Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1270

CIOs as Chief Inspection Officer: Have you Misread the Business Requirement?

Digital IT organizations play a crucial role in enabling business growth and building organizational competency. IT doesn't exist to do everything it is asked. Nor does it exist to implement without business justification. IT is there to manage a scarce and expensive resource for the business, the digital CIO’s mantra is to run IT as the business like a software startup. It is doing its best to see that the application of IT brings the best business results possible. There is no IT project, only business initiative. However, in reality, there is typically a significant gap between what the business wants and needs vs. what IT is providing. The result is usually a lot of churns until they get it right. CIOs as “Chief Inspection Officer”: Have you misread the business requirement and how to clarify it?
There’s difference between business requirements and IT requirements: IT has to oversee the full set of the business requirements to ensure the cohesiveness and to determine all the customers, users, and stakeholders and obtain their involvement. When it comes to collecting the business requirements, IT needs to take the traceability path of where the requirements come from, IT requirements are allocated to IT from the business requirements, and IT requirements need to be functionally structured to serve each functionality the enterprise needs. It is important to clarify where all the functional boundaries are and who is organizationally associated with each requires a specialized generalist with a holistic perspective and ability.  
The top executives who sponsor the initiative and the managers who take charge of implementation are the key on the requirement readiness checklist:  The important participants for IT initiatives are the executive sponsors who are the one at the top to promote the initiative, and they are skilled at defining the business requirements in a business language describing the business goals, customer needs and personas, competitor offers, current product SWOT and all identified opportunities. Also, the tactical managers who are doing the implementation to show the update and result. They are the key on the success readiness checklist. Without both, you cannot get over the "responsibility without authority" barrier. The challenge is to ask the right questions and fitting together different components and mapping the business requirement systematically. It’s important to note this may or may not include any reference to technology or solution approaches, but there are the needs to develop a sound IT Management Framework so the senior IT leaders can run the department keeping him / her informed the processes they need to develop. It will also help the sponsors to understand the specific development plan and consideration such as IT roadmap, resource, skill, etc. If all these are done well, and then a walk through of the business requirements and identified opportunities can be done as part of joint assessment and design review to allow IT to begin shaping system/IT requirements.
Transparency is critical to developing a trusting relationship between the business and IT for clarifying business requirement: IT and business alignment is not just about conformity or order taking, it needs to include a close partnership with interpersonal communication and seamless collaboration, to bridge the gaps and avoid the pitfalls such as misreading business requirement or lost in translation. Whatever term you prefer, it is a persistent and pervasive problem that demands an ongoing reviewing process to ensure that IT and business requirement mapping effectively and efficiently together. IT leadership must increase and demonstrate its level of understanding of their organization's business and strategy. This will lead to greater respect and trust from the business leaders, to truly run IT as the business. The point is how to develop a trust IT-business relationship and improve cross-functional communication, optimize resource allocation, harness partnership, demonstrate ROIs and engage employees.
To improve IT management effectiveness and bridge the gap between IT and business, IT and the business must be partners, speak the same language, must be able to finish each other’s sentences and feel like members of the same team, and also have complementary skills and capabilities to improve business effectiveness and achieve better business result via seamless communication, relentless collaboration and continuous innovation.




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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 12/8/ 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”  12/8/2016The New Book “Unpuzzling Innovation” Quote Collection III Slideshare: Digital is the age of innovation. And innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. The purpose of the book “Unpuzzling Innovation - Mastering Innovation Management in a Structural Way“ is to demystify innovation puzzle in a structural way.  
IT Transformation is on the Horizon when It is Designed to Change: Digital means flow - data flow, information flow, and mind flow. Digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes and business dynamic in striving to become digital masters. Digital transformation is a natural process and rather effortless to maintain, The bottom line is how well the organization is being influenced by varying business factors such as communication, structure, management methodology or approach. IT transformation is an integrated part of the digital transformation of the business. IT transformation is on the horizon when it is designed to change, from a static support function to an innovative growth engine.
Three “IN”gredients of Digital Boards Due to the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and volatility of digital age, digitizing the boardroom is inevitable. The directorship in any organization must have the ability to guide, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goal, set the leadership tone to influence business “mindset” and lead changes as well as digital transformation. Here are three digital ingredients to improve boards’ effectiveness and maturity.
Collective Insight in Decision Making  Due to complex and change nature of the digital business ecosystem, more often than not, decision-making needs to take collaborative efforts and collective wisdom, brainstorm possible options and make alternative solutions. Decision-making today needs to take a systematic approach, but via nonlinear, collective thinking, the mix of analytics and intuition, and group contribution.
Is your IT Organization a Digital Forerunner: Due to the exponential growth of information and disruptive nature of digital technologies, forward-looking organizations across the industrial sectors have high expectation of their IT organizations. It is not sufficient to run a reactive IT to keep the lights on, or a support function to take orders only. Can your IT organization ride above the learning curve, moving faster than the rest of the organization, and become the harbinger of change and a digital forerunner?
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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Making Sound Decisions via Emotional Excellence

