Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1263

The Three Differences between Digital Masters and Laggards

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, communication to process and capability both horizontally and vertically. The purpose of such radical digitalization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of customer delight and achieve high performing business result and build a people-centric organization. But what are the fundamental difference between digital masters and laggards, how can companies fine-tune the important business elements such as people, process, and technology to accelerate digital transformation and improve the overall business maturity?


Transformation requires mind shift: Many organizations are doing digital - applying digital gadgets or taking a few business initiatives. But very few are being digital - move to the high level of digital maturity. The fundamental difference is the digital mind shift. In addition to the set point changing, transformation requires first shifting mindsets, and then building new skills, capabilities, and reinforcing and embedding new practices/reflexes. More specifically, it is about the understanding psychology behind the changes, and diagnose the problems from the mindset level, in order to dig through the root cause, and fix the real issues, not just the symptoms showed on the surface. It is about building a culture (the collective mindset) of creativity because being innovative is also the state of mind. For the digital laggard, the business try to change “manually,” but it can only change behaviors for the short term, without shifting the collective mind (culture) for the long-term success; or it only modifies a few working processes to improve efficiency, without building the differentiated capabilities for improving overall business competency. For the “digital masters,” transformation goes a step further and involves internalization of the outside the box thinking and conceptual model so that the newly required behaviors don't require the same kind of effort and vigilance. When people are comfortable with the changes with a set of digital minds, processes are robust, not overly rigid, and digital technologies are efficient and convenient, transformation will happen naturally, and change mechanism is embedded into every aspect of the businesses, and the organization as a whole will become high-responsive and leapfrog the digital transformation.
IT as a differentiator vs. IT as a commodity: For many digital laggards, they are still running in the “industrial mode,” even the business world is already stepping into the digital reality with increasing speed of changes. In these organizations, IT is only perceived as a commodity and cost center with a controller’s mentality to focus on keeping the bottom line efficiency. In these IT organizations, they want to transform IT but have no strategy, practice, or mechanism to articulate the costs or value of these systems. What's missing in many of these organizations is the CIO's ability to question the business' requirements and justifications used for IT based projects. But for the digital masters, the focus of IT and the CIO are business centric and tightly integrated into the decision process. CIOs can free more time to learn for real business from the business strategist’s perspective. These digital CIOs are the internal consultant and Chief Innovation Officer, trusted experts who understand a lot about the performance dynamics of the tech sector to be seen as value added participants in business-driven conversations. So they can do better on IT-enabled business capability mappings which allow for an understanding of the impact of strategic changes, and to open discussions across business lines on the steps that need to be taken to reach strategic goals timely. Innovation is more about true knowledge acquisition first, with in-depth business understanding, these digital masters can also use less than that 80% to achieve more than what it has today. It is about improving the top-line business growth by maximizing ROIs to add up the overall business performance and unleash the full digital potential on the second dimension. IT needs to build both strategy and practices to transform into digitalization. Information technology should be seen by any business as a “digital transformer” and innovation engine.
Talent investment: In the digital laggards, businesses still treat their people as cost or resource only, with the goal to improve productivity and efficiency only. Thus, the overall employee engagement is very low in these organizations, and people fear to step out of the comfort zone and adapt to changes. They are not motivated to be the innovators or change agents. Therefore, they often have the static mindset with the “We always do things like that” mentality, which become the very obstacle for the digital transformation. These organizations perhaps can survive in the industrial age with the considerably slow-to-change environment, but it is very challenging for them to strive and thrive in the digital dynamic. For the digital masters, people are empowered to change, inspired to be creative, and motivated to keep learning and think the better way to do things. Learning agility is particularly crucial for today’s digital professionals and IT staff due to the changing nature of technology and overwhelming information growth. Hence, modern CIOs need to work closely with talent/performance management, to create a more open, creative and productive working environment and to strengthen the weakest link of strategy execution - their people, make wise talent investment and unleash the collective human potential and therefore, the overall business potential.
Often, the digital laggards try to approach digital via single dimension or a few IT or business initiatives. However, the best technology can’t ensure the digital transformation victory. Digital Masters understand it and take a more structured approach to expanding digital to all important dimensions with a set of well-defined digital principles, the strong business disciplines and a series of digital practices. Digital leaders will act more as conductors than constructors, with the ability to connect the modular business capabilities to the business strategy, focus on integration and orchestration, look for productivity, cost efficiency, and effectiveness, to capture business growth opportunities and significantly improve the business competency and maturity.
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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 1/5/ 2017

