Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1268

Taking a Step-Wise Approach for Leading Digital Transformation

At the high maturity level, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving innovations and the full-fledged digital transformation. Many organizations are at the inflection point of digital transformation journey, either be a disrupter or being disrupted, digital makes significant impacts on every aspect of the business from people, processes, to technology and capability both horizontally and vertically. And organizations have to continue assessing, fine-tuning and adapting, ride above the learning curve and take the journey of digital transformation steadfastly.
Make an objective organizational assessment for digital transformation: Performing an organizational change impact assessment is very important to understand the 'current state' factors in digital transformation. Then determine what the impact, risks and challenges of any proposed changes are. It’s very important for any high performing organization to get the best alignment and leverage the great human potential that exists or is needed to achieve great results and to tap into the passion of the people! It is also important to assess the stage in a life cycle the company is at or the type of tasks that need to be done. An organization or company may be in business for many years but has not matured its management practices or lack of well-defined sets of business principles. The bigger the 'change' the more important to take these into account early rather than late.
Walkthrough “look, listen, question, understand, plan, test and collaboration” stages for digital tuning: Take advantage of the latest technology trend that provides more effective way in cross-functional communication and cross-project collaboration. New generations of digital technologies such as social platform or other collaboration tools are enabling not only the structured processes of the past but also the unstructured processes of the social enterprise. It is the hybrid organizational structure well blends structured and unstructured processes to run with two speeds: industrial speed and digital speed. Functions that need the agility and customer intimacy can be decentralized and perhaps even embedded in business processes. Functions that are common to the enterprise or commodity services can be centralized to derive scale benefits. The key is to improve business agility and enhance cohesive business capabilities. Digital transformation is all about balancing the following main elements impacting change: People ( most important one), Process & Procedures and IT. And you have to maintain and fix any imbalance in those elements by managing them in a holistic way.
Maintaining the digital balance is a never-ending business life-cycle: The challenge for organizations is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational interdependence with the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements, engaging digital talent and balancing effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, a gap analysis, skills assessment, efficiency study, workflow analysis, and knowledge of trends and models that work best to meet the business goals are needed before new schemes and designs are created and agreed upon across the business and all shared services. Digital transformation is to create organizations where change is the norm and happens the whole time thereby delivering faster and increasing market share. 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.
The dynamic digital organizations need to get away from letting things fall through and start creating “integrated wholes.” Digital transformation to achieve organizational maturity is not just about technical excellence or process efficiency, but more about business effectiveness, agility, innovation, intelligence and people-centricity.


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A “Skeptical Board” to Advocate Innovation

The Corporate Board plays a critical role in business strategy oversight, monitoring execution, advising digital transformation, and setting tones for talent management. The boards are also transforming from compliance driven to performance oriented. In practice, the board's role is to pull management out of the trees to see the forest; to understand the business landscape and how it will address it; to continue questioning on important issues where the management's answers do not make sense; to show the constructive skepticism for advocating innovation.
Digital BoDs with the right dose of “doubt” are real critical thinkers who can ask deep questions: Asking good and pertinent questions are critical for governing changes and trigger innovation, so the directors would have to be able to quickly assess any numbers and facts they are given, against applicable benchmarks and detect relevant hints for further questioning or confirmation. Critical Thinker BoDs do not just ask one or two random questions, they ask in a structural way continually. Because Critical Thinking implies the systematic methodology and logical analysis, and even an embedded creativity, employing and applying the criteria deemed appropriate by the thinkers involved, to arrive at the tangible and reproducible truth, either as the commonly accepted objective, or testable, measurable, and time-bound reality. Critical Thinking as an iterative process leads to a series of refinements based on learning and experience.
BoDs with positive doubt or skepticism triggers creativity and stimulates innovation: The constructive skepticism leads to creative problems-solving and innovative solutions. It often challenge conventional thinking as a sole path; add the new perspective via intuition; remove reactive thinking and negative self-talk, and add proactive interaction no matter what is the situation; remove stereotypical thinking and add intuitive listening to capture the important information for decision-making. Asking the right questions helps validate how thorough and deep the board is thinking on a particular issue; avoid group thinking and set the tone for building a culture of innovation. It can also assess whether they consider various different perspectives. It's always about the questions, particularly to come up with thei new perspective to solve a problem or address an issue.
A “skeptical Board” can capture business insight via deep understanding: As the saying goes: "if you doubt at first, doubt again."  Doubt often encourages us to not simply accept what being told, but gain more understanding - that would be positive to avoid many common sense pitfalls. It means to have courage to update the old rules or the “best practices.” It also means to scrutinize the whole picture- to mentally connect all of the different components of a given problem according to their actual working patterns in order to discover the optimal solution to the problem holistically. This is how we transform the complex into simple, define specific solutions, stimulate commitment, and achieve better results. Knowledge is important but more than that is complete awareness of what is happening in the context, be skeptical of conventional wisdom. Once you do that, you use your ability to classify the elements and know their linkage and capture the insight to understand things thoroughly.
A skeptical board has both ‘Fresh Eyes’ and ‘Inquisitive Minds,” to see things differently. The “skeptical BoD” is often someone who has a specialty in something but is not tied to the tyranny of expertise, so they can ask open questions and bring new perspectives for improving board dynamic and effectiveness.