Decision-Making is one of the most important activities for business leaders and professionals. And decision-making in the digital world with VUCA” characteristics is often not the simple tasks, there are many variables you have to leverage, and there are tradeoffs you should make. And it takes both hard science and soft science to improve decision-making. From a psychological perspective, how can you make sound decisions with emotional excellence?
The leaders and professionals having a balanced mind with high EQ can take tough decisions keeping their sensitivity intact: Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify and identify your own emotions or even others’ emotions. It is the ability to harness constructive or positive emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking, decision-making and problems solving. It is also the ability to manage emotions either the historical emotional burden or the current emotional exuberance. As we know the cool-headed decision-makers have better emotional management skills for taking logic, not necessarily always about conventional wisdom, and make more effective decisions than the people with low EQ. It doesn’t mean the high EQ people do not have feelings, but it means such mindsets are more objective, accountable, empathetic, intellectual and progressive, and therefore, they can think in longer term frame, or they are able to strike the right balance of sense and sensitivity, information and intuition in making effective decisions.
High EQ decision makers can leverage multifaceted thought processes in making sound judgment and improving decision-making: Emotions are driven by thoughts, and thoughts piled by thoughts build your thinking capability and cultivate your thinking habit, which directly impacts the intellectual sophistication of decision-making scenario. The ineffective decision-making is often caused by poor judgment, and it further due to the lack of real critical thinking (your thoughts should be reasoned and well thought out/judged), independent thinking (not depending on the authority of others for forming an opinion)m  systems thinking (to understanding the connectivity between the parts and the whole or holistic thinking (leverage both analysis and synthesis for harness understanding), etc. To think critically and profoundly and avoid the trap of emotional turbulence or individual perception, you have to really dig beneath the superficial layer, see around the corner and transcend the interdisciplinary knowledge, it is critical to making sound judgment and effective decisions.
High EQ decision-makers have the emotional maturity to weigh in the multiple decision factors via communications, inquiries, and evaluations: Emotional maturity is the ability to wait, think, and respond to a situation without responding with a knee-jerk reaction. Maturity can be seen from people responding to every situation according to its severity level. Maturity is the clarity of thoughts along with self-control which helps in choosing the most appropriate reaction to circumstances, or inaction -deciding not to react to any given situation. From a decision-making perspective, it is the ability to weigh in the impact of how you make decisions or what you are planning to do and who will be impacted because of the decision outcome or the intended action. It is also the ability to dispassionately" examine alternatives, it’s about fact finding, analysis, structured thinking, objective evaluations and comparisons, the progressive pursuit of better solutions.
Leaders and professionals with high-level emotional excellence can make more effective decisions and take wise actions, also because they have the good attitude to listen and question, high aptitude to think and understand deeply. It’s the soft science of communication embedded with hard science of decision-making or problem-solving capability.


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Does IT Work in the System or on the System to Drive Digital Transformation