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. Here is the weekly insight about digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.
The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO”  1/5/2017What're the Digital CIO’s New Year Reflection and Resolution: Due to the changing nature of technology and exponential growth of information, IT organization is always on the hot seat, with the pressure to adapt - Doing more with innovation. IT enables the business and supports the applications its customers use to not just transact, but transform business. Besides, as a Chief Information Officer, the CIO today is Chief Influence Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, and Chief Insight Officer, who has to continue to lead IT transformation in a proactive, inquisitive, and progressive way. So what’re the digital CIO’s New Year reflection and resolution. The New Book “100 Creativity Ingredients” Quote Collection III All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Here is the set of quotes in the book of “100 Creativity Ingredients.”
Kicking Start the New Year with Digital Fitness: It is another new year ahead of us, and it is the time to recharge the energy, open the new chapter of learning, growing and innovating; do the reflection, make the resolution and kick start the New Year with digital fitness.
The Monthly Spotlight on Digital CIOs: CIOs as the Mastermind of Digital Transformation Jan. 2017  Modern CIOs have many personas and face great 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, contemporary IT leaders need to be the mastermind of digital transformation. But more specifically, what are the digital-savvy CIOs doing to run IT as a growth engine and innovation Hub? Here is the monthly spotlight of the CIO.
To Celebrate New Year- The Most Popular Blog List in the “Future of CIO” of 2016: The New Year bell is almost ringing; it is the time for both reflection and resolution, and it’s the continuous journey to blogging the way on discovering who you are. New Year day is the time to put the hope up. Here is the set of the most popular blogs of the “Future of CIO” to celebrate New Year! “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”  -Desmond Tutu.
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 Scalability, Speed, and Significance of Digital IT

Many forward-thinking organizations are at the inflection point of the digital transformation.Any successful transformation starts and ends with a clear vision of what the transformed organization should be. They are shifting from “Doing digital” with a few business or IT initiatives to “Going Digital and Being Digital” with a holistic approach to expand to all dimensions - with the emphasis on scalability, speed, and significance of digital IT.


Scalability: Digital is about hyperconnectivity and interdependence. The most successful organizations have a very clear vision and understanding of why they exist and the value they bring to customers and the very reason for transformation. The digital ecosystem expands when the digital business territories blurs and the business community broadens its scope and consumes all sorts of resources. Companies operate within ecosystems to deliver value to their customers. However, for many, the ecosystems have evolved without much attention or planning. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. To effectively respond to the digital dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways with strategic planning to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive and scalable. Fro organizational design and structure perspective, align the different parts of the ecosystem to adopt more points of integration with the digital loosely coupled modular capabilities and processes, which are broken into modular service components that have standard open interfaces. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system, as long as the interface is kept stable. The highly scalable digital organization can expand and amplify its influence  with the ability to co-create in a digital ecosystem -treats customers, channel partners, suppliers, and industry ecosystem participants as active agents who have permission to combine the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new experiences and expand its impact.
Speed: Digital means the accelerating speed. Information is growing exponentially, and technology is the disruptive force of the innovation. An accelerating IT separates the exploitation of the existing methods, practices, and technologies from the exploration of the new way (the next digital practices) to do things via leveraging the emergent digital trends. In a business scope, there are some of the important bits and bytes of information needed when evaluating a new market, new technology or any business growth opportunity. IT leaders need to encourage their teams to spend more time with leaders on the business side as well as directly with customers. These engagements are leading IT to be much more proactive in proposing, as opposed to just responding to ideas for new ways to improve services or actually create new customer value or business revenue. Further, IT consumerization is the catalyst to fuel today’s fast speed, to boost employees’ productivity, to reduce the cost and to delight customers. A high-responsive IT should lead the way to lift one foot and shift the organizational structure more into participative models that better support the quantum leap in speed we are experiencing. The digital enterprise needs to be non-stop, instant-on,  high-responsive, and to leapfrog digital transformation.
Significance: Low mature IT runs as a silo function with a “small thinking” - bottom up, the controller’s mindset, and change inetia. Because change could lead to the problems, and innovation may cause troubles, that’s why it’s avoided. However, to increase the significance of the digital IT, CIOs need to take IT to the next level, as the growth engine and game changer.   IT department should not live in a silo, or a function running as a help desk only. The significant IT becomes business driver for transformation, because at today’s hyper-connected, information-driven business dynamic, there’s no shortage of problems to tackle. IT organizations has to step out of the traditional IT box, to understand the business and customers better via the longer time frame. The significance of IT is about to have a purpose such as staying ahead of the competition and become the business differentiator. It's about to be able to get all the way around the task, to see it from all interests. It's about creating a structure that delivers what the business need and take further steps for maximizing business potential.
Organizational success comes when IT and business act from 'IT vs. business' to a true partnership with high scalability, speed and significance. Digital CIOs need to be transformative leaders to advocate for their organization, and to build the momentum for the non-stoppable digital paradigm shift.
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CIOs as “Chief Inquisitive Officer: A set of Q&As (VI) for Setting IT Priority