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Improving Digital Acumen of IT Organization

Digital transformation is not just about using the latest technology gadgets, tools or building the fancy website. Raising organization’s digital is the way that companies leverage digital technologies and channels to meet customer needs as well as the needs of employees and business partners, it often has to shape the collective digital mindsets and bring rich digital insight; it also needs to optimize underlying business functionality to build the high level digital capabilities. IT plays a pivotal role in such a paradigm shift, so how to improve digital acumen of IT organization?



IT plays a forerunning role in digital transformation: Growing digital entails more than merely adopting the latest tools or having a large IT budget; it is about integrating technology into the way a company plans, innovates, operates, measures results, interacts with customers and engage employees, and ultimately creates differentiated business competency. So improving digital acumen means more than a technology upgrade; it requires significant changes in leadership thinking and corporate culture. Chief information officers (CIOs) are uniquely positioned to lead their organizations in the complex work of digital shift via building a comprehensive set of enterprise-wide information management capability to enable better information management by breaking down the silos, reducing costs and increasing efficiency, and improving IT engagement with the business. Laggard companies often have a CXO team or board of directors who are comfortable doing things the old way and view IT as purely a support organization. It's very tough for the CIO to drive transformation if that is the case. And IT still runs in industrial speed in those organizations. Digital IT needs to be running at much faster speed. The focus is to provide business capability (both necessities and competencies), rather than smart solutions.
If IT is supporting the business goals, it will help the company win business: There should also be strong interaction between operations leaders and IT leaders and their teams with feedback mechanisms and willingness to find solutions that can support both the business need and build any ROI required to justify the business case. Make sure the executive team first understands what it needs to drive future business growth, put the framework in place to map the strategic objectives into KPIs and then determine what technology investments will accelerate the changes you want to see in your KPIs. Companies are recognizing that IT is roughly coupled to the business strategy, and it is a very good sign about how the companies will deliver value. That could mean helping business to implement products and solutions at a lower cost so business is able to efficiently utilize limited capital for bringing more products and services to the market; that could also mean creating efficiency in the processes so business can compete in terms of offering better products or services faster than competitors.
Businesses are looking for IT to introduce new practices for innovation management: Businesses are looking for IT to add new innovative methods for management of complexity, business transformation, improving quality, or optimizing business capabilities, etc. Digital is the age of options, it provides the opportunity to think the new way to do things, so it forces IT leaders to get really creative on how they architect and implement change, to ensuring IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next.IT shifts to be more “I” focus: Information, Intelligence, Innovation, Integration, Improvement, Interface, the numerous perceptions of IT guiding business towards the right direction and to deliver services or solutions that address concerns for TCO. IT can keep business areas up to date with the opportunities emerging technology provides. It is important to foster a culture of innovation, create innovative IT-enabled business models and business capabilities through a combination of existing and emerging technologies. Deliver the innovative capabilities to capture first-mover advantages.
IT plays an important role in interpreting business issues into a technology solution, also, leverage necessary resources to solve them. And more broadly, IT can weave all necessary business elements, either hard or soft, to orchestrate a digital symphony. The organization's digital acumen is dependent on how smart it can process and leverage information in decision making; how responsive it can adapt to the increasing speed of changes; how well it can delight customers and how its employees feel engaged, and how capable it can drive the business's digital transformation.
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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 12/15/ 2016