Information and technology catalyze today's digital businesses, either disrupt or being disrupted. IT is at an inflection point to lead the organizational level digital transformation. Nowadays, IT can no longer run in the silo, IT is the business. Because information brings about business ideas; business ideas generate lots of information. Information Systems are the backbone and provide valuable information for key decision making and problems solving, And IT needs to contribute to the business growth and customer experience optimization. So in order to drive digital transformation, Does your IT organization work in the system or on the system to unleash the business potential and improve the organizational maturity.
IT systems are business oriented, with the purpose to accomplish business goals and objectives: Sometimes people equated Information System with Computer System, an amalgamation of computer programs and software. Some IT systems probably are just glorified computer programs. Real information systems are business oriented, they are designed by systems analysts and qualified specialists, including business area experts, to integrate computer programs, databases, and other pieces of IT components, with how users go about accomplishing business objectives. An information System (IS) is a business-centric system that deals with information management for collecting, storing, processing and delivering information, knowledge, and digital products/services to ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time for making right decisions to achieve business goals.
IT shouldn’t just work within the IT information system, but often it has to work on the system or within the systems to driven changes and drive digital transformation:  it's a system that manages information, which is a pretty pervasive concept and mostly depends on humans to define which kind of information that is relevant. Of course, various people are influenced by the system assets they have available and utilize. What can be unifying is looking at each function in the enterprise as a system and then finding a unified means of looking at the essence. In this regard, IT needs to work across the functional systems because information management is not just about IT, but about the business across the enterprise scope, and IT is at the unique position to oversee the functionality underlying the entire business. In reality, due to the functional silos, there are many instances where IT managers and business management experts are in positions to play politics for the budgets rather than a focus on organizational matters. So in many organizations with lower-level of maturity, the business is the sum of pieces, not running as a whole. If only IT can work on the system or across the functional systems, the business and IT can be fully integrated to ensure the whole is superior to the sum of pieces, and improve the overall business responsiveness, changeability, effectiveness, and maturity.
IT is a system which has an emergent property of individual human beings making sense of experiences in time and places: A system is the part of the world which has to be of interest to us on the basis of a certain purpose. The question of whether people are in the system or out of the system is a very important question. Too often the boundary or definition of the 'system-of-interest' can be different depending on the particular problem being addressed, adding people to a system changes the characteristics of the system. So it's up to “someone” to draw the boundary and it probably too depends on the purpose of your thinking about that system. Components are different and the interactions are different. Generally speaking, people are the important element in the environment. This is particularly true because digital is the age of people-centricity. It means having IT and business collaborate as equal partners so that strategies, projects, organizations, people, etc, work in harmony, such that initiatives, especially those focused on leveraging IT to increase revenues are successful. Therefore, IT is a key component of holistic business mindset. The mindset that needs to change is that of business. Companies that continue with the status quo will not win in this ever more competitive digital business dynamic, because the most powerful and differentiating tool in all of the today's businesses is information and that, is provided by IT systems. Anyone with common sense can perceive that, and all forward-looking businesses are declaring they are in the information business regardless of the sectors and nature of business.
Whether IT needs work within, on or across the systems depends on how you define the system scope and the integrated components of the system. The point is that If IT and the business aren't a team working together toward the same goals, then the end result will be diminished. The CIO role has never been about just managing the status quo, so the digital shift for IT is to be innovative with systems of engagement rather than systems of record. This is especially true in today’s hyperconnected and interdependent digital dynamic where the global business environment, organizations, and technology are continuing to experience dramatic change at an accelerated pace. All these need to be effective to have mature IT-business integration, and IT-customer alignment, and that organization with higher and stronger maturity outperform organizations with lower maturity.



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“Digital Master” Book Monthly Tuning: “Break down Silos to Achieve Digital Holism” Dec. 2016

