, ” it means clean, organized, actionable data from which to extract relevant information and insight. Data quality does not end with managing the incorrect entry of information, but the logic of data has to be taken into account too. You can walk through all the various dimensions of data quality such as accuracy, consistency etc, but business context is indeed a very important perspective. The gaps between data and useful information, the gap between information and knowledge/insight will directly impact the business decision-making effectiveness and overall business maturity, Poor information management implies not understanding what raw material they have to play with; or poor measurement, not applying worthwhile evaluation to it to reveal the inherent value, There is the leadership/management gap when quality management is treated as one department or function’s task: In practice, quality management should be the holistic management discipline. "Quality management" is like "change management" in that both appear to be an oxymoron, in which quality and change =process-in motion and management = stabilization and control; the process data is meaningless without theory and knowledge to understand how it applies to people in the process, explain it and continuously improve upon it. There are about dozens of specific management functions and management wheel in any organization. Quality management needs to be embedded into all of them to ensure building a high quality business.
High quality enterprise is comprised of high quality people, high quality products/services, and high quality business capabilities/processes, etc. People quality often decides the quality of the other part  of the business. High-quality leaders or employees are great in attitude, aptitude, and altitude, with a winning mixture composed of character, intelligence and competence in a humble frame of self-esteem which makes aware of his/her quality without needing to show them. High quality staff can deliver high quality products/services/solutions, also build high quality and differentiated organizational capabilities and business competency. Quality is crucial for the business to reach the next level of digital maturity.

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IT Optimizations in the New Year