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 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”  12/15/2016The "Digitizing Boardroom" Book Tuning: BoDs with Digital Acumen: As a Board of Directors is responsible for having the oversight and direction of a business, a Board in a high-level leadership position should be managing for the long term and play a crucial role in business advising and monitoring, as well as setting key digital tones in driving changes. From the leadership perspective, besides years of experience and vertical expertise, BoDs also need to have digital acumen in order to lead digital transformation effectively.  
CIOs as “Chief Inquisitive Officer: A set of Q&As (I) to Lead Digital Transformation: 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 the emergent digital trend. Digital CIOs also have multiple personas, such as “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 seamlessly.
How to Unlock the People’s Creativity Potential In recent years, creativity has become a very highly valued skill, and many think it is the #1 wanted professional capability in the digital era. Creativity is innate with many special ingredients; and creativity can be developed if the conditions are right and there is love, inspiration, encouragement and permission, Creative people combine existing possibilities to reach more often unexpected solutions. Creativity can be abundant. Creativity is a long-term endeavor. It must be unlocked to maximize its potential.
Three Cognitive Fitness to Advance Digital Transformation Being digital fit starts with mind fit. Being a digital professional means information savvy, innovativeness, advancement, and consistency. It’s more about the consistent image you deliver about being who you are or the mentality you have in or out of working hours. It is the convergence of your professional development and digital footprint. It becomes a life attitude. Here are three cognitive fitness to advance digital transformation.
The Monthly Innovation Brief: Building a Creative Workplace Dec. 2016: Innovation takes the cycle of observing-questioning-connecting-networking-experimenting. From the management perspective, innovation is how to transform novel ideas to achieve its business value, due to the hyper-complexity of modern business, innovation is essentially about reducing the unnecessary business complexity to tackle the complexities of business dynamic. Here is a series of blogs to brainstorm the principles and practices of innovation management.
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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CIOs as “Chief Inquisitive Officer": A set of Q&As (II) to Keep IT Digital Fit

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.
Q1: Is your Organizational Personality Digital Fit: Like people, every organization has its own personality, self-diagnoses your business personality: Is your organization an introvert or an extrovert or an ambivert? An “idea generator” or “go doer”?  Often, an organization's personality replicates the personality of its leader, and that the personalities of the leadership drive the “personality traits” of the organization: Do you have an “authentic” organization that encourages its people to express and grow, or do you have a “silo” organization which has many gaps and is made of the sum of parts, not the whole? What are the collective thought processes and behaviors that you can see in your organization, how do things usually get done in the organization? How would you describe the prevailing business mood? What are the contributing environmental factors and behaviors?  Do you inspire open conversations about work environment? What are the needed changes in behavior, process, communication, accessibility, engagement, or approach?
Q2: How Simple is to Simplify IT? By nature IT is complex, but the very purpose to leverage technology is not to complicate things around, but to simplify and make things more intuitive and delightful. Simplicity is optimal of complication. Running a simplified IT means to keep IT digital fit with fluidity and agility.  In a corporate world, you will find the attitude of complicating things in procedures or systems, people love to hang on to the complications and express how they are experts in dealing with complications. To manage IT complexity, IT should consolidate, modernize, integrate, innovate, and optimize its processes, products, services and capabilities all the time; and to keep IT digital fit, IT leaders need to be like gardeners, prune the weeds and eliminate wastes, to fertilize innovation and reap the business benefits. “Less is more,” and “Keep it simple,” are digital principles to run a digital fit IT organization.
Q3: How should CIOs respond to endless internal customer demand for IT solutions? IT is often perceived as slow to change, or an order taker; many IT organizations are overloaded and understaffed. IT leaders say 'Yes' to everything not through the heart to heart agreement, but due to the fears of uncertainties. And many IT initiatives try to fix the symptoms without curing the root causes. So even IT keeps busyness, it still won’t get respect from the business, with the risk to lose accountability, and run IT as a reactive cost center; not a proactive value creator. A good place to start improving is by trying to get all parts of the business on the same process for proposing, justifying and prioritizing projects - including IT. IT needs to say “NO’ to the users if it has to, but say it in a right way. If people see IT as part of the same process, getting some projects now, having to defer some, just like them, that goes a long way gaining credibility when it comes to arguing that the surprise new thing will impact the company’s agreed priorities, and not just mean longer hours for the overworked and ever-whining IT staff. When IT learns to set the right priority, underpromise and over-delivery, it can gain the good reputation as a trustful partner steadily.
Q4 Shall you Put your Digital IT on Diet? Organizations invest significantly in IT to not just “keep the lights on,” but to gain competitive advantage. IT needs to prune “the weed” regularly, pruning the weeds would face resistance, however, at the end of the day, this was not just an IT decision and rather than let the senior management overcome the barriers by understanding and communicating the actual costs. TO keep it fit, IT has to transform into a solution provider, not just a back-office service provider. IT departments have to sell the benefits of their solutions and not just once but continuously.  In this day and age when end user communities can spin up on-demand services without IT, they expect to see products and they expect to be sold to. Measure, measure, measure, to present the business value and fit for the business's long-term growth.
Q5: Can You Manage IT  to Amplify Digital Effect  If most managers still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing and collaborating, over-complexity will continue to be the biggest challenges in the business today. Digital fit IT is about achieving digital premium, which means a lot, such as information fluidity, business agility, innovation fluency, decision maturity and people-centricity. Digital fit IT continually trims cost, ensures quality,  adapts to changes, and works on consolidation, integration, modernization, optimization manage life cycle seamlessly. The benefit of digital fit IT is reducing the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) as it reduces a lot of redundancy in the business process which ultimately increases the customer satisfaction (internal and external) and amplifies digital effect.
The digital CIOs reimagine IT as the business growth engine and lead changes via inquiries. A confident CIO needs 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 “CIO Master” Monthly Book Tuning: Running IT as Growth Engine Dec. 2016