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. At the heart of digital, it is people and how to build a customer-centric organization. But how to assess the digital fitness of your organization for such a paradigm shift.           Break down Silos to Achieve Digital HolismWhy does Silo Happen and How to Bridge It? There are different definitions of the silo, by its nature it’s about isolation. The segmenting or sectioning of work by skill, knowledge, type, etc, is a necessary component of complex work or large workplaces. But silo mentality is fundamentally about keeping the mind static and keeping the people separate rather than keeping work separate?
Three Digital Mentalities to Bridge Digital Gaps? Digital is the age of explosive information, hyperconnectivity, fierce competition, although the physical obstacles can not separate people from communication, but still, there are walls at people’s heart and gaps in their minds. We identified "Three Mentalities which Enlarge the Digital Gaps" in the previous posting, here we also discuss three mentalities to bridge digital gaps?Three Characteristics of Digital Organizations Organizations large or small are on the journey of digital transformation. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way the business is conducted so that simply adopting a new digital technology may not be sufficient. You have to transform the company's underlying functions, processes, and cultures, and organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed. Otherwise, companies will begin a decline from its previous good performance. More specifically, what are the characteristics of digital organizations, and can you make an objective self-assessment whether your organization is a Digital Master or a laggard?
How to Breakdown Bureaucracies in Digital Transformation? Digital is about changes, closer to reality is that 'change' is continuously happening in such a dynamic environment of a company. The desires of stakeholders, clients and employees are evolving naturally, not to mention that many of organizations today are facing a more radical digital transformation. What is the digital leadership all about, how to cultivate digital attitudes to break down bureaucracies in accelerating digital transformation in organizations or our society?
Three Practices to Overcome Corporate Silo Mentality: We have transitioned from an industrial to knowledge, innovation, and hyperconnectivity economy - with this shift has come to a change in organizational forms away from the traditional rigid hierarchies managed through command and control to more fluid and responsive network forms. Yet many business managers still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing and this legacy of the old economy limits many 'networked' organizations. Are silos a mere product of organizational design? Or is their nature tied to a deeper level: the humankind's nature? Despite the mountain of evidence pointing the detrimental effects of these silos, they still seem to be quite common in organizations. The question is: why? In today's volatile economy, nothing impedes progress more than protective silos which are simply a form of bureaucratic amorphous mass designed to preserve the status quo. How does one eliminate bureaucracy? What would be some ideas to assist in breaking down silos in an organization where they are present?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5+million page views with about #3300+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. 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 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

How to Flex your Creativity Muscle via Daily Practices?

Creativity is an innate ability to generate novel ideas. If you consider being creative as a way of thinking, of imagining, of expression, of perceiving things, of inventing, of inspiring, etc, then it happens every day, multiple times a day. Creativity is innate, it could become a healthy habit or a positive addiction. Creativity is the #1 professional skill needed in the 21st century, how to flex your creativity muscle via daily practices?
What fuels creativity? There are many unique ingredients to make “creativity formula.” There is a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic elements. On one hand, you need to have the level of curiosity, desire to learn, observe, with the natural ability to maintain an open and inquisitive mind; and on the other hand, it is important to have a motivational environment to encourage creativity, with less restricted rules, innovative leadership, and learning culture to empower innovators, bridge cognitive gaps, fertilize growth mindset and let creative minds to soar.
Cultivate a thinking habit because creativity is a high level of thinking, either consciously or subconsciously: Creativity is a flow, an abstract and an imagination. Creativity comes into play when we call upon our conscious mind with the intention to bring forth solutions from our unconscious. You can put creativity in a box and say it's "all just creativity," or you can pull it out of the box and look at it through different lenses. It’s your perception. Set your own principles and practice, practice, and practice more to spur the abundance of creativity. Our minds have access to both conscious thoughts and at times unconscious thought. It is a conscious mind we call with some unconscious activities of allowing creativity flow, as many creatives or inventors may tell you, ideas tend to come when you stop thinking about the problem. Creative people use specific systems to be creative, the emergent, the divergent, the convergent thought processes and so on.
Creativity needs a problem, creative people are both problem finders and problem solvers: Creatives always challenge conventional wisdom by asking questions which often lead to discovering situations others do not see at first. The essential to questioning stimulates the creative sides of our brains in order to find answers. The good question is usually open and thought-provoking, brings multifaceted perspective. Like a piece of art, the great question is beautiful and insightful, to connect the dots and ignite creativity. And creatives would also say that it involves allowing to be part of a process of trial and error. Creativity demands the possibility of the wrong in order to be exploring in a free and playful way.  
Creativity is the serendipity which can be unpuzzling. It comprises a combination of “flavored ingredients” that work together, flow, fluctuate, in harmony, in order to weave such creativity. You can pull it out of the box and look at it through different lenses. It’s your perception. Set your own principles and practice, practice, and practice more to ignite the abundance of creativity.