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.
What are the Digital CIO’s Top Priorities in Daily Grinding There is no doubt information is the lifeblood of business and IT plays a more critical role in any sector of organizations today. However, there is still a long way to go for IT to reach the next level of maturity, from reactive to proactive, from alignment to enablement, and from a cost center to a value creator. From IT management perspective, why don't more CIOs have a real seat at the big table? Why does the disconnect exist between the business and IT that fosters many of these concerns? And what are the CIO’s top priorities today to run a high-effective and high-innovative digital IT?
How to Set Priority Right to Run High-Performance IT?  IT plays a significant role in the digital transformation of the organization because information is permeating into every corner of the business and technology is often the disruptive force of innovation. However, the majority of IT organizations get stuck in the lower level of maturity, overloaded and understaffed, slow to change, and operate in a "surviving mode." How to set the right priority to thrive and run digital IT with the full speed?
Does your Organization Have Too Many Business Initiatives? Modern businesses can often get trapped into "busyness," overwhelmed with too many project or change initiatives, and overloaded with the operation and short-term business concerns, what are the root causes of such symptoms, and how to overcome these challenges?
How to setting IT Priorities via Three Lenses of IT Value Index? IT is at the crossroad to either transform from a cost center to a value center or become irrelevant in the digital age. There is triangulate value from the different lens in building a more comprehensive and effective IT organization. IT value index has three lenses: Strategic imperative, operational excellence, and business agility. There are also tangible (cost savings efficiency, etc.) and intangible (brand equity, business growth enablement, etc.) components of value. Most IT organizations are overloading and under delivered. So how to set IT priority right to enhance its value proposition and maximize its value delivery?
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?
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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The New Book “100 Creativity Ingredients” Quote Collection V