Due to the exponential growth of information and change nature of technologies, IT needs to continue to retool itself to keep the digital fit. Forward-thinking organizations are also at the inflection point of digital transformation, IT is reinventing its tarnished image from a cost center to a digital innovation engine in leading business changes. How can IT make continuous improvement via consolidation, integration, optimization and digitization in the new year?
IT Investment optimization: Contemporary businesses invest significantly in IT with the goal to keep the business efficient, also intend to catalyze the future growth of the company. However, most of IT organizations get stuck at the lower level of maturity, being perceived as a cost center and support desk only. So IT leaders need to have the business acumen, try and show how close IT has come to the perceived value that the business has about IT. Often times the business crowd wrongly equate IT solutions with concerns of expensive technical difficulties and the IT crowd builds more out of its own know-how than the need of the business customers. There is miscommunication, thus, there is the need for IT investment optimization, to 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. IT leaders should act as Chief Investment Officer, to justify business case via fiancé term: doing ROI on IT Investment pre-project initiation; also when the project is completed, look at the actual expenditures and benefits to see if the ROI was actually met. To be a business partner, you have to share the goals and aspirations of your business partners. CIOs need to keep a measure and periodicity at which the measure is reviewed against setting targets, to optimize IT investment and maximize its value.
Cost and process optimization: IT also needs to leverage the latest technologies or tools to continue trimming cost or retooling processes. IT is in a unique position to oversee business processes which underpin organizational capabilities. Business functional leaders need IT to ensure the availability and reliability of their business process automation tools/technology, so their staff can function as efficiently as promised. In fact, many organizations have little insight into their cost structures and who is consuming the assets. They have no idea where they are spending their money on and often assume it is mainly being spent on items which are actually much lower on the list. The CIO’s job is to improve operational excellence via reducing the burden on the company while trying to stay current with ever-changing technologies. The approach is to implement a program that like a gardener would prune the tree or remove the weeds, nurture the valuable solutions and optimize cost.
Customer experience optimization: Digital is the age of customers. Both retaining a customer and winning a new customer are very important to every business’s surviving and thriving. IT has both internal customers and external customers. Better internal customer experience helps to improve employee productivity and engagement; and superior end customer experience directly impact the business’s sales revenue and growth potential. Hence, IT needs to shift from an inside-out operation-driven to outside-in customer-centric lenses. Outside-in view is crucial to look at the the customer experience, and Customer Experience is vital for growth, development and to make sure you stay in business. The customer's experience is about how they encounter, observe, or undergo a company's events or stages. Invariably, the total customer experience is typically comprised of a complex set or series of interrelated processes or steps in which IT can help digitize the touch point or integrate and optimize for orchestrating a ‘near-seamless’ experience. Briefly speaking, you have to put the customer at the heart of everything that you do as a business, great Customer Experience Management is a differentiator for companies.
“Doing more with innovation,” and "Continual improvement" is IT mantra in the digital era. There is never "enough" to optimizing operations and fine tuning differentiated business capabilities. However, optimization of technology should not be the be-all and end-all at the expense of the health of the overall organization for hurting the long-term business growth. Further, complacency is maligned when it comes to optimizing operations both in terms of cost and efficiency. Hence, strategy management, IT management and change management need to go hand-in-hand for running a high effective, high efficient and high mature digital organization.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Book "Digitizing Board Room" Monthly Tuning: An Insightful Boardroom Jan. 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.
An Insightful Boardroom An Insightful Board? At today’s “VUCA” digital dynamic, organizations face both unprecedented opportunities to grow and hyper-competition or great risks to survive. Therefore, corporate board plays a more significant role in overseeing business strategy, setting principles and policies, and making the judgment on and assurance of corporate action within a framework of practical knowledge. Not only do today’s BoDs need to have sufficient knowledge to understand the business ecosystem, but also they need to have the collective insight to present today and foresee the future. Nut how to build an insightful digital board?
A Cognitive Board: The corporate board plays a significantly crucial role in exemplifying leadership qualities and practicing governance disciplines, but how to build a cognitive Board to strengthen independent thinking; enforcing the multitude of innovation, capturing profound insight and catalyzing rapid growth at the age of digitalization?
A Heterogeneous Board: There is no question that businesses need digital leadership in today's boardrooms, with “VUCA” characteristics of business dynamic, overloading information, and globalization as the new normal of business expansion, all of these bring the significant opportunities and responsibilities for the new breed of digital BoDs, and it is crucial to brainstorm on how to build a highly effective board with a heterogeneous viewpoint, and right mixing of Individualism and collectivism nature, to set the tone of directorship with innovation and influence.
An Informative Board: Information is the lifeblood and one of the most invaluable assets in digital business today, the corporate board as top governance body plays a significant role in overseeing business strategy and monitor business performance. To connect the dots, can today’s digital board become more information-driven, and IT savvy? But how?
A ‘Mindful’ Board: Corporate Boards are there to oversee business strategy, to ensure reasonable governance, and hold the senior executive team accountable for execution. Modern Board as high-level governance body plays the crucial role in business advising, monitoring, and setting key tones in corporate culture as well, these are all significant responsibilities, thus, mindset, more precisely, mind shift or mind flow is so critical to director selection criteria. But what are the characteristics of those mindful BoDs and a mindful board overall?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.6 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. 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 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.

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book  Quote Collection 3"Digitizing Boardroom" Book  Quote Collection 2"Digitizing Boardroom" Book  Quote Collection 1"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 8 A Culture Savvy Board Introduction"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 7 A "Talent Master" Board Introduction"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 6 A "Governance Champion" Board Introduction"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 5 An IT-Friendly Board Introduction "Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 4 An Innovative Board Introduction"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 3 A Performance-driven Board Introduction"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 2 A Strategic Board Introduction"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 1 23 Themes of Digital Boardrooms Introduction"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Preview"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Introduction, Slideshare Presentation
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Five Pillars to Achieve Decision-Making Maturity

