Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1316
July 20, 2016
Three Role Shift to Make CIOs Digital Leaders
Compared to other CXOs, the CIO role is considerably new with less than three decades of history. However, due to change nature of technology and exponential amount of information, the CIO role also needed to continually reinvented to fit for the new digital era. And forward-look organizations also empower their CIOs to lead digital transformation. So which role shift to make CIOs high-effective digital leaders?
From a functional manager to a digital ambassador: In the industrial age, the majority of IT organizations get stuck at the lower level of maturity, and CIOs act as siloed functional managers to keep the lights on. There is a huge gap between IT and the business due to miscommunication, and the common pitfall for IT leader is to fail to make the connection between IT and the business, lack the cognizance of how it will actually impact the company's top line and bottom line growth. In order to run a digital IT and unleash its full potential. CIO should have a holistic view of the business from top business leaders’ perspectives and to provide the added value of technology. To bridge the gaps between IT and business, CIOs need to become digital ambassadors for sharing technological vision, and be able to communicate with the other executives to demonstrate IT capabilities as a strategic enabler of the business and CIOs to be part of the executive team for articulating the business strategy. They are responsible for making sure that the IT meets the business requirements and works as an enabler. Learn the business; be the business and become the business. It starts with building strong and value-creating relationships with C-suites, between IT and vendors or suppliers; and build a strong team with a strong bench. Make IT more shared, integrated, flexible, reliable, and fast.
From an order taker to a digital innovator: Traditional IT organizations often act as order takers to fix problems in a reactive mode. And IT is also slow to change because IT is often under staffed and overloaded. Digital is the age of innovation, and a high-effective IT strives to become an innovation engine. As a CIO, you need to understand what the organization’s expectation from IT through an innovation lenses. There’s a lot of opportunities to clarify the role of IT in innovation. Are you talking about enterprise innovation using technology or are you talking about IT’s innovation, improving things they have more control of, such as business processes or the IT function itself? Or both? IT is uniquely positioned to observe processes across the enterprise. a CIO must find the connection with the business in order to deliver the tailored business solution, not just IT projects.Sometimes when one business area has a new product that can be used by another, IT leaders can connect the dots to come up with new innovative solutions.CIOs needs to be an innovative business leader as well with adequate technical skills who can drive technology to deliver value to the organization, not just technical wizardry, but about how to translate into revenue or profit in the business.
From a IT geek to a business strategist: Many CIOs today come from the technology rank and are perceived by their business colleagues as IT geeks. A digital CIO needs to become a business strategist. Enterprise strategy is bigger than a department or a group. If the CIO comes only to speak about IT, he or she only acts as a functional manager, but in fact, the CIO is the most senior IT executive in an organization, and therefore, must be at the enterprise strategy table for co-creating business strategy. A great CIO should be able to not just understand business objectives and priorities, but also be able to break these down and cascade them downstream to his/her team in an IT-comprehensive format. The objective of the IT strategy is not just to be aligned with business strategy, but IT strategy is an integral part of business strategy. CIOs as business strategist have to always “keep the end” in mind, focus on solving business problems, not just overcoming technology challenges. It’s about having problem-solving skills and technological understanding that give you the ability to invent new ways to create or manage information effectively to drive business growth.
Now, Information Systems are impacting every business activities at the organization, CIOs must continue to reinvent themselves to gain respects from business peers. To be truly great, you have to be confident in build reputation as a business strategist, innovative leader and digital ambassador based on the hard-core knowledge and profound thinking skills, to run IT as a business catalyzer, and lead the digital transformation at the company scope even beyond more effortlessly. And they are all
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July 19, 2016
Running a Digital Ready Talent Management (II) July 2016
People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. “Hiring the right person for the right position at the right time,” is the mantra of many forward-thinking organizations. The question is how would you define the right people? How do you define wrong, average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person? Or put simply, for what should they be right? How do you define “Digital Fit”?
Running a Digital Ready Talent Management (II)Integrating Performance Management and Talent Management to Achieve High-Professionalism? People are always the most invaluable asset to the organization. However, in most companies, people management are silo disciplines and outdated practices. In order to strengthen the weakest link - people and advocate high-professionalism, how can organizations integrate performance management and talent management to a holistic solution to get people digital-ready, to unleash their potential and inspire innovation?
Five Traits of High Quality IT Professionals People are always the weakest link in any organization, this is particularly true for IT organizations due to the changing nature and complexity of technologies. IT skills gap is a significant challenge facing IT leaders today, the common complaints from talent managers include: people do not have the right competencies; they can’t find the right skills to fill the positions or their non-IT partners do not understand IT, etc. Are such problems an organization specific, or systematic? what are exactly the skills gaps and what are the resulting symptoms? What are the emergent traits to be high-quality IT professionals regardless of the specific skills, how to reinvent "IT geek" stereotype and build a healthy and positive IT culture for catalyzing innovation.
The Continuous Performance Management: Performance Management is an important process which underpins organization’s collective human capability to achieve high performance. However, in most organizations, the term "Performance Management" has a negative connotation because it tends to label processes that the business sees as, at a minimum, administratively burdensome and at worst simply dreads. There is a danger of not having a process to "develop and nurture" performance, bias and favoritism are common in the workplace. Waiting until once per year or even every six months to evaluate workers is also not enough to know key performance nor should it be. So what're the differences between Continuous Performance Management and traditional Performance Management? Where will you go by using such methods?
How to Build Sustainable Motivation?: Motivation is often innate, and it is different for each one according to cognition, personality, and circumstances. Motivation is not only about the feeling, but a combination of several emotions also describes the trajectory of behavior. Motivation fluctuates and when it does can we still be honest and say yes a bit low today. Which requires being in the moment and facing self now. Most of the motivations are a short run, but how to build sustainable motivation? And how to strike the right balance between the two important factors of motivation “push” and “pull”?