All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Here is the set of quotes in the book of “100 Creativity Ingredients.”
89 Innovation is about moving forward. If you are not moving forward, you are moving backward. There is no standing still. 90 Being inclusive means to appreciate differences and enjoy the diverse viewpoints. 91 Creativity can manifest in a collective environment. 92 Inspiration is not just a short-term momentum. It could take time and generations of change to truly build a culture of creativity. 93 “To motivate” is the act of giving somebody a reason or incentive to do things. 94 A free person is indeed “rule-less,” “border-less,” and “worry-less,” but not thinking less or mindless. 95 Creating space and silence, even for a moment, allows one to observe rather than act. 96 Innovation by its inherent nature comes with a risk.97 Create a working atmosphere to allow free expressing the creative potentials. 98 Self-realization is a desire to experience ever deeper fulfillment by realizing and actualizing more of own potential.99 Creativity is fluid, like the fountainhead from within you, flowing out.100 Digital has the hybrid nature; it’s about mixing something old and new, the best practices and the next practices. 101 The exercise of blending people’s cognitive differences and problem-solving abilities to produce the desired outcome is a worthwhile thing to do. 102 Digital is the age of innovation because creativity is about connecting the dots in the wider scope. 103 There is always a right way to challenge others and it is never demeaning, always constructive. 104 To succeed in driving innovation, it is essential for empowering people to push ideas forward, and the entire company to be pulling in the right direction. 105 Digital workplace is dynamic, fluid, live, creative, flexible, and productive. 106 Intrapreneurialism is a constructive emotion that drives positive value creation in a well-established organization. 107 Essentially, innovation is a type of creative disruption. 108 Creative collaboration via integrative diversity and seamless orchestration can overcome silos. 109 Creativity is a good mix of art and science. 110 Set your own principles, practice, practice, and practice more to ignite the abundance of creativity. 111 Creativity is the potential which can be unlocked and innovation is the serendipity which can be unpuzzled.
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Setting Principles and Initiating Next Practices to Reboot IT in the New Year

It is the beginning of the year, also the time for the digital CIO leaders reimagine IT: What is the IT role in your company? Are you there to just keep the lights on, or is IT expected to actively take part in strategic and tactical decisions? How to set principles, develop practices, and reboot IT to get digital ready?
Setting guiding principles for IT management and talent management: The guiding principle is like the light tower, navigates IT toward the right direction and speed up the organization to the well-planned destination, from strategic direction (Is IT cost center or revenue generator?) to talent management (What kind of people should be working in your IT group? Do you want techies, business folks, project-oriented people? What rough percentage of each) to IT performance (How is IT performance as an organization evaluated by the rest of the company? How will you measure success.) Keep in mind, setting principles and making policies to reinvent IT is not about putting restrictions on what you can do, it is more about monitoring and knowing when things are not going on plan so that you can take appropriate actions at the right time. There needs to be a pragmatic way of applying whatever principles to the problem in a consistent manner. Otherwise, it is a waste of effort to even state them.
Developing the next practices and build the business competency: Doing daily grinding doesn’t mean IT should ignore its role refining. Indeed, continuing refining its role as a strategic business partner, the digital capability multiplier and the innovation engine.  In order to achieve business goals, organizations need to build a set of business capabilities, and IT is not just the sum of services or processes, but an enabler of business capabilities which can weave all necessary elements of the business into strategic capabilities and unique competency of the organization. A company has finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectation. And there are too many things in the daily agenda of IT. So there’re always some constraints for businesses to balance a healthy portfolio of “run, grow, and transform,” to explore the new opportunities or deploy the new ideas. Therefore, evaluation and prioritization are taken place to leverage resources in IT management.

Improving IT performance and measure it in the right way: When a CIO is able to position and maintain the IT organizational performance to ensure it addresses both "IT Effectiveness" and "IT Efficiency," they have earned their stripes. as IT exists to enable and catalyze the business and the top performers are the ones who understand the business requirements, delivering on time, with the right technologies and solutions in collaboration with the business. Business orientation; Enabling both business and IT to achieve organizational objectives. IT should work with stakeholders to develop the right set of measurement that shows how IT is improving the business performance and enforcing business capabilities. Ensure that IT performance measures are quantitative, and implement whatever mechanisms you need to be able to gather the information and deliver the results.

Organizations are stepping into the deep digital normal with increasing speed of changes. Technology is pervasive and the information is abundant. Business initiatives and digital transformation today nearly always involves some form of IT implementation, IT is a key enabler to build almost all differentiated digital capabilities nowadays, New Year is the crucial time to keep the growth mentality and run IT as the digital accelerator.
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The New Book “100 Creativity Ingredients” Quote Collection IV

Creativity is like a muscle; you must exercise it daily or it atrophies.

All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Here is the set of quotes in the book of “100 Creativity Ingredients.”