 Digital IT needs to become more dynamic and innovative to be a pathfinder for the digital transformation.

Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges. It is not sufficient to only keep the light 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, but more specifically, what are the digital-savvy CIOs doing to run IT as a business growth engine and digital transformer? Here is the monthly “CIO Master” Book Tuning. Running IT as Growth EngineRunning 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.Running a Future-Driven IT Organization to Catalyze Growth: Organizations large or small are at the digital journey, corporate IT needs to shift from a back office support center to a future-driven growth engine. Because more often information is the lifeblood and technology is the disruptive force of digital transformation?
Refining IT Role as the Digital Business Value Creator? IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. With emerging digital opportunities and risks, business leaders, including IT leaders are once again seeing the benefit of running IT as a business inside the business, that's the way to go. IT also needs to clearly define its role as a value creator for business, to enable growth and catalyze innovation?
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?
Three Capabilities to Accelerate IT as Digital Growth Engine? Information and technology are pervasive, business transformation or any business initiatives today nearly always involves some form of technology implementation and information-bases insight; IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behaviors. Hence, forward-thinking companies have to empower their IT organizations to drive digital transformations, which enterprise capabilities should IT build to deal with the emergent digital complexity with the new characteristics such as hyper-connectivity, hyper-density, and hyper-dynamism, and become a growth engine of a high-mature digital business?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with about #3300th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Participative Decision-Making