Nature offers countless choices during life struggle. Either at the individual or the corporate level, people have to make decisions, large or small even at daily basis. There are many reasons for making decisions (WHY & WHAT); there are many ways to make decisions (HOW), and there are also different personalities in decision-makers (WHO). And surely there is “No One Size Fits All” formula for making great decisions. Decision-making is both science and art. The issue of the issue is: Decision power is a mind-power; and decision-making is not an event, but a process and a capability, how to improve its effectiveness and maturity?
Perception: Decision power is knowledge-based, perception-driven, and character-oriented. A selection among multiple available choices is a decision. Human knowledge is imperfect about multiple choices and the related outcomes. The knowledge constraint and perception bias are paramount issues during the decision process. Hence, decision power is a mind power, it guides through what to select from available choices, how to accommodate constraints, how to identify bias, how to avoid distractions, and where to show firmness and flexibility. Decision-making is both science and art. Both information and intuition count. Insight-based decision-making is logical because information drives awareness, and intuition makes time-space limitations irrelevant and compensates knowledge deficiency.
Principles: Decision maturity is to ensure the right decisions have been made by the right people at the right time. Setting principles for improving decision maturity is crucial for making a leap of overall business maturity. Enterprise principles provide a basis for decision-making throughout an enterprise and inform how the organization sets about fulfilling its vision and goals. Principles are those core decisions values (not value as in benefit, but values as in beliefs) that shape behavior and define culture. Principles allow many people at different organizational levels to individually make their own decisions to run in the same direction to meet the same objectives in a consistent and rapid manner. There is fuzziness in the decisions because there is fuzziness in conflicting criteria, the decision is about future, and future is full of uncertainty. At the Digital Era, making decisions in digital ways means to apply the set of digital principles to general guidelines that require sound judgments and informs decisions.  
Process: Decision-making is not a one-time event, but a process, at today’s “VUCA” - Volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous digital dynamic, the importance of the process becomes critical as decisions become more complex and involve more diverse stakeholders. You need a sound process to frame the decision, spec out your options, weigh them appropriately with the right people, and actually make a decision. With an effective process, if you mine, cleanse and improve the data to produce information, then combine that information and visualize it in different ways, then you gain organizational knowledge and from that knowledge, you can capture the insight and make excellent decisions.
People: Decision-making assessment starts with the decision-maker evaluation. There are no such perfect decision makers due to cognitive bias, limited knowledge, low EQ maturity, or ineffective decision-making scenario. Making the large, especially strategic decisions is not the easy task. Very few decision masters can make high-effective decisions all the time. In reality, many poor decisions are made by very intelligent people. When you judge something, you form a critical opinion of it based on facts, discerned data, filtered information, and preconceived notions.  Often assumptions and prejudices are due to lack of deeper understanding. Many times people make a poor judgment, not because of ignorance, but because of the lack of insight. Hence, a good judgment is a must for good decisions. But decision making is the professional capability which can be developed. The biggest challenge is knowing what you don’t know, it’s a reasonable moniker for decision-making blind spot and biases. It is the responsibility of each individual to examine themselves and to make sure they are open to true understanding.
Practice: Decision-making is the capability. Like many other skills or professional capabilities, it takes practice, practice, and practice more. It is important to leverage multidimensional thinking processes, advanced decision tools, the human’s intuition-gut feelings, and add the “wisdom’ in the decision process to improve the overall effectiveness of decision making.  In the world of uncertainty and ambiguity, the mind with decision wisdom can, by definition, not control the outcome, however, focus on making effective decisions and the best chance for a good outcome is to make a good decision. If the decision-making scenario is well designed and well-executed, you have the highest probability of getting the best outcome in the state of knowledge accessible at the time of decision-making. Always attempt to identify areas in which measurable improvements can be realized via practicing, providing demonstrable progress is essential for improving decision maturity.
The decision is about the future, a decision is needed when there is uncertainty. Decision-making is both art and science. Emotions and intuition matter, but by following the logical scenario decision making, it is more science than art. Think slow, and think fast, decision-making capability can be developed. Decision power is a mind power.
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CIOs as the Digital Visionary and Business “Mind Reader”