The True Value of Employees: Let's look at the definition of value in order to brainstorm what is the true value of the employee. Value is something that is held to deserve; the importance or preciousness of something, There is an attempt to quantify the value of an employee in financial terms. To estimate the monetary worth of (something); worth - price - cost - merit - rate; appreciate - evaluate - estimate - appraise - assess. It is easier to look at direct labor costs, burden, and even recruiting/hiring and training costs. But there is an element that is even harder to put into monetary terms. How does one put a value on what an employee can add or take away from culture? How does one negative employee impact efficiency or productivity? How does a creative employee help the organization discover the new way to do things, hence saving the cost or improving the revenue., etc? The 'True Value' of an employee is: 'A total of what the employee brings to a business, now and in the future via multi-dimensional lenses (Quality, Creativity, and Productivity).' You need to look at all aspects of their individual traits, work ethic, influence, creativity, experience, ability, achievements and performance, and the hidden potential each employee has if given the opportunity to excel within the work environment.The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about #2900th 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 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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Good Innovation, Bad Innovation: How to Discern It
Innovation is the light every business is pursuing, and there is no surprise that the average success rate is very low for Innovation Management. The good innovation can leap the business to the next level of prosperity, and the bad innovation can fail the business in a fatal way. So how to set the criteria, make a clear discernment, and manage innovation more effectively?
Attitude toward risk: Failure is part of innovation; it is very much an intrinsic part of innovating. And innovation is always the tough journey, not a flat road. So the differentiation between a good innovation and bad innovation is the innovation leaders’ attitude toward risk. It is a positive attitude to take calculated risk and be cautious about obstacles or pitfalls. Like many other things in business, 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. The leadership attitude toward risk also directly impact on how the business manage an innovation portfolio, with which percentage of incremental innovation practices, and which percentage of breakthrough innovation effort. For example, the enterprises are often much better at incremental innovation than radical, so they also rule on incremental innovation due to their history and incumbency whereas the startups lead on bringing out more radical innovation. With the right attitude and scientific approach, evaluation and prioritization are taken place to leverage resources in innovation management. Prioritization is about managing constraints - you can't do everything; so which innovation initiative will you take? Creativity typically comes from having some resources that you can apply to problem-solving. If you prioritize across all projects, you know which projects should get that extra increment of analysis and design effort.
Following rules versus bending or breaking rules: There is the time to break the outdated rules and there is the time to bend the rules, and there is the time to set new rules.Creativity is about thinking out-of-the box, and innovation is about transforming the novel ideas to achieve its business values. By nature of creativity, it’s about discovering the new way to do things, and it often means to break the old rules or the “old way to do things.” However, setting rules to keep focus on managing innovation effectively is also important for reaping profit from a good innovation. Shaping a disruptive innovation to fit the market often requires strategies, designs and product introductions that build towards the long-term vision. Breaking the old rules is important for radical innovation, but it doesn’t mean to be “ruleless,” or get lost or lack of focus. There are no rules for how you deliver those benefits, but to begin the disruption, history would suggest that they must be offered, and therefore a good rule is to ensure that innovation efforts are focused in that direction. The right set of ‘rules’ is not for limiting your imagination, but for framing the system to identify opportunities and mitigate risks. Rule-breaking or making demands insight, understanding, patience, persistence, and courage, among other things. In essence, If you look at the history of market disruptions, they almost always deliver some combination of the benefits of affordability, convenience and ease-of-use compared to higher-performance existing solutions.
Aptitude to manage innovation: 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. 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. An overly complex process can easily stifle innovation as organizations get locked into huge processes around building extensive business cases. To optimize the innovation process (minimizing cost, time and risk, maximizing scalable solutions) requires much more effective cross-functional collaboration throughout the innovation pipeline.
There is no common standard to differentiate good innovation from bad innovation. But it’s important to develop the best and next practice for innovation management, it’s also critical to groom more high effective innovation leaders with both good attitude and high aptitude. And it’s crucial as well to learn from failures (bad innovation), fail fast and fail forward, to make good innovation not as a serendipity, but a new normal.
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"CIO Master" Book Tuning XXXXXXVIIII How to Run a High-Mature IT with Digital Sophistication
From survival instincts to thriving sophistication, it’s not a quantitative accumulation, but a digital quantum leap.
Organizations large or small are on the journey of digital transformation. The characteristics of the digital era are velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). IT organizations play a critical role in leading such a business transformation. In order to prepare for the digital paradigm shift, how can IT knit all important business elements such as process, technology, talent, culture, etc., into differentiated business competency with necessary digital sophistication which developed at the higher level via multidimensional lenses to reach digital maturity?
Digital leadership sophistication: Sophistication is an interesting word which is different from complexity. Complexity which often describes the things or systems, can be managed and optimized from a technical perspective. And sophistication which can describe either a person or a thing via the multidisciplinary lens needs to be cultivated with both soft touch and hard discipline. It implies intelligence, profundity, uniqueness, urban fit, and multidimensional understanding. Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and highly influential because the digital ecosystem is complex and volatile. Digital leadership sophistication is crucial in complex problem solving, understanding context is often the first and the important step in leadership perception, create the relevant context to make a more lasting solution, not just fixing the symptom. Organizations not only need good managers to take care of today’s business but also have to grow the future leaders with sophistication to deal with the digital “VUCA” reality. The emphasis of leadership sophistication is on trying to determine which competencies or capabilities should be used in which combination, and with what level of weight for each, for every different situation, in order to improve leadership effectiveness. It’s also about the multidimensional competencies to formulate creative, unconventional alternatives or solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances. Digital transformation is the thorny journey. To clear the path, whether that be the elimination of obstacles or to provide coaching and guidance and make an influence so that the talent employees are limited only by their imagination.