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The Perception, Profit, and Partnership of Digital IT

Due to increasing speed of changes and overwhelming information flow, many IT organizations are at the cross road - Shall they continue to run IT as a support center to keep the lights on? Or can they make a big leap to reinvent the tarnished reputation via the lens of perception, profit, and partnership, for running IT as a growth engine and innovation hub? How does the business perceive IT leadership, and what can CIOs do to become truly transformational leaders, not just transactional managers?
Perception: Many IT organizations get stuck at the lower or middle level of maturity, running in a reactive mode, no wonder it is perceived as an order taker and support desk only. What usually happens is that IT couldn't get the business engaged and then ran out of runway. Same as CIOs, when IT only focuses on the operational part of the business, IT leaders are perceived as tactical IT managers without the seat at the big table. So the gap between IT and business is enlarged due to mistrust or “lost in translation” syndrome. At the higher maturity level, IT has to become the business growth engine and even a game changer. Nonetheless, the IT enablement and effectiveness should be measured and value attributed which the business recognizes and endorses. IT needs to be perceived as the change department of the company because IT maturity also depends on how it manages the changes. Modern CIOs have multiple personas, either the perception is fair or not, CIOs should take a personal approach to improving the leadership reputation as “Chief Innovation Officer,” “Chief Improvement Officer,” and “Chief Insight Officer,” etc.  
Profit: The best IT  leaders and managers have a strong understanding of what the business does, how it does it, and how it could be better with 360 degrees of view. IT needs to run as a business, to transform from a cost center to a business growth engine. Profits and then ROIs should be the driving force behind any IT management.IT entrepreneurialism becomes a new fixture for management in their efforts to substantiate their competitive position, effect the business landscape, and drive new revenue growth. IT leaders need to be excellent at articulating the benefits of making changes to the business' operating model and show how IT can make these changes happen. Triangulate multidimensional IT benefit both tangible (cost savings, efficiency, etc.) and intangible (brand equity, sales enablement, etc.) components from the different lens in building a more comprehensive IT value proposition.
Partnership: Digital IT shouldn’t be run as an isolated function, but a real business partner in order to bridge the gap and improve its responsiveness and maturity. IT leaders should check continually: Who are your supporters and who will be your detractors? Who will work with you to overcome the problems, and who will try to kick you when you're down? And how do you overcome the objections or roadblocks that will inevitably raise? IT is more critical in leading the organization’s digital transformation today. CIOs need to understand how technology affects each area of the enterprise. You have to speak business terms by area, not the technology. CXOs are all people fundamentally, and their approach to problem-solving and collaborative working is what shapes how either of the CXO would contribute. And high-performing IT will engage business for both questions and answers, businesses also should learn and support their IT, as trust is a two-way street. Organizations, where management/business is technologically evolved and keep up with digital/technology developments around them becomes key drivers for the desired synchronization with IT teams. To manage change and digital transformation well,  IT must partner with human change management experts to manage change. In the end, it is not about technology, but what technology can do when it is enabling and integrating with change management and business processes to deliver strategic differentiation.
The perception, profit, and partnership of IT directly reflect and make impacts on the overall business reputation, maturity, and brand. High mature organizations treat IT as their partners and often engage them in situations of no real tech need at the short term. The common goal for such partnership is to build business competency and bring the long-term business prosperity.

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The Spotlight on Digital CIOs -CIOs as Chief Influence Officer Dec. 2016

Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges.
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 growth engine and innovation Hub? Here is the monthly spotlight of the CIO.                              CIOs as Chief Influence Officer
CIOs as Chief Influence Officer: How does a CIO Make a Digital Influence Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology and capability. IT plays a pivotal role in digital transformation. Given the power of SMAC technologies and abundance of information to fuel business innovations, how does a CIO make the multitude of digital influence, like a Pro?CIOs as Chief Innovation Officer: Can you Play the Role at the Big Table? More and more organizations invite their CIOs to the big table for strategic discussions. The issue is that there are too many examples that CIOs (or other senior IT executives) have a "seat at the table," participate the conversations with non-IT executive decision makers, but they are often not given the "appropriate voice" in getting engaged in discussions, focused on the quest to leverage IT initiatives. So what are some effective ways to get to the point where CIOs are considered a driver as well as an enabler? CIOs, though you have a seat at the table, do you play the role and have the voice over the table? Formal meetings with individual stakeholders are essential, so are informal meetings. What should they focus on? How should they differ from Board meetings or governance meetings? The CIO’s Situational Leadership for IT Digital Transformation  Many IT organizations are on the inflection point for digital transformation, to transform from a cost center to a growth engine, from a back office function to a digital brain front yard, and from a help desk to an innovation hub. CIOs are wearing multiple hats, practice situational leadership to bridge the industrial age with the Digital Era, to focus on information management, process optimization, business innovation, and overall organizational maturity. Many think IT is shifting from a static function which is often controlling or even lagging behind the changes to a people-centric changing organization. Here are a couple of leadership and management roles CIOs need to balance well for improving IT efficiency, effectiveness, and agility?
CIO as Chief Influence Officer: The Multi- Points of Key Influences: The CIO role by nature is fraught with paradox, the modern CIO need be both business strategist and IT manager, innovator and cost-cutter, visionary and situation-driven. Chief influence officer is one of the most pertinent personas for CIO in the 21st century since technology is ubiquitous in the information age. However, the traditional big box hardware style of IT infrastructure is disappearing, and more invisible digitized IT backbone based on Cloud computing is emerging, modern CIO is no longer just the chief infrastructure officer to manage back office of functional IT, this strategic role is more based on the influence made across the organizational boundary, from innovation to sustainability, from talent management to cultural transformation?
CIO’s  D&B (Depth & Breadth) of Influence Matrix  Modern CIOs face many dilemmas: being sustainable or disrupt, keep status quo or innovative? Act as a business executive or an IT manager., etc, command-control leading style is no longer effective to make business transformation at  today’s 3D (physical, virtual, mental) working environment, and conventional IQ & EQ may also not be sufficient enough to deliver high impact leadership influence?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with about #3200th 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