Decision-making is both art and science. Having all the facts to make the best decision is a utopia we would all like. But in practice, each person has their own cognitive strength, knowledge limitation, background, or experience. So besides independent thinking and structural decision-making scenario, we should always collective feedback and involve the right people for getting complementary insight in making better decisions. Technically, it is about leveraging participative decision-making style for improving decision-making effectiveness and maturity.
Including the right people in the right roles can help shape ideas faster and make better decisions: Because we all filter information differently based on our experiences, sharing knowledge and ideas gives depth and shapes a well-rounded concept, and help each other to capture insight from different angles. Communicating and actively listening to one another also creates excitement which propels good ideas to be formed or capture the decision insight you need. The trick is selecting the right audience; one that will listen appropriately, also provide unique feedback, constructively challenge your thinking, stimulate you to seek better answers. It is more effective to have a decision process that enables all those information to relate to a structure of meaning. The whole point is that all the information are a response to the focus of the inquiry and thus must form part of the decision-making
Communicating to others raises the total cognitive threshold to fill decision-making blind spots: Each of us has a defined cognitive threshold. An upper limit to the level of complexity that we can handle at any one time or on any one topic. Participating decision-making is about communicating with others about the issues and such idea sharing significantly raises the total cognitive threshold available to analyze the situation and clarify the problems. It also allows new pieces of information to be synthesized to generate new knowledge and fresh insight for filling blind spots in making effective decisions. Communicating, clarifying, building on each other's ideas, discovering and questioning, all of which enriches the thinking and contributes to a fabulously rich output.
Participative decision-making can also help to remove decision-making bottleneck via leveraging expansive thinking via cross-functional communication and collaboration: It’s about co-creating knowledge, sparking possibilities that happen in conversations of purpose and trust - conversations that are relevant, without fear of judgment, allow for expansive thinking, value the teamwork and discover nuances and unexpected relationships, and so on. It is important to surround yourself with others who complement your strength and knowledge in order to understand the “two side of the story” either for decision-making or problem-solving. To use the diversity of ideas as a rich source of connectivity and relationship, to harness all the spontaneity of interaction the group is capable of and provoke breakthrough thinking to arrive at creative outcomes that would be otherwise very unlikely.
The businesses and the world become more complex, uncertain, so decision-making also become more complex, critical thinking, creative thinking and independent thinking are always crucial, the characteristic of participative decision-making is to embrace the collective insight for either problem framing or information clarification, enhancing the communication and harnessing collaboration, with the goal to make effective decisions and improve decision-making maturity,  





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The Achilles Heel of Innovation Management

Businesses today face fiery competition and rapid digital shift either technologically or economically, most of the organizations are focusing on improving margins by reducing the bottom-line cost rather than top-line growth; because innovation and risk are proportional, also because very few organizations can master innovation and generally it has a very low success rate. So what is the Achilles Heel of innovation management? And how can organizations reap more business benefit from innovation?
There is innovation friction: Innovation is change, change in a work environment is hard. Once people get into a routine at work, they typically do not like to hear about how things could be done differently to make the work more productive, fun, effective, or error-free etc. People consciously or subconsciously protect their status quo. To be truly creative means challenging conventional wisdom and beliefs, and making progress intellectually and psychologically.  And, even if there is a real mandate for change and everyone agrees a change is needed, most people at most of the time want to find something quickly: "low-hanging fruit" or "quick wins" rather than something more radical. But digital transformation or radical innovation often requires mind shift, from a static mind to a growth mind; from “we always do things like that,” attitude to “Is there better way to do things.” And people also look for “What’s It In Me” for the change or innovation. Why should they change if the system is working for them? It’s not like that people don’t like innovation, but rather that people don’t like to be challenged, they need a clear vision, well-defined principles, and practices, and keep motivated to move forward.
Lack of the risk-tolerant culture: Innovation and risk often go hand-in-hand. With creativity, "change" is made." With every "change," the risk is involved. The more dramatic and powerful the innovation is, the greater the risk would be. However, people tend to be “risk averse,” and most of the organizations are not fertile ground for ideation, also do not have a culture of risk-tolerance to cultivate innovation. They fear taking risks, and seldom learn from their mistakes. The fact is that anyone or any company that fervently wants to be creative must be willing to face risks, and overcome the fear associated with such risks. The failure is of crucial importance in the process of achieving innovation. These lessons learned will increase the effectiveness of your innovation management and therefore probably increase your chances of meeting your objectives on your next attempt. Hence, the best judgment, a qualitative framework, with the risk-tolerant culture are important for managing innovation effectively.
Lack of a structural approach for innovation management: Most companies fail at execution because they have no clear process, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally across departments, or a holistic approach to manage innovation. Systems and tools have changed, and in fact become more effective, thanks to the more powerful digital technologies, but the step by step process is still valid. Innovation execution requires a systematic approach with clear stages, performance thresholds, and decision-making parameters combined with an iterative, experimental learning process that supports wide-ranging exploration at each stage. Idea generation is important for innovation management, but lots of ideas mean you will fail if you do not have a screening process to systematically evaluate them, their internal politics and fears diminish creative projects by means of senseless KPIs, while they push down the innovation funnel; but  keep the business process as simple and flexible as possible, as the creative environment is an incubator for innovation, the harmony of people and process can orchestrate the impressive innovation symphony.
Innovation involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel and then transform those novel ideas to achieve the business value. Identification of the novel is only the beginning, the heavy lifting starts as a firm aligns resources and executes effectively, pay more attention to the Achilles Heel in innovation management, so the firm can seamlessly manage innovation life cycle and execute in a manner that provides sustained competitive advantage.