Digital capability sophistication: A business capability is a specific ordering of people, processes, technology, resources, information, and aimed at creating a defined business outcome. At the organization level, the enterprise consists of a set of capabilities. The organization then uses these capabilities to understand the markets, environment, create new products and services and then deliver products and services. The unique set of organizational capabilities with focus is business competency. The necessary business capabilities are often developed reactively to competitive threats, strategic opportunities, and environmental changes. So all businesses have certain capabilities, what matters is digital capability sophistication (hard to copy, uniqueness, complexity) and maturity (efficiency, effectiveness, and agility). The set of business capabilities with high-maturity can make organizations more adaptable, agile, and highly competitive, to fulfill their strategy. As sophisticated capability is an acquired and organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place, it can therefore not be transferred because of the degree of organizational learning and organization that goes with it. A core competency is a harmonization of multiple capabilities with digital sophistication such that it permeates the entire organization with a focus, and in alignment with the resource-based view, it is valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate. Digital capability sophistication and maturity will differentiate a digital leader from laggards.
Decision-making sophistication: Decision making is one of the most important and sophisticated activities for business leaders and professionals today, and at the strategic level, the outcome of decision making will directly make an impact on the survival or thriving of the business. With the abundance of information and the increasing speed of changes, decision making needs to strike the right balance of “Thinking Fast,” and “Thinking Slow.” In order to bridge the gap and make effective decisions. As the information steward of the business, IT has to step into business with knowledge and confidence to become the key strategy/decision-maker, because more often technology is the growth engine for any businesses, 'seeing' the context you are 'part' of, allows one to identify the leverage points of the system and then 'choose' the 'decisive' factors, in the attempt to reach the set goals and achieve the best possible outcome.
Digital Ecosystems generally do not ‘think’ in the way we understand thinking; ecosystems are complex systems, behaving by way of interactions among the various constituents, it follows from this hypothesis that sophistication appeared rather suddenly within the history of human evolution. From a management perspective, so many companies and "managers" focus on the tangibles, but they lack the in-depth understanding and leadership sophistication of understanding the intangible things; just getting them to consider the list of intangibles would be a breakthrough. In fact, leadership, culture, innovation, customer centricity and brand, all are key intangible elements, or some call the “soft factors,” which can be “hardened” at the certain level, as better drivers of solid business results. From survival instincts to thriving sophistication, it’s not a quantitative accumulation, but the digital quantum leap.
CIO Master Order Link on Amazon CIO Master Ordre Link on Barner & Noble CIO Master Order Link On IBooks “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection III “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection II “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection I, Slideshare Presentation “CIO Master” Book Preview Conclusion Running IT as Digital Transformer “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 9 IT Agility “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 8 Three "P"s in Running Digital IT “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 7 IT Innovation Management “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 6 Digital Strategy-Execution Continuum "CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 5 Thirteen Digital Flavored IT “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 4 CIO as Talent Master Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 3 “CIOs as Change Agent” Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 2 “CIOs as Digital Visionary” Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 1 “Twelve Digital CIO Personas” Introduction "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Introduction "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Book Preview
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Organizations large or small are on the journey of digital transformation. The characteristics of the digital era are velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). IT organizations play a critical role in leading such a business transformation. In order to prepare for the digital paradigm shift, how can IT knit all important business elements such as process, technology, talent, culture, etc., into differentiated business competency with necessary digital sophistication which developed at the higher level via multidimensional lenses to reach digital maturity?
Digital leadership sophistication: Sophistication is an interesting word which is different from complexity. Complexity which often describes the things or systems, can be managed and optimized from a technical perspective. And sophistication which can describe either a person or a thing via the multidisciplinary lens needs to be cultivated with both soft touch and hard discipline. It implies intelligence, profundity, uniqueness, urban fit, and multidimensional understanding. Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and highly influential because the digital ecosystem is complex and volatile. Digital leadership sophistication is crucial in complex problem solving, understanding context is often the first and the important step in leadership perception, create the relevant context to make a more lasting solution, not just fixing the symptom. Organizations not only need good managers to take care of today’s business but also have to grow the future leaders with sophistication to deal with the digital “VUCA” reality. The emphasis of leadership sophistication is on trying to determine which competencies or capabilities should be used in which combination, and with what level of weight for each, for every different situation, in order to improve leadership effectiveness. It’s also about the multidimensional competencies to formulate creative, unconventional alternatives or solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances. Digital transformation is the thorny journey. To clear the path, whether that be the elimination of obstacles or to provide coaching and guidance and make an influence so that the talent employees are limited only by their imagination.
Digital capability sophistication: A business capability is a specific ordering of people, processes, technology, resources, information, and aimed at creating a defined business outcome. At the organization level, the enterprise consists of a set of capabilities. The organization then uses these capabilities to understand the markets, environment, create new products and services and then deliver products and services. The unique set of organizational capabilities with focus is business competency. The necessary business capabilities are often developed reactively to competitive threats, strategic opportunities, and environmental changes. So all businesses have certain capabilities, what matters is digital capability sophistication (hard to copy, uniqueness, complexity) and maturity (efficiency, effectiveness, and agility). The set of business capabilities with high-maturity can make organizations more adaptable, agile, and highly competitive, to fulfill their strategy. As sophisticated capability is an acquired and organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place, it can therefore not be transferred because of the degree of organizational learning and organization that goes with it. A core competency is a harmonization of multiple capabilities with digital sophistication such that it permeates the entire organization with a focus, and in alignment with the resource-based view, it is valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate. Digital capability sophistication and maturity will differentiate a digital leader from laggards.
Decision-making sophistication: Decision making is one of the most important and sophisticated activities for business leaders and professionals today, and at the strategic level, the outcome of decision making will directly make an impact on the survival or thriving of the business. With the abundance of information and the increasing speed of changes, decision making needs to strike the right balance of “Thinking Fast,” and “Thinking Slow.” In order to bridge the gap and make effective decisions. As the information steward of the business, IT has to step into business with knowledge and confidence to become the key strategy/decision-maker, because more often technology is the growth engine for any businesses, 'seeing' the context you are 'part' of, allows one to identify the leverage points of the system and then 'choose' the 'decisive' factors, in the attempt to reach the set goals and achieve the best possible outcome. Digital Ecosystems generally do not ‘think’ in the way we understand thinking; ecosystems are complex systems, behaving by way of interactions among the various constituents, it follows from this hypothesis that sophistication appeared rather suddenly within the history of human evolution. From a management perspective, so many companies and "managers" focus on the tangibles, but they lack the in-depth understanding and leadership sophistication of understanding the intangible things; just getting them to consider the list of intangibles would be a breakthrough. In fact, leadership, culture, innovation, customer centricity and brand, all are key intangible elements, or some call the “soft factors,” which can be “hardened” at the certain level, as better drivers of solid business results. From survival instincts to thriving sophistication, it’s not a quantitative accumulation, but the digital quantum leap.