Five “A”s in Innovation Management

Digital is the age of innovation. The blurring border of the digital organization and its business ecosystem make the world hyper-connected, but also over-complex. Organizations today can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. It often has to be managed in a structured way across the organizational scope. It is largely due to the fact that innovation in the digital dynamic has become increasingly complex in nature. Innovation needs to lay out different mindsets, structures, processes, capabilities to unleash its potential. There should be encouragement and involvement by management to spread the culture of innovation via five “A”s.
Altitude of innovation impact: Innovation needs to become an important component of the business strategy in order to present the altitude of innovation impact. Innovation strategy has to be practiced by management in true spirit. Being innovative is the ability to co-create in a digital ecosystem; a co-creation strategy 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. To amplify innovation impact, information systems play a fundamental role in deploying and operating within digit ecosystems. An open information platform enables companies to integrate the critical components of a digital business system, which is “open” not only because it allows information exchange and participant involvement, but also because it ensures that interdependencies and collaboration between partners are taken into account and build up a strong innovation engine.
Allocation of resources: Creativity typically comes from having some resources that you can apply to problem-solving. Innovation is the sustainable and scalable way to building a balanced innovation portfolio as a practical approach for optimizing resource and improving risk intelligence. A company has finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet a stakeholder expectation. So there’re always some constraints for businesses to explore the new opportunities or deploy the new ideas. If you prioritize across all projects, you know which projects should get that extra increment of analysis and design effort. Prioritization is about managing constraints: you can't do everything, so which innovation initiative will you take to maximize the value with calculated risks? With the right attitude and scientific approach, the evaluation and prioritization are taken place to leverage resources in innovation management. Because innovation is not all about products and services, it can also be used for cost reductions, process and business model changes and improvement.
Aptitude to manage innovation: The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s aptitude to manage innovation. And the aptitude is based on the set of tools, structure, and talent, which are better equipped to manage innovation by allocating time and resource to the people in charge. Innovation Management System includes policies, structure, and program that innovation managers can use to drive innovation. Remove any of the three, you're liable to fail. You apply principles of approach and vary the resource and tool mix by the ever changing environment, day to day through the year to year. An overly complex process can easily stifle innovation as organizations get locked into huge processes around building extensive business cases. For example, ideas are crucial to an innovation program. You need to make sure, that your company has a steady flow of fresh ideas floating in your innovation pipeline, and, therefore, you need a methodological platform that allows you to do that.
Attitude toward risk: Innovation is always the tough journey, not a flat road. Failure is part of innovation; it is very much an intrinsic part of innovating, but fail forward and learn some lessons from it. So the differentiation between a good innovation and bad innovation is the innovation leaders’ attitude toward risks. The positive attitude to be cautiously optimistic, take calculated risks and be alert about obstacles or pitfalls, can inspire a good innovation initiative, and avoid a bad innovation pitfall. Like many other things in businesses, innovation management take a balancing act to have enough failure and an environment that encourages learning from failure quickly and cheaply, without having failures that are too frequent or too expensive.
Assess innovation performance: Assuming an organization believes that metrics can lead to continuous improvement and improve innovation effectiveness. The perception will come from the usage you're doing with metrics.  It won’t be just a matter of explicit communicating the intention behind metrics, but a matter of coaching and leadership to guide the team via understanding the purpose of doing that and engaging on that. Innovation management assessment and measurement is both art and science. In many companies, a pervasive obsession for purely numerical success indicators sweeps aside much of the softer, more qualitative information that is crucial in understanding the health and well-being of the firm's innovation efforts. The goal of innovation assessment and measurement is to build innovation capacity, not about adding the new layer of complicated processes and causing more confusions or problems as a side effect.
Innovation becomes simply ”creating value by solving simple or complex problems.” Innovation is a production, adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of value-added novelty in economic and social spheres.Digital organizations reach the next level of innovation flow, At the tipping point, the innovation management will have to catch up to the business needs with digital speed.