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The Hybrid Decision-Making Style

The digital leaders and professionals spend the significant amount of time in making decisions. However, the overall the decision-making failure rate is very high, the poor decision-making can cause the business dysfunction, employee disengagement, or customer dissatisfaction; the short time loss or the long term pain. The point is that there is no one size fits all formula for all decision making, there are all sorts of decision-making styles depend on the decision maker's cognitive ability, knowledge, insight, or personality. With the increasing pace of change and overwhelming information, can the hybrid style help to improve decision-making maturity?
Leverage the hybrid thought processes in decision-making: It is always crucial to leverage critical thinking in decision analysis, the sense of urgency, the impact of decision, scope, who is being impacted, how likely the situation is likely to change or better information will become known, etc. Critical Thinking brings insight into different situations. It is contextual, it involves both induction and deduction continuum. The real Critical Thinking is an important skill to deal with the multi-logical situation or today’s digital dynamic, which are complex with many moving parts, require multiple disciplines, or have multiple valid viewpoints. But in order to make great decisions and solving problems in the better way, creative thinking is also critical, to connect the nonlinear dots, clarify the vision and perceive the new possibilities, in order to make the right decisions for testing the uncharted water and stepping into the unknown digital territories. Critical Thinking narrows, and Creative Thinking expands. In fact, they are interwoven thought processes for enabling  decision-making maturity. Critical thinking evolves deep thinking process usually with creative thinking embedded. Creativity is the one which deals with any sort of idea necessary to solve a situation which definitely requires a critical analysis skill, so to an extent, both of them share a kind of symbiotic relationship for making sound judgment and effective decisions.
Information –Intuition – Decision making: Information allows you to build an actionable insight on how to move from one level to the other. It applies to the context and environment in which decisions are made. However, information has its own limitation (quality, availability, accuracy., etc.) In face of today’s uncertainty and ambiguity of the digital new normal, intuition is also important in making good decisions. Intuition or being intuitive is when you have a gut feeling about something. It is when there isn’t an exact answer to the puzzle because you don’t have all the pieces. Chaos needs to be navigated by intuition.  An intuitive mind has the strength and the willpower to follow the courageous heart, if with the right information, have the better chance to make effective decisions. In the human context, information + intuition drives awareness, which can include all of these characteristics, uncertainty, surprise, difficulty and entropy, although they can also trigger a sense of confidence, confirmation, validation, verification, with the goal to improve decision-making maturity.
The hybrid of independent decision making and collective decision-making: Digital businesses are hyperconnected and over-complex, with overloading information and unprecedented uncertainty, and continually evolving in the digital dynamic ecosystem. Hence, it’s much more difficult to make effective decisions with the traditional top-down, one-way management style. Decision agility based on the hybrid of individual decision-making and collective decision-making is dependent on better access to right information, at the right time, but also access to right people. Using the traditional ways of working in the silos and through the rigid processes simply won't have enough time to produce the input for the decision makers. More often than not, you need to allow a 'bottom up' approach to collect sufficient information and leverage collective wisdom. And then you can proceed to environmental, organizational and sociological factors that define the environment in which the decisions are made. Digital is the age of people. In complex operations and organizations with unprecedented uncertainty, business managers also have to live with the consequences of making the wrong decisions faster! Taking the hybrid styles to making leadership team's thinking visible by using a more democratic process for decision making will dramatically reduce or eliminate the gaps. Group dynamics leads to final results and performance, especially if the involvement of the activity is related to group inputs and processing. And without proper information or collective input, no good decisions can be made.
The hybrid decision-making style is practical because we live in such a hybrid, networked, extended modern digital working environment. The digital computing technology enables the more seamless virtual platform, enhance the physical organization structure, empower workforce sharing the thoughts and ideas, engage customers and partners to voice the concerns and feedback, and encourage the broader conversation and interaction within its business ecosystem and social circles in order to decide democratically and collaborate seamlessly.