CIO Master Order Link on Amazon CIO Master Ordre Link on Barner & Noble CIO Master Order Link On IBooks “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection III “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection II “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection I, Slideshare Presentation “CIO Master” Book Preview Conclusion Running IT as Digital Transformer “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 9 IT Agility “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 8 Three "P"s in Running Digital IT “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 7 IT Innovation Management “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 6 Digital Strategy-Execution Continuum "CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 5 Thirteen Digital Flavored IT “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 4 CIO as Talent Master Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 3 “CIOs as Change Agent” Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 2 “CIOs as Digital Visionary” Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 1 “Twelve Digital CIO Personas” Introduction "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Introduction "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Book Preview
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
How to Run a High-Mature IT with Digital Sophistication
Organizations large or small are on the journey of digital transformation, the characteristics of the digital era are velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. IT organizations play a critical role in leading such a business transformation. How can IT knit all important business elements such as process, technology, talent, culture, etc. into differentiated business competency with necessary digital sophistication (developed at the higher level) in order to prepare for such a paradigm shift?
Digital leadership sophistication: Sophistication is an interesting word which is different from complexity. Complexity can be managed and optimized from technique perspective, and sophistication needs to be cultivated with both soft touch and hard discipline. It implies intelligence, profundity, uniqueness, urbanization, and multidisciplinary understanding. Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and highly influential. Digital ecosystem is complex and volatile, thus, digital leadership sophistication is crucial in complex problem solving, understanding context is often the first and the important step in understanding, create the relevant context to make a more lasting solution, without it, you are working without any boundaries, or basis for understanding what you are doing. Organizations not only need good managers to take care of today’s business but also have to grow the future leaders with sophistication to deal with the digital “VUCA” reality. The emphasis of leadership sophistication is on trying to determine which competencies or capabilities should be used in which combination, and with what level of weight for each, for every different situation, in order to improve leadership effectiveness. It’s also about the multidimensional competencies to formulate creative, unconventional alternatives or solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances. It is the thorny journey of digital transformation, to clear the path, whether that be the elimination of obstacles or to provide coaching and guidance and make an influence so that the talent employees are limited only by their imagination.
Digital capability sophistication: A business capability is a specific ordering of people, processes, technology, resources, information, and aimed at creating a defined business outcome; and the unique set of organizational capabilities with focus is business competency. The necessary business capabilities are often developed reactively to competitive threats, strategic opportunities, and environmental changes. So all businesses have certain capabilities, what matters is sophistication (hard to copy, uniqueness, complexity) and maturity (efficiency, effectiveness, and agility). The high-mature set of business capabilities can make organizations more adaptable agile, and high competitive, to fulfill their strategy. As sophisticated capability is an acquired and organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place, it can therefore not be transferred because of the degree of organizational learning and organization that goes with it. At the organization level, the enterprise consists of a set of capabilities. The organization then uses these capabilities to understand the markets / environment, create new products and services and then deliver products and services. A core competency is a harmonization of multiple capabilities with digital sophistication such that it permeates the entire organization with a focus, and in alignment with the resource-based view, it is valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate. Digital capability sophistication and maturity will differentiate a digital leader from laggards.
Decision Making sophistication: Decision making is one of the most important and sophisticated activities for business leaders and professionals today, and at strategic level, the outcome of decision making will directly make impact on the survival or thriving of the business. With abundance of information and increasing speed of changes, Decision making needs to strike the right balance of “Thinking Fast,” and “Thinking Slow.” In order to bridge the gap and decide effectively, from IT management perspective, IT has to step into business with knowledge and confidence to become the key strategy/decision-making; because more often technology is the growth engine for any businesses, 'seeing' the context you are 'part' of, allows one to identify the leverage points of the system and then 'choose' the 'decisive' factors, in the attempt to achieve the set goals and achieve the best possible outcome.
Digital Ecosystems generally do not ‘think’ in the way we understand thinking; ecosystems are complex systems, behaving by way of interactions among the various constituents, it follows from this hypothesis that sophistication appeared rather suddenly within the history of human evolution. From management perspective, so many companies and "managers" focus on the tangibles, but they lack the in-depth understanding and leadership sophistication of the intangible things; just getting them to consider the list of intangibles would be a breakthrough. In fact, leadership, culture, innovation, customer centricity and brand, all are the key intangible elements, or some call the “soft factors,” which can be “hardened” at the certain level, as better drivers of solid business results. From survival instincts to thriving sophistication, it’s not quantitative accumulation, but quantum leap.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
July 18, 2016
The Monthly “Digital Leadership” Book Tuning July, 2016
The substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about making the positive influence, and providing direction, both for oneself and others.
Leadership is complex yet simple: Complex in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. Simplicity in that the substantial of leadership never changes, it’s all about future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation. The purpose of book: Leadership Master - Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity is to convey the vision of digital leadership, share the insight about leadership maturity, and summarize five emergent digital leadership trends:
The New Book “Leadership Master" Introduction Chapter 1 Thought Leadership As a verb, Thought Leadership can be best offered as a state of mind. Thought Leadership is the ability to assimilate knowledge, to think with knowledge, but transcends to insight and wisdom. At today’s digital dynamic with increasing speed of changes, uncertainty, and hyper-competition, being a thoughtful, mindful and multi-dimensional thinker is more crucial to improve leadership effectiveness. In chapter I of "Leadership Master," we brainstorm the multifaceted Thought Leadership and summarize thirteen flavors of digital leadership.