68 Creativity is like a muscle; you must exercise it daily or it atrophies. 69 Observation is a critical activity in the innovation process to understand the context of an issue from a human perspective. 70 Creative expanding cannot happen without vision. 71 Imagination is like virtual creativity, formless and intangible. 72 Listening is an important skill to spark creativity and cultivate empathy.73 The good question is usually open and thought-provoking to bring multifaceted perspectives. 74 Creativity is like the light, the reason we see the light because the “switch” is on and the connection is made. 75 The more mindless the task, the higher probability of subconscious disruption can stimulate creativity. 76 Context is a chain of associations which stimulate creativity. 77 Creativity isn’t necessarily a paint-by-numbers process, more as a “connect-the-dots” adventure. 78 Many creative minds, just like many light bulbs, lit up simultaneously, could lead to brainstorming and breakthrough innovation. 79 Curiosity and a sense of adventure are parts of the creative process, and not necessarily at odds with the word “focus.”80 Without constructive skepticism, without human progress.  81 The ultimate aim of assimilating knowledge is to create new ideas or gain wisdom. 82 Creativity is a synthesis of two qualities: imagination and concreteness. 83 Collaboration stimulates creativity and fuels sustainable growth.84 Creativity flourishes in solitude. 85 Self-reflection is an important stage to diagnose, develop and strengthen your creativity. 86 Prioritization provides a framework for focusing on creativity. 87 Make time and space commitment for things matter, including how to unlock your creativity. 88 Perception shows how deep one can understand an issue or a phenomenon, the mental strength.


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"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Introduction

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Introduction Chapter 1 Intellectual Ingredients

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Introduction Chapter 2 Psychological Ingredients

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Introduction Chapter 3 Knowledge and Capability Ingredient

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Introduction Chapter 4 Activity Ingredients

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Introduction Chapter 5 Motivational Ingredients

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Conclusion

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Quote Collection I

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Quote Collection II

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Quote Collection III

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Quote Collection IV

"100 Creativity Ingredients" Book Quote Collection V
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The New Book “100 Creativity Ingredients” Quote Collection V

All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Here is the set of quotes in the book of “100 Creativity Ingredients.”
68 Creativity is like a muscle; you must exercise it daily or it atrophies. 69 Observation is a critical activity in the innovation process to understand the context of an issue from a human perspective. 70 Creative expanding cannot happen without vision. 71 Imagination is like virtual creativity, formless and intangible. 72 Listening is an important skill to spark creativity and cultivate empathy.73 The good question is usually open and thought provoking to bring multifaceted perspectives. 74 Creativity is like the light, the reason we see the light because the “switch” is on and the connection is made. 75 The more mindless the task, the higher probability of subconscious disruption can stimulate creativity. 76 Context is a chain of associations which stimulate creativity. 77 Creativity isn’t necessarily a paint-by-numbers process, more as a “connect-the-dots” adventure. 78 Many creative minds, just like many light bulbs, lit up simultaneously, could lead to brainstorming and breakthrough innovation. 79 Curiosity and a sense of adventure are parts of the creative process, and not necessarily at odds with the word “focus.”80 Without constructive skepticism, without human progress.  81 The ultimate aim of assimilating knowledge is to create new ideas or gain wisdom. 82 Creativity is a synthesis of two qualities: imagination and concreteness. 83 Collaboration stimulates creativity and fuels sustainable growth.84 Creativity flourishes in solitude. 85 Self-reflection is an important stage to diagnose, develop and strengthen your creativity. 86 Prioritization provides a framework for focusing on creativity. 87 Make time and space commitment for things matter, including how to unlock your creativity. 88 Perception shows how deep one can understand an issue or a phenomenon, the mental strength.
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A Prioritizing Board with Digital savvy BoDs