Due to the changing nature of technology and the fast-growth of information, the CIO role also has to continue to adapt to the disruption, Today's CIOs are both business strategist and technology visionary, they not only need to understand how new technologies impact businesses, but also they should be able to “read the mind” of the board and executive peers, customers, and IT staff in order to lead fore foreseeably and manage effectively.
The “mind reader” CIOs can tailor the needs of audience to convey the vision and enforce communications: As a leader, the CIO has to be able to inspire and encourage with his/her vision and generate conviction and enthusiasm for the missions of the company and the IT organization, regardless of how exciting or mundane they may be. Through an in-depth understanding of the business, CIOs are able to not only articulate the vision but communicate it in various forms and forums, including executive peers, investor relations, business partners, IT personnel, etc. Not just “reading the mind,” a CIO has to be a good communicator, a good facilitator, a good listener, and a good collaborator. Communicate skillfully. IT leaders need to learn business languages and drivers, they should be aiming to shape the thing of information within the executive team to include an information strategy as a core element of the business strategy and tactical plan. CIOs must be able to relay complex technical ideas in a no technical manner to business leaders and have skills to communicate change. So the CIO has to be flexible, adaptable, and able to adjust the lingo to suit the audience, sometimes soften it up and drop the technical jargon when communicating with the business executive peers, and other times diving into the bits and bytes level when discussing technical details with staff.   
The digital visionary CIOs can help the Board become IT friendly and digital savvy: Many organizations are still confused digital with general technology adoption. The board as the top leadership team sets the tone for radical digital transformation. It is not just about adopting a few technology gadgets or tools or building a fancy website presence. It has to make a significant shift from doing digital to going digital and being digital via taking a holistic approach. Hence, Boards need more business-technology-savvy visionary CIOs amongst their ranks, to demonstrate the business impact the information and technology can make. So BoDs can understand what's required and how as a high-level basis of going digital mean to the business. And digital visionary and “mind-reading” CIOs can better connect with BoDs intellectually and influence them on policy making and principle setting.
The digital savvy and “mind-reader” CIOs can discover more growth mindset, improve employee engagement and make a leap of the business and societal advancement: The traditional talent management focuses on managing behaviors and improving efficiency. Digital talent management needs to put emphasis on discovering talent and solving problems at the mindset level, and invest human capital to maximize the collective people potential. Technology has played a large role in the diversification of the modern workforce, but with increased diversity comes increased discord. It’s important to understand people at a cognitive level, find the right people through what they think and how they act. The right mindset is utmost quality for being a right fit because the power of the mind is the force to change for the more prosperous business and the better world. IT skills gap is the reality, not fiction. Hence, improving employee engagement and satisfaction is another challenging facing IT leaders today.  If engagement is low, the team corner of the triangle (quality, process, and holism) is off balance, which can be reflected from the IT management. The visionary and mind-reader CIOs would consider the positive energy the employees bring to the workplace for building the culture of innovation, also assess the “digital fitness” of employees, in order to put the right people in the right position for solving the right problems and to unleash their potentials and leap their performance.
CIOs are absolutely vital in the digital age because all forward-looking organizations across vertical sectors declare they are in the information management businesses. Digital-savvy CIOs can envision the upcoming business trends and ride the digital waves for accelerating the business growth; the mind-reader CIOs have both “sense and sensitivity” to understand their executive peers, customers and staff for harnessing cross-functional business communication and collaboration, and enlighten both end customer and internal customer with tailored solutions and delightful experience.



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CIOs as “Chief Inquisitive Officer: A set of Q&As for Running IT as Revenue Rain Maker