“Leadership Master” Book Introduction Chapter 2: Creative Leadership Digital is the age of innovation. And creativity is the #1 wanted skill in the 21st century. Therefore, creative leadership has also emerged as one of the most important digital leadership trends to improve leadership effectiveness and accelerate business & society advancement. But more specifically, what is creative leadership all about, and who are creative leaders?
“Leadership Master” Book Introduction Chapter 3: Visionary Leadership? The substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about making a positive influence, providing direction, both for oneself and others. At the Digital Era with “VUCA” characteristics -Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, visionary leadership is in strong demand to navigate through uncharted water and blurred digital borders to guide businesses towards the right direction. Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today. A visionary mind has the ability to think the past, perceive what is now and foresee the future.
“Leadership Master” Book Introduction Chapter IV: Inquisitive Leadership The business and world become over-complex and hyper-dynamic, how can leaders become more comfortable and confident in asking questions rather than giving answers. As in many instances, there is a perception that leaders should be the most experienced people and thus, have all of the answers. That’s a fallacy. Confidence comes from being comfortable in your role as a leader, value collective wisdom, not only provide answers but facilitate solutions. Should inquisitive leadership become a trend in the Digital Era?
“Leadership Master” Book Introduction Chapter 5 Profound Leadership At the silo industrial era, leadership effectiveness is perhaps dependent on the hierarchical level of authority and brute force style of command and control. However, now we live in a hyper-connected and over-complex digital ecosystem, digital flow changes the landscape of communication, collaboration, and connection, command and control leadership style is no longer effective enough to make a profound influence and lead change and digital transformation smoothly. Because amplifying digital leadership is not about how loud you can speak, but how profound you could think. Digital leadership must go deeper, to touch the heart and mind, to practice the power of pull, to lead via wisdom, and to harmonize via positive thinking. In this chapter, we describe 13+ different leadership strengths to deepen leadership influence and enforce leadership effectiveness.
The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about #2300 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. 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
Leadership is complex yet simple: Complex in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. Simplicity in that the substantial of leadership never changes, it’s all about future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation. The purpose of book: Leadership Master - Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity is to convey the vision of digital leadership, share the insight about leadership maturity, and summarize five emergent digital leadership trends:
The New Book “Leadership Master" Introduction Chapter 1 Thought Leadership As a verb, Thought Leadership can be best offered as a state of mind. Thought Leadership is the ability to assimilate knowledge, to think with knowledge, but transcends to insight and wisdom. At today’s digital dynamic with increasing speed of changes, uncertainty, and hyper-competition, being a thoughtful, mindful and multi-dimensional thinker is more crucial to improve leadership effectiveness. In chapter I of "Leadership Master," we brainstorm the multifaceted Thought Leadership and summarize thirteen flavors of digital leadership.
“Leadership Master” Book Introduction Chapter 2: Creative Leadership Digital is the age of innovation. And creativity is the #1 wanted skill in the 21st century. Therefore, creative leadership has also emerged as one of the most important digital leadership trends to improve leadership effectiveness and accelerate business & society advancement. But more specifically, what is creative leadership all about, and who are creative leaders?
“Leadership Master” Book Introduction Chapter 3: Visionary Leadership? The substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about making a positive influence, providing direction, both for oneself and others. At the Digital Era with “VUCA” characteristics -Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, visionary leadership is in strong demand to navigate through uncharted water and blurred digital borders to guide businesses towards the right direction. Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today. A visionary mind has the ability to think the past, perceive what is now and foresee the future.
“Leadership Master” Book Introduction Chapter IV: Inquisitive Leadership The business and world become over-complex and hyper-dynamic, how can leaders become more comfortable and confident in asking questions rather than giving answers. As in many instances, there is a perception that leaders should be the most experienced people and thus, have all of the answers. That’s a fallacy. Confidence comes from being comfortable in your role as a leader, value collective wisdom, not only provide answers but facilitate solutions. Should inquisitive leadership become a trend in the Digital Era?
“Leadership Master” Book Introduction Chapter 5 Profound Leadership At the silo industrial era, leadership effectiveness is perhaps dependent on the hierarchical level of authority and brute force style of command and control. However, now we live in a hyper-connected and over-complex digital ecosystem, digital flow changes the landscape of communication, collaboration, and connection, command and control leadership style is no longer effective enough to make a profound influence and lead change and digital transformation smoothly. Because amplifying digital leadership is not about how loud you can speak, but how profound you could think. Digital leadership must go deeper, to touch the heart and mind, to practice the power of pull, to lead via wisdom, and to harmonize via positive thinking. In this chapter, we describe 13+ different leadership strengths to deepen leadership influence and enforce leadership effectiveness.
The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about #2300 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. 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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How to Assess and Improve Change Management Maturity
Make the Change Management process as visible, company-wide, as possible, but not too rigid.
Change is inevitable and needed in every business. But organization Change Management is always challenging with high percentage of failure rate. The successful businesses are the ones that have learned how to implement change time after time, and build it as a solid ongoing business capability. Change Management requires a well-defined strategy with comprehensive change agenda as well. Is there any ideal route for the change, and how to improve the success rate of Change Management?
Assess important business factors in Change Management: Because Change Management is an overarching management discipline which needs to weave many key business factors into an Change Management playbook. A quick Change Management maturity assessment include:-Business culture: it relates to organizational vision and mission, less to Change Management itself. Some companies have relatively high business culture itself, but no Change Management maturity.-Leadership: Change the game is a mindset, transformational/change leaders can provide the direction as vision, mission, strategy, as well as leadership skills like decision-making, delegation, and monitoring. -Processes: Change Management processes evaluation is clear, but the process of "planned Change Management" shouldn’t be too rigid. Because change is dynamic and Change Management is an ongoing business capability.-Monitoring and measuring: How do you design metrics to measure what changes and how these changes are measured? What is the relevant metrics and how can they be quantified and validated?