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CIOs as “Chief Improvement Officer”: How to Demystify the Triple Puzzles of IT

On one hand, modern IT plays a significant role in gluing the enterprise puzzle together to ensure the business as the whole is superior to the sum of pieces. On the other hand, due to the complex nature of technology and exponential growth of information, IT itself is also like the large piece of the business puzzle sometimes being misplaced, because many IT organizations are still perceived  slow, expensive, and not integrated with the business. In today’s digital dynamic and technical environments where IT is being used more and more around the globe for revenue generating initiatives, how to run a digital-ready IT as a thresholding competency of the organization via demystifying the triple puzzles of IT?
Is IT too costly: Organizations invest significantly in IT with the intention to gain the long-term competency. Is IT too costly? That’s debatable. Because the cost is not a good measure in today's dollars. IT is too costly if it only keeps the lights on without adding further value to exceed the business’s expectation. The optimistic view is that technology becomes cheaper than ever these days, IT can just do more with less now, If you break down the costs into functional units, though the overall spend is higher as IT intends to achieve more, the cost has come down. Indeed, the high-performance IT organization has higher performance-cost ratio today than ever. Assume you're going to allocate the cost of an IT investment across several revenue generating groups, whatever the cost is estimated to be, they will then need to determine the net increase in revenue at current margins needed to offset the cost of the the business and the management can get a better clearer picture of IT solution from a cost, transparency and complexity level. From IT management perspective, the focus of the digital CIO’s role needs to be shifted from product-oriented to customer-centric, and run IT as the software company, they manage applications as products: with incentives on how much revenue they generate, on customer satisfaction, on strong quality assurance, on market acceptance and on building the business competency.
Is IT too complicated: Traditional IT organizations are often overloaded and understaffed. Too many requirements, too many conflicting priorities of organization do not create an environment for clarity in thought. The root of all lack of coherent thought is in the way to divide work in organizations. In the past, some IT departments have done things because it was fun and as IT leaders, you need to see it as a real need that could improve business. IT is complex,but it doesn’t mean IT should add another unnecessary layer of complication. On the opposite, IT should periodically prune the weed and eliminate the waste via consolidation, modernization, integration, innovation and optimization. IT should follow “Keep it Simple” digital principle and focus on delivering high quality, reusable, consistent services/solutions that support the businesses needs in a cost-effective manner over the long term. IT needs to ensure “doing the right things,” before “doing things right.” After all, if you have a process that is "wrong," the application of technology will simply make getting "wrong" quicker. The pervasive digitization requires both business and technology professionals to rethink how things are done in organizations. The “reach and range” flexibility that now exists removes barriers that have existed in the past. Some of the most elegant systems out there are ecosystems, even they are very complex. Thus, IT needs to focus on ease of use, and reduce unnecessary complexity, but improve flexibility, scalability, reconfigurability, reliability, interoperability and elasticity.
[image error] Is IT too slow: Because the industrial age is considerably static, that’s why many traditional IT organizations were run in the controlling mode, slow to change. However, nowadays,  the emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern, even with an exponential speed, as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. Most of IT organizations today have to run bi-modal modes: IT at the average speed to keep the lights on, and the digital IT with faster speed to focus on innovation and digital transformation. The digital world is so information-intensive, technology needs will only expand, and most likely expand hyperbolically. The business professionals request IT to think about the opportunities made available by pervasive digitization and provide the similar technologies or tools that they use in their personal life. Hence, IT has to  set the priority right and speed up, do things most important to the business, also educate the business about the potential opportunities and risks in the upcoming digital transformation.  It takes commitment and discipline to stay focused on the real priorities of the business instead of being distracted by what seems to be more urgent on any given day. Run, grow and transform, to strike the right balance in running a healthy IT portfolio.
Demystify the triple puzzles of IT is all about running IT better, faster and cheaper to its own and overall business maturity. The digital paradigm shift from IT being a reactive, support desk culture to one that is responsive, innovate, with the capabilities to drive business growth and perpetual improvement. It is important that the opportunity is not squandered, and that maximum benefit is derived from the business.



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