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 Run Digital IT as a Revenue Rain Maker Traditional IT organizations are perceived as the cost center, running in an inside-out operation driven mode. Nowadays, with the exponential growth of information and lightweight digital technologies, forward-looking organizations across industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business, and there is a high expectation of IT to drive changes and lead the digital transformation. Therefore, the invisible divide IT vs. Business needs to go away, and CIOs should market themselves and advocate IT as an integrated component of the company, in order to run IT as an innovation engine and revenue generator for the business. CIOs must set priority right and have an IT transformation checklist on how to answer the questions such as: How do we get revenues now? How will we do in the future? How should IT help the company win businesses? How can IT contribute to customer acquisition and retention? And how to run digital IT as a revenue rainmaker??
How to Avoiding Three Traps in Calibrating IT Growth IT is at the crossroad, either continues to be a commodity IT service provider or reinvent itself to become a business growth engine. Because the majority of IT organizations still get stuck in the lower-level of maturity and struggle to prove their unique value for helping the business gain competitive advantage. In order for the CIO to practice transformational leadership and for the IT department to reposition itself as the premium provider of competitive business solutions, IT needs to avoid these three traps in calibrating the growth and improve its efficiency, effectiveness, and agility.
Is your IT organization a digital catalyzer or digital laggard? IT is on the big shift to transform from a cost center to a business value creator, from a help desk to a growth engine; IT should devote more attention to what organizations really care about - managing information to capture insight and foresight, putting technology to business advantage. However, there is the gap between the aspirations of what IT could do to the business versus what the current IT “mentality” and capability within the respective IT department is capable of providing and enabling. How can IT close communication and capability gaps, and what is the focal point to run IT as the digital catalyzer and improve its effectiveness, agility, and innovativeness?
How can IT Enable Business Growth? More and more IT organizations are transforming from back end internal support function into front office revenue generators, during the journey, CIO must know how to answer the question such as: How do we get revenues now? How will we do in the future? How should IT help the company win business? And how can IT contribute to customer acquisition and retention?
How to Transform IT from Cost Center into Value Creator In most cases, the IT department isn't producing anything that is saleable and, therefore, many in the organization will view IT as something that seems to ceaselessly suck up money with the little perceived return. First and foremost a CIO needs to show that IT isn't just a cost center but is a deliverer of value, what’re the effective approaches in doing so?


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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Digital CIOs as Problem-Solvers

Modern CIOs have many personas, fundamentally digital CIOs are problem-solvers who need to take business problems, find solutions for them, increase value propositions, simplify operations and be the better business partners with the rest of the organizations.
IT needs to shift from an order taker to a proactive problem-solver: Traditional IT organizations are often overloaded by the internal users’ requests, operate via an inside-out lens to keep the lights on and are perceived as the cost center. To reinvent the tarnished IT reputation, a problem-solver is needed. IT leaders need to have the strong business orientation and ability to bring the benefits of IT to solve business issues; they need to have the ability to align the business requirement with the IT capacity and build an IT-enabled differentiated set of business capabilities for problem-solving and improving the organizational competency. It means that they are not necessarily always say “YES,” to the customers, but they are able to constantly and dynamically lead an IT structure that will seamlessly solve the real issues in the better way and well ahead of the business requirement; they have the ability to interact with the business on their processes and pain areas. IT has the capability to bring out a technology driven solution, driving adoption of applications, be the spinal cord for the organization - integrating various departments, to simplify and optimize processes across functional boundaries, and often across the entire enterprise. This requires an unprecedented level of collaboration with the line managers and business units who own those processes. Hence, IT leaders need to be good communicators who have the business acumen and great problem-solvers who can leverage outside-in viewpoint to run IT as the business.
The digital CIO is a business conductor: Running IT as a problem-solver does not necessarily mean CIOs will solve every problem on his/her own, it’s more about the ability to think analytically and synthetically, to orchestrate and manage business solutions via high-performance IT team, partners, even evolve customers/users for brainstorming new ideas and manage optimal innovation portfolios. Business has three fundamental elements: People, process, and technology. The role of modern CIO is to identify and blend the ways that information and technology can assist and shape the business by linking all digital aspects together to create business synergy for either problem-solving or digital transformation. IT is there to provide whatever technology services/solutions the business needs to serve its customers;  mixing all important ingredients to creating products and processes which generate differentiated value for their business’s long-term growth. Enforcing the weakest link - People in problem-solving and strategy execution: IT delivery is about People, Process and Technology. The first is PEOPLE. However, people is often the weakest link in the business as well. From talent management perspective, the CIO organization shouldn't just be stocked with technologists; you need problem solvers, change agents, customer champions and innovators, and those who can think forward, dig deeper, see through the issues, look around and beneath the corner, and work smarter. Companies have to make a tough decision to increase their bottom line or net operating income, but they must do so by first investing in their employees so that they are able to find better opportunities in the future. The success of any problem-solving must include the welfare of the principals - employees. Involve your users by giving them active roles on the project, make them feel important, appreciate and reward them, and then, your project is off to a successful start, and real issues can be solved, not just fix the symptoms.
Statistically, around 20 percent of IT problems are caused by technologies, 40 percent are caused by people and 40 percent of them are caused by processes. Either CIOs as ideal Chief Innovation Officer or de facto Chief Process officer, CIOs’ positive tones can amplify collective human capabilities in the organization and takes calculated risk in solving tough business problems and gaining the business competitive advantage.
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Well-Prepare the "Digital Storms" to Accelerate Business Transformation