There are many business culture requirements call out for the standards: How can you change without planning? When you have a comprehensive change agenda, why would you not monitor and measure its effectiveness in achieving your Change Management objectives. Change Management process must be open to new insights that should come from the persons involved in the program. Give yourself an opportunity to build on others know-how your own approach and vision about Change Management. The truth will come out of the box. There are reports covering both Change Management process and measuring the value of ideas.
Make the change management process as visible, company-wide, as possible, but not too rigid: A charter makes sense only for a company that is relatively new to the Change Management process and that has no established "structure" or "culture" yet. However, this represents a solid majority of existing companies. Immediately engage folks who stop and look, and invite any feedback. Let them know their feedback is valued and how. Make a suggestion, offer an opinion. Think of other ways to include "outsiders" as "Change Management-excitement participants."
There are both promises and perils in Change Management. The promises of effective changes often lead the organization to the next level of business agility and maturity. The perils of Change Management waste a lot of resources and cause a lot of pains. There are many reasons to cause Change Management failure. 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. In today's over-complex work environment, change is happening at a more rapid pace. If you make change part of your operation routine and your DNA - and then change becomes easier to deal with, and even become an ongoing business capability.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Change is inevitable and needed in every business. But organization Change Management is always challenging with high percentage of failure rate. The successful businesses are the ones that have learned how to implement change time after time, and build it as a solid ongoing business capability. Change Management requires a well-defined strategy with comprehensive change agenda as well. Is there any ideal route for the change, and how to improve the success rate of Change Management?Assess important business factors in Change Management: Because Change Management is an overarching management discipline which needs to weave many key business factors into an Change Management playbook. A quick Change Management maturity assessment include:-Business culture: it relates to organizational vision and mission, less to Change Management itself. Some companies have relatively high business culture itself, but no Change Management maturity.-Leadership: Change the game is a mindset, transformational/change leaders can provide the direction as vision, mission, strategy, as well as leadership skills like decision-making, delegation, and monitoring. -Processes: Change Management processes evaluation is clear, but the process of "planned Change Management" shouldn’t be too rigid. Because change is dynamic and Change Management is an ongoing business capability.-Monitoring and measuring: How do you design metrics to measure what changes and how these changes are measured? What is the relevant metrics and how can they be quantified and validated?
There are many business culture requirements call out for the standards: How can you change without planning? When you have a comprehensive change agenda, why would you not monitor and measure its effectiveness in achieving your Change Management objectives. Change Management process must be open to new insights that should come from the persons involved in the program. Give yourself an opportunity to build on others know-how your own approach and vision about Change Management. The truth will come out of the box. There are reports covering both Change Management process and measuring the value of ideas.
Make the change management process as visible, company-wide, as possible, but not too rigid: A charter makes sense only for a company that is relatively new to the Change Management process and that has no established "structure" or "culture" yet. However, this represents a solid majority of existing companies. Immediately engage folks who stop and look, and invite any feedback. Let them know their feedback is valued and how. Make a suggestion, offer an opinion. Think of other ways to include "outsiders" as "Change Management-excitement participants." There are both promises and perils in Change Management. The promises of effective changes often lead the organization to the next level of business agility and maturity. The perils of Change Management waste a lot of resources and cause a lot of pains. There are many reasons to cause Change Management failure. 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. In today's over-complex work environment, change is happening at a more rapid pace. If you make change part of your operation routine and your DNA - and then change becomes easier to deal with, and even become an ongoing business capability.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
"CIO Master" Book Tuning XXXXXXVIII: Running IT Outwardly to Embrace Digital
Embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of the business venture.
IT is the business, and digital IT is outward and customer-centric. This should be the focus of digital CIOs. So today's CIOs should understand the strategic goals of the company and ensure IT is laser focused on those goals, and they need to continually ask themselves: What’re your multidimensional business views? What's IT value proposition? Does IT have the vision necessary for the business to succeed and continuously grow? And your company relies on an IT system, is that a commodity with a standardized usage of technologies, or is IT system the core and key differentiator of your business? The approach depends on the company's business and the role that IT plays in defining its positioning in the market. Overall speaking, running IT outwardly with customer-centricity is the right approach to embracing digital radically.
Embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of the business venture. Companies across sectors ultimately respond to the external environment as geopolitics, rapid innovation, and social expectations change the business landscape and blur the digital territories. As organizations that do not respond to external environmental changes will quickly outcompete as more innovative enterprises take their customers. 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. The managers today, especially senior leaders should have the ability to see the big picture, to complement team’s viewpoint. Because people who can see the bigger picture, abstract the insight from the overloading information, and are not living the day-to-day activities, are needed to clear blind spots, integrate a multitude of viewpoints, and inspire the culture of innovation
There is a method, albeit a bit self-serving to those pushing it, called user-centric IT. It is the outside-in lenses to see IT management from customers' view, instead of just IT operation perspectives. IT has both internal business customers and end customers. IT plays a crucial role in optimizing and digitizing every touch point of customer experience and improving overall customer satisfaction. CIOs need to transform IT from a controller to a business enabler, from inside-out, operation-based IT view to outside-in customer point of view, to empower users with the right tools and information to make decisions at the right time. Thus, the next practice of practicing IT management is to live as "customers." A valid strategic objective and the strategy mapping allow you to first understand your customers and what they value, and then identifies how to best characterize that value through project portfolio management, define key indicators, and then define those measures appropriately to best assess the performance of these indicators because they show you how well they satisfy or delight customers.
Put emphasis on customer-centric innovation. Organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. This is largely due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. Variety, complexity, diversification, and collaboration are the characteristics of the digital innovation ecosystem. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking and solutions to allow this to develop in its potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative, advantageous ways. To enable customer-centric innovation, assign the best team members in your first line of contact, so they should have a good understanding and appreciation of the business processes, fully aware of the organizational structure and who is responsible for what - both infrastructure and applications. And the app teams should have access to the senior people to whom escalation can be made to resolve challenges. Point out that customer inquiries are not just support related, but can foster new and better ways the application can perform and optimize every touch point of customer experience. Digital the age of people. The more difficult challenge is not just launching a successful team, but maintaining their motivation and focus.