The modern digital board has many responsibilities, also gets a lot of distractions and hits many pitfalls.
The board in a high-level leadership position plays a crucial role in business advising and monitoring, as well as setting key digital tones in leadership quintessential and talent management. The board needs to retain the ability to capture immediate and future opportunities which will enhance their shareholders’ benefit. And the board has to spread their thin time on the variety of important things. Digital is about the accelerating speed of changes and the abundance of information (but still with the scarcity of insight), how to build a “prioritizing Board” with digitals savvy BoDs?
The Board has to have a good understanding of the organization’s strategic direction and its strategic alternatives: The Board needs to be engaged at the most senior levels to help influence and shape the business of the future. From concerns about risk management to the use of emerging technologies to leapfrog competitors, the digital BoDs’ challenge is how you move the ‘needle’ forward, and really mind the digital gap to accelerate your organization’s digital transformation. Boards need to spend time on the oversight of strategies, not operational issues that should be delegated to management or others. To build a prioritizing board to laser focus on the most important issues, the boards need to understand how to delegate, which means articulate what is delegated and then monitor, not micro-manage what is delegated. IT can make or break the business easily these days, and IT strategy is an integral component of the business strategy. To build the digital board with high “Tech IQ,” and digital savvy, it is important for BoDs understanding how the information can make an impact on the business growth, and how the digital technologies can lead through the business direction. Create an innovative boardroom with “free atmosphere,” so directors are inquisitive to ask great, tough questions for understanding better as well as providing invaluable input for integrating IT strategy into the corporate business strategy. Asking good questions is not the “wasting time” activity, it can help clarify the vision and bring the new insight to steer the company in the right direction, to ensure “doing the right things” (effectiveness) before “doing things right” (efficiency).
The board needs to make laser-focused performance driven agenda: The Board's role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization. They need to focus on their own performance as well as the performance of the management team. The business performance is not limited to financial performance, but also to the firm's performance in creating value for employees and customers, etc. Though both performance and compliance are important boardroom agenda. At the majority of the time, the board agenda should be focused on the performance progress toward the goals, targets, schedules., etc, of the value maximization planning. Further, much of the boarding process or deep boardroom discussions around the business progress is the process that facilitates high-level management accountability.
High-performing boards have to prioritize and put significant effort into risk management: BoDs can sense emergent opportunities, and predict potential risks. 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, to steer the business ship to the uncharted water or the blurred digital territories. It also means taking control of the softer issues such as setting policy, strategic thinking, setting risk appetite. This includes addressing risks to reputation, and the need to be transparent and the ability to define risk appetite and risk culture for the business. No board will find this easy, but practice will ensure a more controlled outcome that protects reputation risk. Boards need to master risk intelligence to identify both business risks and opportunities, keep the focus on governance effectiveness and risk intelligence.
The modern digital board has many responsibilities, also gets a lot of distractions and hits many pitfalls. The board provides an “outside-in” view of the business and multi-dimensional lenses to oversee and advise business strategy and execution, in order to steer business toward the right direction.  A high performance board needs to set the priority right,  It has to laser focus on the most critical things, pulling enough resources and pushing the business model of technology, trustworthiness, innovation, and mastering digital fluency.

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What're the Digital CIO’s New Year Reflection and Resolution

IT needs to leverage technological vision and provides guidance for the organization’s future growth.

Due to the changing nature of technology and exponential growth of information, IT organization is always on the hot seat, with the pressure to adapt - Doing more with innovation. IT enables the business and supports the applications its customers use to not just transact, but transform business. Besides, as a Chief Information Officer, the CIO today is Chief Influence Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, and Chief Insight Officer, who has to continue to lead IT transformation in a proactive, inquisitive, and progressive way. So what’re the digital CIO’s New Year reflection and resolution?


Q1 Does IT provide guidances for the organization’s future? And how to make a set of digital principles to run a high mature IT organization?  IT is in a unique position to oversee the underneath functions and processes of the entire organization; IT is like the “super-glue” to integrate all hard and soft business elements into necessary and differentiated business capabilities and competencies. Nowadays, all forward-looking organizations declare they are in the information management business, because information is the lifeblood of the business, and technology is often the disruptive force of digital innovation and transformation. Hence, IT also needs to leverage technological vision and provides guidance for the organization’s future growth. The guiding PRINCIPLEs should cover the customer, people, and quality from a holistic business perspective. The guiding principle is like the light tower, navigates the business toward the right direction and speed up the organization to the well-planned journey of the digital transformation. Though it’s not easy for a set of principles defined that can be applied holistically. Their content sometimes contains natural conflict, without a method of prioritizing and implementing them consistently, they become a source of contention. Hence, business/IT leaders have to articulate which principle is applicable in which situation. A well-defined set of IT management principles would guide decision making, bridge IT-business gaps, do more with innovation, measure right things before measuring it right. Keep in mind, principles are guidelines, not rigid rules, there needs to be a pragmatic way of applying whatever principles to the problem in a consistent manner, with the goal to achieve strategic goals and guide daily business activities effectively.