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CIOs as Chief Improvement Officer: Setting Priority Right to Run High-Performance IT

IT plays a significant role in modern businesses to ensure the right people can get the right information at the right time to make the right decisions for either business problem-solving or customer delight. However, the majority of IT organizations get stuck at the lower level of maturity, always understaffed and overloaded. CIOs as chief Improvement Officer: How to set the right priority and run high-performance digital IT?


Reputation Management: Many IT organizations intend to serve customers better via taking orders and say “YES” to all the requests from business users. Though the attitude is good, the outcome is not always good; that approach is sometimes a lose-lose situation with the risk to lose accountability, to run IT as a reactive cost center; not a proactive value creator. Because you end up committing to projects that you cannot successfully deliver without an additional budget, so now you bolster a reputation in the company that "IT can't deliver”; or, most of IT projects are fixing the symptom, but not cure the root cause. The better way should be “underpromise,” and over-delivery, in order to gain respect from the business and build a good reputation as a trustful business partner. It is both the art and science to know when to say ‘YES,” and when to say “NO” to your internal customers, as the old adage may still be true, "you have not because you ask not." Sometimes IT staff and leaders become so conditioned to a presumed ‘order-taker.’ IT needs to act as a strategic business partner to frame the real problem and advise the business the better solution.
Running proactive IT for priority management: IT is the only function in an organization which has the touch point with all other functions and provides the necessary integration between them through efficient business processes and information systems. CIOs need to have information technology insight and foresight upon potential opportunities to retool business, re-imagine growth possibilities and manage innovation effectively. Running a proactive (not reactive) IT helps to set the right priority and manage IT and business resource efficiently. The proactive IT leaders and sponsors attend business reviews with the various business stakeholders in attendance and equally invited those business stakeholders to their IT forums, to share IT innovation, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats present within IT, they listen to the business to understand the issues, put in action plans to help, review the business plans and strategy and work within IT to set the right priority, drive the value and outcomes to meet the business objectives. There are two sets of organizational capabilities: competitive necessities and competitive uniqueness; IT enables both, and at high-performing IT organization, the majority of resources and budget should be assigned to building the business’s competitive advantage.
Resource Management: Prioritization is critical, because the alternative is a land grab for resources. So the objective shouldn't be to work on only those projects for which you have staff, it should be to maximize what you can accomplish through creative leverage of your talent pool and build business competency. Since the projects have different investment considerations, for example, risk reduction for maintenance work, ROI for tactical and some strategic work, and organization learning measures for innovation work. Besides internal customers, end customers should also be IT focal point, CIOs must go out and talk with customers to understand business and understand their tastes and current and future needs. It is important to leverage resource and set priority for innovation management as well. If companies don't make room in the prioritization process for projects that have significant risks but also potentially significant upside results, it can, in fact, discourage innovation and diminish the business’s unique advantage for the long run.
IT-driven digital transformation is the journey of continuous delivery and improvement; unless something new or unforeseen and game-changing is found during the execution, continuously try to improve/develop/change everything in a prioritized order as long as it creates a more long-term business advantage. The challenge for the IT leader is to set the right priority, manage the limited budget and resource, to “Do more with Innovation,” acquire and deploy appropriate technologies and services with the help of the available ecosystem and resources to achieve significant objectives.



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