IT needs to shift from inward-operation driven to outward-customer centric and innovation focused. IT leaders shouldn’t get stuck to “we always do things like this,” because when they keep moving forward, they create the blind spots, or jump to the wrong conclusions. If most managers still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing and this legacy of the old economy limits many digital organizations. CIOs and IT management have to equip with the new mindset to run a bold IT outwardly.
CIO Master Order Link on Amazon CIO Master Ordre Link on Barner & Noble CIO Master Order Link On IBooks “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection III “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection II “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection I, Slideshare Presentation “CIO Master” Book Preview Conclusion Running IT as Digital Transformer “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 9 IT Agility “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 8 Three "P"s in Running Digital IT “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 7 IT Innovation Management “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 6 Digital Strategy-Execution Continuum "CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 5 Thirteen Digital Flavored IT “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 4 CIO as Talent Master Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 3 “CIOs as Change Agent” Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 2 “CIOs as Digital Visionary” Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 1 “Twelve Digital CIO Personas” Introduction "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Introduction "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Book Preview
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IT is the business, and digital IT is outward and customer-centric. This should be the focus of digital CIOs. So today's CIOs should understand the strategic goals of the company and ensure IT is laser focused on those goals, and they need to continually ask themselves: What’re your multidimensional business views? What's IT value proposition? Does IT have the vision necessary for the business to succeed and continuously grow? And your company relies on an IT system, is that a commodity with a standardized usage of technologies, or is IT system the core and key differentiator of your business? The approach depends on the company's business and the role that IT plays in defining its positioning in the market. Overall speaking, running IT outwardly with customer-centricity is the right approach to embracing digital radically.
Embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of the business venture. Companies across sectors ultimately respond to the external environment as geopolitics, rapid innovation, and social expectations change the business landscape and blur the digital territories. As organizations that do not respond to external environmental changes will quickly outcompete as more innovative enterprises take their customers. 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. The managers today, especially senior leaders should have the ability to see the big picture, to complement team’s viewpoint. Because people who can see the bigger picture, abstract the insight from the overloading information, and are not living the day-to-day activities, are needed to clear blind spots, integrate a multitude of viewpoints, and inspire the culture of innovation
There is a method, albeit a bit self-serving to those pushing it, called user-centric IT. It is the outside-in lenses to see IT management from customers' view, instead of just IT operation perspectives. IT has both internal business customers and end customers. IT plays a crucial role in optimizing and digitizing every touch point of customer experience and improving overall customer satisfaction. CIOs need to transform IT from a controller to a business enabler, from inside-out, operation-based IT view to outside-in customer point of view, to empower users with the right tools and information to make decisions at the right time. Thus, the next practice of practicing IT management is to live as "customers." A valid strategic objective and the strategy mapping allow you to first understand your customers and what they value, and then identifies how to best characterize that value through project portfolio management, define key indicators, and then define those measures appropriately to best assess the performance of these indicators because they show you how well they satisfy or delight customers.
Put emphasis on customer-centric innovation. Organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. This is largely due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. Variety, complexity, diversification, and collaboration are the characteristics of the digital innovation ecosystem. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking and solutions to allow this to develop in its potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative, advantageous ways. To enable customer-centric innovation, assign the best team members in your first line of contact, so they should have a good understanding and appreciation of the business processes, fully aware of the organizational structure and who is responsible for what - both infrastructure and applications. And the app teams should have access to the senior people to whom escalation can be made to resolve challenges. Point out that customer inquiries are not just support related, but can foster new and better ways the application can perform and optimize every touch point of customer experience. Digital the age of people. The more difficult challenge is not just launching a successful team, but maintaining their motivation and focus.
IT needs to shift from inward-operation driven to outward-customer centric and innovation focused. IT leaders shouldn’t get stuck to “we always do things like this,” because when they keep moving forward, they create the blind spots, or jump to the wrong conclusions. If most managers still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing and this legacy of the old economy limits many digital organizations. CIOs and IT management have to equip with the new mindset to run a bold IT outwardly.
CIO Master Order Link on Amazon CIO Master Ordre Link on Barner & Noble CIO Master Order Link On IBooks “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection III “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection II “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection I, Slideshare Presentation “CIO Master” Book Preview Conclusion Running IT as Digital Transformer “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 9 IT Agility “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 8 Three "P"s in Running Digital IT “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 7 IT Innovation Management “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 6 Digital Strategy-Execution Continuum "CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 5 Thirteen Digital Flavored IT “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 4 CIO as Talent Master Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 3 “CIOs as Change Agent” Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 2 “CIOs as Digital Visionary” Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 1 “Twelve Digital CIO Personas” Introduction "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Introduction "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Book Preview
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Running IT Outwardly to Embrace Digital
IT is the business, and digital IT is outward and customer-centric. This should be the focus of the digital CIO. So today's CIO should understand the strategic goals of the company to ensure IT is focused on those goals, and they need to continually ask themselves: What’s your multidimensional business view? What's IT value proposition? Does IT have the vision necessary for the business to succeed and grow? And your company relies on an IT system, is that a commodity with standardized usage of technologies, or is IT system the core of your business? The approach depends on the company business and the role that IT plays in defining its positioning in the market.
Embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of the business venture. Companies across sectors ultimately respond to the external environment as geopolitics, rapid innovation, and social expectations change the business landscape and blur the digital territories.As organizations that do not respond to external environmental changes will quickly outcompete as more innovative enterprises take their customers. 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. The managers today, especially senior leaders should have the ability to see the big picture, to complement team’s viewpoint. Because people who can see the bigger picture, abstract the insight from the overloading information, and are not living the day-to-day activities, are needed to clear blind spots, integrate a multitude of viewpoints, and inspire the culture of innovation
There is a method, albeit a bit self-serving to those pushing it, called user-centric IT. It is the outside-in lenses to see IT management from customers' view, instead of just IT operation perspectives. IT has both internal business customers and end customers. IT plays a crucial role in optimizing and digitizing every touch point of customer experience and improving overall customer satisfaction. CIOs need to transform IT from a controller to a business enabler, from inside-out IT view to outside-in customer point of view, to empower users with the right tools and information to make decisions at the right time. Thus, the next practice of practicing IT management is to live as "customers." A valid strategic objective and the strategy mapping allow you to first understand your customers and what they value, and then identifies how to best characterize that value through project portfolio management, define key indicators, and then define those measures appropriate to best assess the performance of these indicators because they show you how well they satisfy or delight customers.
Put emphasis on customer-centric innovation. Organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. This is largely due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. Variety, complexity, diversification, and collaboration are the characteristics of the digital innovation ecosystem. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking and solutions to allow this to develop in its potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative, advantageous ways. To enable customer-centric innovation, assign the best team members in your first line of contact, so they should have a good understanding and appreciation of the business processes, fully aware of the organization structure and who is responsible for what - both infrastructure and applications. And the app teams should have access to the senior people to whom escalation can be made to resolve challenges. Point out that customer inquiries are not just support related, but can foster new and better ways the application can perform and optimize every touch point of customer experience. Digital the age of people. The more difficult challenge is not just launching a successful team, but maintaining their motivation and focus.
IT needs to shift from inward-operation driven to outward-customer centric and innovation focused. IT leaders shouldn’t get stuck to “we always do things like this,” because when they keep moving forward, they create the blind spots, or jump to the wrong conclusions. If most managers still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing and this legacy of the old economy limits many digital organizations. CIOs and IT management have to equip with the new mindset to run a bold IT outwardly.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
July 17, 2016
The Monthly “CIO Master” Book Tuning: How to Run a Digital IT (II) July 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 value creator and innovation engine? Here is the monthly “CIO Master” Book Tuning.
How to Run a Digital IT (II) July 2016Three Dynamic Elements in Running Digital IT Digital transformation represents the next stage of business maturity which will optimize how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem, with the customer at the center of its focus, and how the business is always on, because employees can get work done from anywhere, anytime, with the right information to make the right decisions. Digital IT needs to become more dynamic and innovative to be a pathfinder for the digital transformation. Here are three dynamic business elements in running a digital IT.Running Digital IT from “Outside-In”: Traditional IT organizations are inside-out operation-driven, and the company relies on an IT system via standardized usage of technologies, but often treated as the commodity. Nowadays, at the dawn of the Digital Era, information is one of the most invaluable business assets and technologies are disruptive forces behind the digital transformation. How to run a digital IT from “Outside-In,” as a customer advocate and a business differentiator?
Setting the Right Priorities to Run Digital IT with Full Speed: IT plays a significant role in the digital transformation of the organization because information is permeating into every corner of the business and technology is often the disruptive force of innovation. However, the majority of IT organizations get stuck in the lower level of maturity, overloaded and understaffed, slow to change, and operate in a "surviving mode." How to set the right priority to thrive and run digital IT with the full speed.How to Build an IT Roadmap for Digital Transformation: Forward-looking IT organizations are on the journey to digital transformation. And strategic IT leaders also build a solid roadmap to show the time sequence of a strategy. A "roadmap" is simply a plan for moving or transitioning, from one state to another. More specifically, how can CIOs build a digital-ready IT roadmap?
Three Digital Balances IT Needs to Strike: IT is a system which has an emergent property of individual human beings making sense of experiences in time and place, IT system makes interactions with the environment to collecting, storing, processing and delivering information, and ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time to make the right decision. IT organization plays a significant role in both keeping the business bottom line and contributing to the top line business growth; setting the standard for risk management, as well as leveraging the latest tools and platforms to enable innovation; IT is also crucial to fix the handy, urgent business problems, as well as digitizing the touch points of customer experience for the business’s long-term transformation. In practices, there are three digital balances IT needs to strike in order to improve its efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about #2900th 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 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
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 value creator and innovation engine? Here is the monthly “CIO Master” Book Tuning.
How to Run a Digital IT (II) July 2016Three Dynamic Elements in Running Digital IT Digital transformation represents the next stage of business maturity which will optimize how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem, with the customer at the center of its focus, and how the business is always on, because employees can get work done from anywhere, anytime, with the right information to make the right decisions. Digital IT needs to become more dynamic and innovative to be a pathfinder for the digital transformation. Here are three dynamic business elements in running a digital IT.Running Digital IT from “Outside-In”: Traditional IT organizations are inside-out operation-driven, and the company relies on an IT system via standardized usage of technologies, but often treated as the commodity. Nowadays, at the dawn of the Digital Era, information is one of the most invaluable business assets and technologies are disruptive forces behind the digital transformation. How to run a digital IT from “Outside-In,” as a customer advocate and a business differentiator?
Setting the Right Priorities to Run Digital IT with Full Speed: IT plays a significant role in the digital transformation of the organization because information is permeating into every corner of the business and technology is often the disruptive force of innovation. However, the majority of IT organizations get stuck in the lower level of maturity, overloaded and understaffed, slow to change, and operate in a "surviving mode." How to set the right priority to thrive and run digital IT with the full speed.How to Build an IT Roadmap for Digital Transformation: Forward-looking IT organizations are on the journey to digital transformation. And strategic IT leaders also build a solid roadmap to show the time sequence of a strategy. A "roadmap" is simply a plan for moving or transitioning, from one state to another. More specifically, how can CIOs build a digital-ready IT roadmap?
Three Digital Balances IT Needs to Strike: IT is a system which has an emergent property of individual human beings making sense of experiences in time and place, IT system makes interactions with the environment to collecting, storing, processing and delivering information, and ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time to make the right decision. IT organization plays a significant role in both keeping the business bottom line and contributing to the top line business growth; setting the standard for risk management, as well as leveraging the latest tools and platforms to enable innovation; IT is also crucial to fix the handy, urgent business problems, as well as digitizing the touch points of customer experience for the business’s long-term transformation. In practices, there are three digital balances IT needs to strike in order to improve its efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity.The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about #2900th 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 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