Q2 Is IT provocative: Does IT stretch, challenge, or interrupt the status quo? The CIO role has never been about just managing the status quo. Digital is the age of innovation. The main barriers to innovation are silos, rigidity, inflexibility, static mindset, or bureaucracy, etc. The available technology just makes innovation easier to do now than in the past, more powerful, less costly, more easily accessible, thanks to the "lightweight' digital technologies and mosaic style of the on-demand service model. IT needs to set the priority right via proactively solving business problems, not just overcoming technical challenges. IT has to proactively work as an integral part of the business to capitalize on opportunity via leading the digital transformation. IT organizations today have to become highly responsive, dynamic, and hyperconnected. IT needs to be a proactive business problem solver to gain a sense of achievement. It is also important to build a scalable idea management which means for sharing and managing ideas throughout the enterprise, even across silos and geographies. A high-mature IT organization is high-effective, high-intelligent, and high-innovative.

Q3 Is IT desired? Does IT help the business from the customer's perspective?  IT should facilitate the business partners to the right solutions and help to implement them. If the CIO isn't tied in closely to different business functions, and run in the silo, IT is still in lower maturity. IT shouldn’t always look at itself from inside out via IT lens, but via outside-in customer viewpoint, to ensure the daily task helps the business build the competency for delighting both internal and external customers and improving the business agility and maturity. Often, IT suffers from overload, lack of resource, and talent shortage, and managing IT delivery including supporting process development projects in other parts of the company and sometimes no time left selling the idea about investing in their own processes. As daily practices, IT needs to be proactively planning, not justing taking the order, but working closely with internal customers to improve the overall business operation from a holistic business perspective. Fundamentally redesign IT role and culture as a co-creator of top line value, growth, and profitability.

Q4 Is IT in a high-involvement process? Does IT expand the zone of possible change and development? Digital CIOs can have a sense of achievement by running IT as a business; by people and for the people, to be future driven and digital ready; making IT integrated into the company while avoiding making it a separate "stand alone" department. When there is no willingness to serve users and on the other way round, no appetite from users to involve IT, the gaps get bigger and dangerous behaviors may get introduced. The CIO is required to think about the business first, technology second. CIOs need to be the digital visionaries derive the most value out of the technology investments by translating the promise of technology to strategic and competitive advantage for the company. Technology is one of the tools the CIO uses to help move the business in the direction of meeting its strategic objectives. This strategic focus is all the more important in the current environment where technological advances happen at a rapid face. The type of speed issues, such as IT slow to change comes from gaps created between IT and the rest of the company. So digital IT has to not only improve its own speed, but also the overall organizational agility and maturity.

Q5 Does IT have a positive and bold message and brand? The business goal for IT branding is to have all (if possible) business audiences at every level of enterprise weighed-in with delight. Identify the key messages you want to convey to each of these different stakeholder groups. This is your brand. So it is urgent to know exactly what image you intend to convey, create a comprehensive list of the IT organization’s strengths, weaknesses, goals, and objectives. For successful IT branding, basically you are asking yourself: What are you trying to accomplish? Are you on the right path? What do you aspire to achieve? Is “what you look” consistent upon “who you are”? There are best practices and next practices to create and reinforce IT brand, to promote innovation and create new knowledge and build the great IT reputation with freshness and innovativeness.



The New Year comes with the new inspiration. CIOs as “Chief Inspiration Officer” need to convey the vision clearly and get ready for changes. To put simply, an IT organization with high-maturity not only adapts to the changes but drives digital transformation in their company, IT is an enabler and catalyzer for the business to reach the era of radical digital and the next level of digital maturity.

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