The "digital storms” do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways; they act as a complex and unpredictable way.

Digital storms are like the nature rainstorms, could be welcomed in one place and becomes overwhelmed at the other places. Whether it is perfect or not is circumstantial. The emergent digital dynamic is about hyper-connectivity, hyper-diversity, and hyper-dynamism. The exponential growth of data causes information storms; the increasing speed of changes leads to “business transformation storm”; the fierce competitions and people-centricity drive innovation storm. Moreover, these “digital storms” do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways. They act as a complex and unpredictable way. So, how to well prepare for them and reap significant business benefits through them?

The information storm: Information is growing exponentially and it is humanly impossible to explore all of the "art" out there around a subject or technology. So whether information storm is “perfect” or not depends on the value it can provide. Information only has a value when it has been used. When information has been used to make an informed management decision to develop the right products, enter the new markets, exploit the new channels or having the information to be able to conduct day to day operations which have an output value. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. The effort of valuing information independent of its association to the value of related tangibles seems a difficult, if not a futile exercise. The reasons why many organization are overwhelmed by information storm: (1) They do not understand what raw material they have to play with (poor information management); (2) They do not apply the worthwhile evaluation to it to reveal the inherent value, but mostly, (3) They do not understand why they should do these things in the first place. The enabling value of information can be captured and an information lifecycle is developed - the different information is required at different points in the decision and operational delivery chain.

The innovation brainstorm: Idea generation is always important and innovation brainstorming should be always welcomed; but for some businesses, it could become overwhelmed. It’s not about too many ideas, but about the lack of effective processes or the innovation management framework (like the umbrella) to accelerate idea validation. Keep in mind: Innovation is not for its own sake, but for problem-solving. One of the issues about generating too many ideas is that one can get stuck in the rut of idea generation only. An idea is just an idea unless executed. To prepare for the “perfect” innovation brainstorm, companies need to have a process in place that allows for the submission of ideas and filters out the “nonsense” that sometimes occurs in brainstorming. Far too many innovation management experts excel in helping their organizations create ideas but come short in innovation management which is crucial for innovation to flourish. Before ideation, companies need to discover insights. After ideation, companies need to filter, prototype and validate their ideas. There needs to be a robust and flexible process to follow, the good ideas get discussed and funded and move forward. So the great attitude for innovation is to be fearless to experiment the new things and take a new adventure but to be well prepared for the idea/innovation management life cycle.

The change storm: Digital means the increasing speed of changes and inevitable business transformation. A changeable organization is to creating organizations where change is the norm and happens the whole time thereby delivering faster and increasing market share. Well-preparing change storms is about looking uphill to identify the real problems that matter, and on a scale that can make a difference; looking deeply into the future can have a profound effect on where you go, and how you get there; both uphill and into the future, you gain an understanding of the unintended consequences of your actions in the future. Change can not be just another thing that needs to be accomplished. It has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the organization. Besides those macro, large-scale problems, at the intermediate or micro level, for either organization or individual, how do you get motivated to be innovative at daily basis via solving real world problems large or small, in a creative way. Successful organizations see the changes coming and with preplanning to overcome the resistance before it even manifests. They have the solid umbrella for the changing storm. Businesses will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their change capability.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. But it is a long journey. The shift to digital cuts across sectors, geographies, and leadership roles, But dealing with the challenge of digital transformation requires an accelerated digital mindset, taking an end-to-end response, building a comprehensive set of business competency, to reap the business benefits via those "perfect or imperfect" digital storms, and achieve high-performance business results.



Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Well-Prepare the Digital Storm to Accelerate Business Transformation

Digital storm is like the nature rainstorm, could be welcomed in one place and becomes overwhelmed at the other place. Whether it is perfect or not is circumstantial. The emergent digital dynamic includes hyper-connectivity, hyper-diversity, and hyper-dynamism. The exponential growth of data causes information storm; the increasing speed of changes leads to “business transformation storm”; the fierce competition and people-centricity drive innovation storm. Moreover, these “digital storms” do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways. They act as a complex and unpredictable way. So, how to well prepare for them and create significant business benefits through them?

The information storm: Information is growing exponentially and it is humanly impossible to explore all of the "art" out there around a subject or technology. So whether information storm is “perfect” or not depends on the value it can provide. Information only has a value when it has been used. When information has been used to make an informed management decision to develop the right products, enter the new markets, exploit the new channels or having the information to be able to conduct day to day operations which have an output value. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. The effort of valuing information independent of its association to the value of related tangibles seems a difficult, if not a futile exercise. The reasons why many organization are overwhelmed by information storm: (1) They do not understand what raw material they have to play with (poor information management); (2) They do not apply the worthwhile evaluation to it to reveal the inherent value, but mostly, (3) They do not understand why they should do these things in the first place.The enabling value of information can be captured and an information lifecycle is developed - the different information is required at different points in the decision and operational delivery chain.

The innovation brainstorm: Idea generation is always important and innovation brainstorming should be always welcomed; but for some businesses, it could become overwhelmed. It’s not about too many ideas, but about the lack of effective processes or the innovation management framework (like the umbrella) to accelerate idea validation. Keep in mind: Innovation is not for its own sake, but for problem-solving. One of the issues about generating too many ideas is that one can get stuck in the rut of idea generation only. An idea is just an idea unless executed. To prepare for the “perfect” innovation brainstorm, companies need to have a process in place that allows for the submission of ideas that filters out the “nonsense” that sometimes occurs in brainstorming. Far too many innovation management experts excel in helping their organizations create ideas but come short in innovation management which is crucial for innovation to flourish. Before ideation, companies need to discover insights. After ideation, companies need to filter, prototype and validate their ideas. There needs to be a robust and flexible process to follow, the good ideas get discussed and funded and move forward. So the great attitude for innovation is to be fearless to experiment the new things and take a new adventure but to be well prepared for the idea/innovation management life cycle.

The change storm: Digital means the increasing speed of changes and inevitable business transformation. A changeable organization is to creating organizations where change is the norm and happens the whole time thereby delivering faster and increasing market share. Well-prepare change storms is about looking uphill to identify the real problems  that matter, and on a scale that can make a difference; looking deeply into the future can have a profound effect on where we go, and how we get there; both uphill and into the future, you gain an understanding of the unintended consequences of our actions in the future. Change can not be just another thing that needs to be accomplished. It has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the organization. Besides those macro, large-scale problems, at the intermediate or micro level, for either organization or individual, how do you get motivated to be innovative at daily basis via solving real world problems large or small, in a creative way. Successful organizations see the changes coming and with preplanning to overcome the resistance before it even manifests. They have the solid umbrella for the change storm. Businesses will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their change capability.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. Digital transformation is a long journey. The shift to digital cuts across sectors, geographies, and leadership roles, But dealing with the challenge of digital storms requires an accelerated digital mindset, taking an end-to-end response, building a comprehensive set of business competency, to reap the business benefits and achieve high-performance business results.



Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu