Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1358

A Cost-Transparent IT

Many IT organizations still get stuck at the lower level of maturity, running as a back office function, no one knows what happens inside if only the light is continuous on. However, forward-looking companies have positioned their IT organizations at the digital frontier to drive changes, optimize business processes/capabilities, and catalyze business growth. So how to run a cost-transparent IT organization to re-energize its value proposition and unleash its full potential?
All IT spending must be rationalized against the business benefits: IT is always striving to improve its value to the business. Some of the "long poles in the tent" tend to be labor; depreciation and new capital spending. It isn't just the IT spending ratio as a percentage of budget numbers (70/30, 85/15), but the question of what is real - tangible - measurable business value? And who is measuring / driving the perceived value? When all departments truly collaborate with IT to improve the vision,  realized of using IT as a competitive weapon versus just another utility, everybody wins.
Trim wastes and redundancy: IT needs to continue fine tuning its own infrastructure, applications, and services via consolidation, modernization, integration, optimization, innovation., etc.  The approach is to implement a program that like a gardener would prune the tree and nurture the valuable solutions. Pruning the weeds would face resistance, however, at the end of the day, this was not just an IT decision and rather than let the senior management team beat them up, by understanding and communicating the actual costs. IT needs to promote its products and market its capabilities via transparency and cultural willingness to optimize IT spending,
Keep on track: if as a CIO, your key metrics focus only on cost, then don't be surprised if you are managed on cost. If your metrics is all pointed backward at the technology, then don't be surprised that the business can't really understand the value of IT. Only through the well-defined set of KPIs, IT can both qualitatively and quantitatively measure value delivery to business and achieve a high-performance result. Business should be able to define and align operational KPIs to strategic KPIs for successful tracking of the effectiveness of strategic KPIs. The effective way to track the achievement of strategic goals is to cascade those down throughout the organization with the use of operational KPIs. Often the root cause for dissatisfaction with IT projects is a mismatch between the initial expectations of the business stakeholders and IT. This can be addressed by ensuring up front that the desired benefits are realistic and achievable in an organization.There is a concept of the 'golden thread' that can link business strategy to an investment objective, a business benefit, a business change, an enabling change and finally a technology enabler. This helps an organization to assess if the business change (with associated technology) is the right thing to be doing in the first place. It is imperative that you link lower level metrics with higher level strategic objectives.

Analytics: Do cost/benefits analytics is important to improve IT effectiveness and efficiency. A business stakeholder has to be accountable for realizing the benefits, not IT. On the ROI side, there are metrics that could be used and monetized. The top metrics which is of interest to Executive Management are either ROI, ROE or growth. Any project has a cost and a cost with no obvious or measurable (directly or indirectly) return makes no sense. A project with no clear ROI (not just the crunching number from finance perspective though) sounds like you don't really understand the project and its relation to the strategy. Cost/benefit analytics continues to practice of being called 7"Cs" to measure SMARTLY: conceptualization, characterization, challenge, collection, control, construction, and conversion. It is useful looking at this exercise almost as a type of experiment where one hopes to gain results at the end. Like in all experiments, there has to be some sort of hypothesis - some sort of conceptualization of a useful outcome. Performance Indicator helps you make better decisions to improve performance. If your KPIs are opposite, they are a long list copied from the industry database; are not aligned to your organization's specific strategy; are only lagging and financial not being able to tell you anything about the future; drive wrong behaviors across the organization and bring some significant levels of discomfort to employees, then they could be deemed as bad measurement.
Multiple perspectives of ROI & metrics: Do not think of ROI as a simple accounting measure. ROI is a concept first and a set of numbers second, and the types of numbers involved can vary widely depending upon to what the ROI relates. If ROI is only financial, you are hard-pressed to do that. But in the 21st century, ROI is expanding into other less measurable, but no less tangible areas that we need to be focusing on, such as employee satisfaction, creativity, teamwork, collaboration, making silos disappear, etc. Educate not only the IT organization but also spend considerable time with each LOB to educate them on how to determine if they actually needed to contact the operations group for support. They are able to determine on their own if there are known problems with their IT services plus they are able to see exactly where those problems are. Have multiple perspectives when running metrics: - Do know why you are collecting the metrics. - Establish a good root question. - Identify the purpose of the information and the stakeholders who will use it. - Ask whether the metrics can reveal anything meaningful for the identified purpose. - Give those responsible for collecting the metrics a reason for doing so. - Ensure management buy-in for the metrics collection process. - Use metrics as pointers to areas requiring further investigation. - Don't collect metrics for the sake of collecting metrics.
Take multi-phased approaches to building a more transparent IT for customers. What these phases essentially do is to reduce the IT service support because the end users are empowered with the visibility of IT they required. Define the right set of KPIs which can reflect progress for the long term goals of the firm. The way the KPI is measured needs to be an accurate reflection of the behavior the firm is looking to exhibit. The purpose of running a cost transparent IT is to bridge the gap between IT and business, link lower level metrics with strategic goals, harness cross-functional communication & collaboration, improve IT performance and maturity.

Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The CIO’s Digital Agenda XXXXVII: Transform IT from a Cost Center to a Value Creator

Too often, IT is driving by a look at rear mirror only, not pay enough attention to the front window.

IT Management is a strange animal, in that the capabilities are there, the data is there - but the motivations are often confused. Technology drives changes nowadays, but IT is often considered the function slower to change with “controlling mentality.” IT tends to measure itself against trivial things IT considers important but are often less important and impactful in the business lens. No wonder most of IT organizations are still perceived as a cost center. CIOs as IT leaders, how to practice innovative leadership to transform IT to a value creator, and improve the overall organizational capabilities and maturity?  

Transform IT from a Cost Center to a Value CreatorHow to Transform IT from a Cost Center into Value Creator? In most cases, the IT department isn't producing anything that is saleable and, therefore, many in the organization will view IT as something that seems to ceaselessly suck up money with a little-perceived return. First and foremost a CIO needs to show that IT isn't just a cost center but is a deliverer of value, what’re the effective approaches in doing so?

Is IT a Growth Engine or Supporting Function:IT perception is always controversial, on one hand, IT touches every nerve of an organization at the digital era, makes a significant impact on business growth; on the other hand, most of IT organizations today are still under-appreciated, being treated as supporting, back office function, why, and how should IT refine its purpose and rebrand its reputation?

Three Perceptions of IT Value Proposition: IT is working hard to transform from a cost center to value center, but some of the challenges facing in IT valuation is that we attempt to apply the same measurement approach to all investments - yet there are unique attributes that differentiate one investment category from another. Further, too often, IT is driving by a look at rear mirror only, not pay enough attention to the front window and create forward-looking view upon how to run IT smoothly, or only focus on ‘tangible’ value, with ignorance of ‘intangible’ one. So what are the best way to present IT value?

How to Run IT as a Better Business Partner: Many IT organizations are at transformation journey, from an industrial model to digital leap; from a cost center to value-added; from 'T'-technology driven to 'I'-Information focus, from alignment to engagement. But more specifically, how should IT leaders run IT as a better business partner?

A Value - Driven IT  In many organizations, IT is still being portrayed as a help desk, back office function and cost center, a business outsider, while IT is supposed to be an integral and critical part of businesses. At what point does IT no longer have to deal with the continuing discussions that include the phrase "IT and the business"? How should IT build its value proposition, and gain a solid reputation as a value creator, innovation engine, customer champion, talent master, business catalyzer, and beyond?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The CIO’s Digital Agenda XXXXVI: Transform IT from a Cost Center to a Value Creator

IT Management is a strange animal, in that the capabilities are there, the data is there - but the motivations are often confused. Technology drives changes nowadays, but IT is often considered the function slower to change with “controlling mentality.”  IT tends to measure itself against trivial things IT considers important but are often less important and impactful in the business lens. More importantly, CIOs as IT leaders, how to practice innovative leadership to transform IT from a cost center to value creator, and improve the overall organizational capabilities?  
Transform IT from a Cost Center to a Value CreatorHow to Transform IT from a Cost Center into Value Creator? In most cases, the IT department isn't producing anything that is saleable and, therefore, many in the organization will view IT as something that seems to ceaselessly suck up money with the little-perceived return. First and foremost a CIO needs to show that IT isn't just a cost center but is a deliverer of value, what’re the effective approaches in doing so?
Is IT a Growth Engine or Supporting Function:IT perception is always controversial, on one hand, IT touches every nerve of organization at digital era, makes a significant impact on business growth; on the other hand, most of IT organizations today are still under-appreciated, being treated as supporting, back office function, why, and how should IT refine its purpose and rebrand its reputation?
Three Perceptions of IT Value Proposition: IT is working hard to transform from a cost center to value center, but some of the challenges facing in IT valuation is that we attempt to apply the same measurement approach to all investments - yet there are unique attributes that differentiate one investment category from another. Further, too often, IT is driving by a look at rear mirror only, not pay enough attention to the front window and create forward-looking view upon how to run IT smoothly, or only focus on ‘tangible’ value, with ignorance of ‘intangible’ one. So what are the best way to present IT value?
How to Run IT as a Better Business Partner: Many IT organizations are at transformation journey, from an industrial model to digital leap; from a cost center to value-added; from 'T'-technology driven to 'I'-Information focus, from alignment to engagement. But more specifically, how shall IT leaders run IT as a better business partner?
A Value - Driven IT  In many organizations, IT is still being portrayed as a help desk, back office function and cost center, a business outsider, while IT is supposed to be an integral and critical part of businesses. At what point does IT no longer have to deal with the continuing discussions that include the phrase "IT and the business"? How should IT build its value proposition, and gain a solid reputation as a value creator, innovation engine, customer champion, talent master, business catalyzer, and beyond?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Running IT on the Fast Lane

Nowadays information is the lifeblood of the business and technology is often the digital disruptor, and change is the very nature of Information Technology. The irony fact is that IT is often perceived to be too slow to adapt to the changes in the majority of large enterprise organizations, and some businesses even complain their IT organizations become the obstacle to get things done. How to speed up IT- it means IT has to adapt to changes in proactive ways, and more often, IT has to drive the changes and plays a pivotal role in digital transformation, focus on the fastest speed available - because that is where the main threat to competitiveness. It is about running IT as a business enabler to catalyze growth and improve organizational agility. In practice, how to run IT on the fast lane?


Spot new opportunities: IT is the steward of the business’s information system, it is also in the unique position to oversight the business landscape horizontally. Hence,  IT should be proactively generating ideas and then working with business partners to take those ideas forward. IT plays innovation role as more of a proactive influencer. It is important to take advantage of the IT vantage point to surface ideas proactively, but it is even more important to work with business stakeholders to make sure they jointly own the idea before proceeding. The expectations for CIOs have grown multi-fold, and they are expected to be visionary and path-finder for business strategy and growth. IT leaders can appreciate such unprecedented transformation, and look for every opportunity from risks; besides managing risks within every opportunity. CIOs should serve as catalysts who can drive the organization to see the value of information technology in opening new revenue streams and achieving competitive advantage.
Prioritize right: The majority of IT organizations are overloading and understaffed, how to set priority right and speed up IT to do things most important to the business. Run, grow and transform, strike the right balance in running a healthy IT portfolio. It takes commitment and discipline to stay focused on the real priorities of the business instead of being distracted by what seems to be more urgent on any given day. The wisdom and ultimate goal of innovative CIOs are to help the organization think clearly about the two horizons of future, the short term gain & long term wins, set appropriate strategies, and make intelligent plans, to deliver IT via the business value-driven metrics. The best way to find the balance between working on the business while doing business is to utilize the process - create a rhythm of meetings that establish clarity around the top priorities of the company, and then review those priorities on a regular basis. The key to success is for the team to hold each member accountable for doing their part and this is where many teams fail.
Innovate fluently: To speed up, IT needs to run as an innovation engine of the business. An opportunity for the CIO to add a lot of value in the C-Suite is helping C-Level leaders understand the possibilities of how new technologies can enhance the creation or improvement of products and services while balancing the technical and business risks, investment needed, timing, etc. Innovation requires thinking beyond, as opposed to outside the box, altering or changing the frame of reference to create previously unconsidered solutions. Innovation can be categorized as empowered innovation (creative disruption), sustainable innovation (better version of product/service) or efficiency innovation (process improvement). IT can drive all sort of innovation, proactively pushing ideas on how to leverage technology to drive revenue growth, increase business productivity,  flexibility, and agility. The concentration should be on what these technologies can do for the businesses not on the technology itself.  IT is business innovation catalyst.
Champion the intuitive and easy to use solutions: Delighting customer is the other dimension to speed up IT. Digital is the age of customers. Customer Experience covers the entire experience of the customer. Technology is being leveraged every day to enhance the customer experience, this will provide a competitive advantage for the business, keep their loyal customers, and expand their customer base, as customer experience has to be aligned with company strategy and more important company branding. The strategic objective is to understand what your customers need and to help the business orient itself towards those needs in pursuit of its objectives, tactically, IT needs to champion the intuitive and easy to use customer tailored solutions to achieve specified goals and optimize customer experience.
High-response to changes: Running IT on the fast lane also means to speed up the organizational vehicle as well. Due to the unique position to oversight business processes, IT also plays an important role in building up an agile enterprises which can succeed in combining two distinct but interconnected elements— strategic responsiveness and organizational flexibility, with the combination of an innovative culture that promotes responsiveness throughout the company. IT has to not only improve its own speed, but also overall organizational agility. The type of speed issues (such as IT slow to change) comes from gaps created between IT and the rest of the company. When there is no willingness to serve users and on the other way round, no appetite from users to involve IT, the gaps get bigger and dangerous behaviors may get introduced. A responsive IT means a lot of things for the digital transformation: speed, innovation, agility, integration, modernization, intelligence, value creation, and maturity, etc. CIOs need to take business problems, find solutions for them, increase value propositions, simplify operations and be better partners with the rest of the organizations.
Where is the gas pedal to speed up IT? A fast and highly-responsive IT means a lot of things for the digital transformation: speed, innovation, agility, integration, modernization, intelligence, value creation, and maturity, etc. It is the way to run a digital IT and an overall digital organization.

Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Five High-Influential Digital Leadership Strengths

The substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about future and change, making positive influence, and providing direction, both for oneself and others. However, leadership trends continue to emerge due to increasing speed of changes in the business and the world. And transforming leadership from good to great is a journey, how to cultivate high-effective and high-influential digital leadership?
Visionary Leadership: A great leader is a visionary. Leadership is one's ability to paint a vivid picture, a vision of a future state and motivate others to achieve it. Despite our present condition and realities, we must never abandon the hope that generations to come will view things differently and breathe new life into an old and dysfunctional system. Thus, visionary leadership is crucial to zoom into the future as if it were closer, because leadership is all about future and change. There are too many transactional managers who overly focus on short-term thinking due to the pressure of stakeholder, risk aversion, or ineffective strategy. Technology changes very quickly, and the speed of business changes is also increasing. Visionary leaders have better sense to capture the business trend, be genuinely curious about information, knowledge and future perspective, so they can drive changes more confidently.
Knowledge-based leadership: Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and highly influential.  Coaching and mentoring are going to be increasingly important now, and that’s why expert power is perhaps more powerful than other types of powers in the age of digitalization and globalization. What keeps leaders successful is their intellectual curiosity and ability to continuously be open to learning and applying these learnings as they move forward. The authentic leaders with high intelligence have adaptability, consistency, profundity, and empathy to master business dynamic and cultural differences. Top leader need to have broad business acumen, deep expertise in the specific field, transdisciplinary knowledge and cross-functional experience, and the leadership skills required for professionals in any organization must be built on the foundation of the moral competencies –wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.
Creative leadership: Creative leadership is the unique combination of leadership behaviors that develops and achieves high quality and meaningful results over a sustained period of time. Creativity is a higher level of thinking because it often imposes a higher cognitive load as you think 'harder' and consciously use different kinds of thought actions and thinking tools like association, perspective shifting, opposites etc when you are wanting to come up with a creative solution to a challenge. Creative leaders do this by challenging him/herself and staff to find optimal high-value solutions to provide clarity on high priority objectives, criteria, quality, and results. Therefore, a creative leader can influence and build a culture of innovation.
Change leadership: Change is not for its own sake, the drive of Change Leadership is for making progress and inspiring innovation. People are the very reason for the changes. Help talented people be successful and bring the wisdom to the workplace. Embracing change and making it integral to how we engage in the world is a river which you willingly step into and enjoy facilitating with others.  As a change leader or agent, managing change is no longer a one-time initiative, but an ongoing strategic capability, leading strategy is different from managing the operation. Therefore, you have to be learning agile and be a change agent yourself first, in order to lead change more effectively. A change leader is a problem-solver, enjoy understanding the complexity and guide people through it; finding common ground and initiative dialogue. Change needs to be people-centric, not process focused. Leading change starts from the mind shift, the high mature leadership should evoke the positive emotions in order to make change sustainable and lead business transformation more effectively for the long term.
Thought Leadership: At today’s “digital dynamic with VUCA” (Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) characteristics, Being thoughtful, mindful and multi-dimensional thinker is more crucial to improve leadership effectiveness. So a mindful or thoughtful leader has a better perception to be a good communicator upon thinking profoundly, upon knowing when to voice out, when to keep silent; upon striking the right balance without any sort of extreme thinking or bias. Authenticity is the foundation to be a thought leader. When we dig deeper in ourselves the questions arise - Who am I? Why am I here? Where do my thoughts come from and so on? When we get some answers to these questions and get some clarity, the fountain of thought starts to flow, it helps us in identifying our purpose, which instills action to serve the purpose and is perceived as leadership for our cause, and is moving into embedding distinctive attitudes and behaviors around the norms.
Leadership strength is different from leadership style, the strength is both innate, but can be strengthened further via practicing. Focusing on leadership style alone to attract the followers is, at best, a short-lived adventure. Therefore, it’s important to discover and enforce your own leadership strength, in order to amplify leadership influence and improve leadership effectiveness. Leadership is complex, and although it has many facets, at its core, the foundation of leadership is the character. The ultimate criterion of "high-influential leadership," is the ability to create more leaders, to spread leadership - or, more precisely, to groom more authentic leaders with the ability to think differently, independently and innovatively. Make ⅜-the International Women’s Day, also a digital leadership refining day!Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The CIO’s Digital Agenda XXXXVI: The Digital CIO’s Innovative Leadership

IT Management is a strange animal, in that the capabilities are there, the data is there - but the motivations are often confused. Technology drives changes nowadays, but IT is often considered the function slower to change with “controlling mentality.”  IT tends to measure itself against trivial things IT considers important but are often less important and impactful in the business lens. More importantly, CIOs as IT leaders, how to practice innovative leadership to catalyze the business grow and improve the overall organizational capabilities?  

The Digital CIO’s Innovative LeadershipWhat are the most Important Skills for the CIO of the Future? IT is at the cross-road, shall it continue to be run as the cost center to keep the light on, or should it move up the maturity level –to become the value creator or even a game changer for the business. If so, what are the most important business skills for the CIO of the future? What are the important technical skills for the CIO of the future? What are those synthetic capabilities or unique skills which can differentiate a modern digital CIO from a traditional industrial CIO?
Five Characteristics of Next Gen CIO: IT is on the way to transform from a cost center to value creator, so does IT leaders, CIOs are no longer good enough to be tactical IT managers only, they have to play multiple leadership roles and wear the different hat to deal with business complexity today. So, What're the characteristics of next-gen CIOs as effective business leaders?
The Changing Role of CIO: With the consumerization of IT and other emerging digital technology trends such as Cloud, mobile, social and analytics, the role of IT is at the inflection point to go digital. IT shouldn’t be just satisfied with the surviving mode, it has to be thriving, and CIO roles is also changing from an infrastructure IT manager to 'keep the light on' to a wise business strategist/solution advisor/consultant to create value for the organization and make leadership influence across functions and beyond.
Three Tips for CIO as Chief Innovation Officer: Modern CIOs have many personas indicated in the magic “I” of CIO title, Chief Innovation Officer is one of the most pertinent roles, because so much business innovation these days is enabled by technology, a good CIO with their finger on the pulse of technological advancement or information insight can provide many ideas on how new tech and abundance of info could create fresh business opportunities. CIOs are uniquely positioned to drive business innovation because of their vantage point in digital transformation. But how can CIO build a solid innovation agenda, and play such a new role more effectively.  
CIO’s Innovation Dilemma: Today’s CIO is one of the crucial leadership roles facing  significant transformation, Being a Chief Infrastructure Officer to align IT operation with business is no longer sufficient,  since the rate of changes is accelerating at the age of digitization. CIO is facing the modern innovation dilemma: Just keep the light on when the users are pushing the legacy IT into the breaking point? Or be the change agent to expedite the transformation to reach innovation tipping point by pulling people, process, and technology seamlessly to achieve the higher level of IT maturity.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Three Questions to Assess an Employee’ “Big Picture” Business Acumen

Today's organizations have a big disconnect between talent performance manageemnt and business strategies. Often the front line employees or even middle level management do not have a lot of clue about the “big picture” of their business, there is lack of clear two way (both top down and bottom up) communication and lack mapping between the business's strategic goal and employees daily responsibility. In order to bridge the gap between strategy and execution and build purpose-driven and business savvy workforce, how to assess an employee’s “big picture” business acumen regardless of his/her specific job responsibility?
Can you articulate the business strategy briefly in one sentence? Strategy all starts with the awareness that there is a holistic perspective to business that is all encompassing, and then there are the separate intertwined parts of the puzzle. Business strategy defines, develops and executes value propositions, that allow to share value across the value chain, respond to the needs and expectations of customers and stakeholders at the same time - optimization. When the frontline employees can clearly articulate the strategy concisely, it means the strategy has been communicated thoroughly from top down, even the business has collected the necessary feedback from bottom up. When communicating a strategy or organizational changes to a team, it is important to explain the "why" behind your communication. All too often, discussions are held at a senior level where the reasons behind a strategy are talked over extensively, but those reasons are not explained to the wider audience. This can lead to teams not understanding a strategy, or not buying into it. It is also important to map vision - strategy - tactics.  By mapping strategy to execution, you need to well define the business goals (both long term and short term). What you are going to achieve could be “LONG TERM” or “SHORT TERM” goals. ‎Usually ‎companies need to measure the goals using certain KPIs which are very much to do with ‎time and investment. From talent management perspective, at many levels, there are limited people that are strategic thinkers. Just like leadership as a skill set that is needed at every level. The key is to understand who the strategic thinkers are and provide them the ability to utilize these skills to help in discussing the direction and various options a company can go.
What’s the business culture readiness? Culture in a company is a collective mindset, attitude, and top-down behaviors and action. Hence, every person in the organization has the fair share of contribution to the business culture, either in the positive or negative way. And the spirit of an organization often comes from the top. When asking employees about the “culture thing,” it will encourage them to make objective observation on the work environment, to hunt for the culture traits such as: respect, fairness, balance, creativity, feeling valued, empathy, wisdom, maturity,etc. The vivid metaphors for describing culture is the visible and invisible levels of an iceberg. The iceberg metaphor well describes the layers of culture, with values and beliefs often being under the surface. It’s nearly impossible to change the culture without bringing these to the surface, articulating them and assessing whether they are still the right ones for the current environment. When every employee has in-depth understanding about the culture thing, there is the better chance to make positive changes and bring wisdom to the workplace.
What is your understanding about the philosophy behind talent/performance management? The business advantage lies in the hands of people with “KASH” - Knowledge, Attitudes, Skills, and Habits will make that vital difference to the success and failure of organizations. To be successful, leaders should know that they need to learn quickly as to how they can assign the right person for the right position at the right time, and fully unleash their potentials. Often time, there are many things employees won’t tell the managers what’re in their mind. Hence, managers should ask the thought-provoking questions to get their feedback about talent/performance management. The traditional performance management more focuses on the quantitative result, the effective talent management next practices should be more structured and focus on digging deeper into mindset level: what questions to ask, what questions not to ask, and how to using questions that elicit insightful answers and reveal the truth about the candidate’s mindset and attitude; how to define different types of digital minds, how to create a structured approaches for assessing and evaluating not only the behaviors, but digging through the thought processes, how do people think, why do they think that way, and how do they approach problems and solve problems, so you can easily and consistently differentiate future high performers from mediocre mindset in your organization.
Businesses are complex and people are complex, all organizations face a challenge to evaluate the value of employees in an objective way. The organization needs to be more fact-based, more objective, more creative, and ultimately learn to earn by assessing and measuring people's personality and performance accordingly. Each valuation will obviously vary in outcomes and results as each workplace and position varies. When you look at the true value of an employee, you are looking at the return on the investment that you have made. It also looks at the overall success of the company.


Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Nine Perspectives to RE-Imagine IT Outside in & Retool IT Inside Out

Refocus on IT value proposition as a business enabler, innovation engine, and gamer changer.
In today's digital business environment, information is the lifeblood, and technology touches every phase of the business. However, the majority of IT organizations still get stuck at the lower level of maturity and running in the industrial mode as a cost center and commodity service provider. How to reimagine IT’s unleashed potential, rebrand IT’s tarnished image and retool IT in a systematic way?

Reboot IT Mentality: At the industrial age, IT has a controller’s mentality and focus on keeping the bottom line efficiency. With emergent digital technologies and consumerization of IT, and the whole consumerization of IT movement has largely focused on IT getting its arms around the trend and 'managing' it. IT has a great opportunity here to lead the business transformation. Rather than wait for business to tell IT what they want, IT needs to proactively work with the business and partners upon the great new digital technologies which can change the business. That has the added benefit of steering business toward things IT recommends to use. Businesses also love to see IT getting deeply immersed in the new apps, devices, and solutions and make internal customers more productive, collaborative and smart. What are the opportunities to change, how should you interact with customers and each other. Think like customers and let the business know how mobile, social and cloud can change the way to do business. In short, instead of focusing on controlling computerization, use it as an opportunity to reboot IT mentality as a business enabler and catalyzer.

Refresh IT Leadership: IT leadership also shifts from a transactional management style to transformational leadership focus, from reactive to proactive mode. IT leaders must know how to promote their organizations by "selling the right things right," to have the seat at the big table to envision radical digital transformation IT can catalyze and the culture of innovation IT should shape. IT includes the organization/people, technology, and processes that are in place; anything less would be a misnomer or at the very least relinquishing responsibilities. If the focus is on operations and controlling only, it is no wonder non-IT executives consider IT as an obstacle. The forward-looking organizations should empower their CIOs to co-create strategy and encourage IT leaders to be the change agents to drive the digital transformation.

Reinforce IT-Business relationship: To bridge the gaps and reinforce the partnership, Business and IT have to work together to achieve their goals. The CIO has to work with the senior executives to understand the business, the business drivers, long-term objectives, strategy and then ensure that he/she is providing input to support them. This, in turn, will lead to the development of related IT strategies / initiatives. IT is not just part of the business; it is a critical, integral component of the business. The CIO sits in a unique seat of having the opportunity to oversee across the entire landscape of the business. Ultimately, what the CIO and IT, in general, must truly understand the business visions and goals. The method that is used must deliver the results that are consistent with the business values and goals.

Reengineer IT process: The process of changing a good business idea into an effective IT solution has become awfully complex and messy in many larger organizations. IT is in the unique position to oversight business processes. You can not deliver value without "de-complexitizing" and make transparent on what is being delivered and how or what is being delivered. IT plays a crucial role in process improvement and standardization (where possible) and master data harmonization, through both, leveraging industry best practices and identifying/ implementing innovative process specific to the business, which will increase efficiency, competitiveness, and profitability. The benefit of IT is reducing the TCO (total cost of ownership) as it reduces a lot of redundancy in the business process which ultimately increases customer satisfactions (internal and external) as well as employee productivity and engagement.

Renovate IT capability: The focus of digital IT needs to provide business capabilities, not just commodity services. Businesses need IT as a strong partner who is passionate about exploiting information enabled by technologies to work at the heart of the enterprise. IT needs to transform itself from a service provider to business solutionary, from a cost center to an innovation engine, from process tuner to a capability builder. IT is a key enabler for a set of capabilities business need to have in order to compete for the future, such as transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, agility, innovation, flexibility, scalability., etc.

Reinvent IT culture and organizational culture as well: Change is the very nature of technology, and technology is more often than not, the driver of changes, it is also the tools to enable changes. IT workforce as a group of talent knowledge workers can play a change agent role in cultivating the culture of learning, as learning agility is the willingness and ability to learn, de-learn and relearn, and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations. This is particularly important in IT department because the new technologies continuously disrupt the old way of doing things, and the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. People who are learning agile continuously seek new challenges, solicit direct feedback, self-reflect, driven, and get jobs done resourcefully. Digital IT talent is visioneers, imagintects, curious explorers and change champions who can catalyze the culture of learning across the organizations and beyond.

Reshuffle IT organizational structure: Due to the hyper-connectivity of digital nature, the trend toward softer and flatter organization structure is clear. And surely it is the right direction, as the speed is a key imperative these days and “silo” mentality as a product of rigid hierarchy hinders flexibility. Limited hierarchy works best in a creative environment where the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of success. The IT organization needs to be realigned to ensure the people are put in the right positions; they have better focus to execute what is needed of them. The focus of duties makes it much simpler to hire and scale the organization as the business rapidly grow. Other than that scenario, you realign when the business strategy changes, justify a solid business case, subjected to reality-based cost-benefit analysis, well align people, process, and technology, to make change happen not only on the structural surface, but really ensure the culture is harmonized and the right people are in the right position to take the right tasks, and organization as a whole is optimal than the sum of pieces.

Reform IT talent management: IT needs to bridge both mind gaps and skill gaps, bridging so many gaps in IT talent management is obviously not an overnight job, it’s a thorny journey and takes the thought out planning and practices. IT should embrace the new digital mantra to practice analytics-based talent management to hire the right mindsets. The organization needs to be realigned to ensure the people are in the right positions; they have better focus to execute what is needed of them. The focus of duties makes it much simpler to hire and scale the organization as business rapidly grow.Weather IT can attract the brightest talent or not also depends on how effective the CIO is marketing his/her organization as a contributor to the corporation and society as a whole.

Last but not least, refocus on IT value proposition. IT is, and will continue to be, a critical department. The real question is whether IT is seen as a necessary expense - a provider of devices and software - or a true strategic business enabler and a game changer. It is crucial that IT be an active & even proactive participant in business decisions. The CIOs or other IT leaders sitting at that table must be engaged, understanding the business and always thinking and socializing how IT can bring value that will ultimately help the company achieve a competitive advantage over the company's competitors to boost the business prosperity for the long term.


Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Nine Perspectives to RE-Imagine IT Outside in & Retooling IT Inside Out

In today's digital business environment, information is the lifeblood, and technology touches every phase of the business. However, majority of IT organizations still get stuck at the lower level of maturity and running in the industrial mode as a cost center and commodity service provider. How to reimagine IT’s potential, rebrand IT’s tarnished image and retool IT in a systematic way?
Reboot IT Mentality: At the industrial age, IT has a controller’s mentality and keep the bottom line efficiency.  With emergent digital technologies and IT, and the whole consumerization of IT movement has largely focused on IT getting its arms around the trend and 'managing' it. IT has a great opportunity here to lead the business. Rather than wait for business to tell IT what they want, IT proactively work with the business and partners upon the great new digital technologies which can change the business. That has the added benefit of steering business toward things IT recommends to use. Business also love to see IT getting deeply immersed in the new apps, devices, and solutions and make internal customers more productive, collaborative and smart.  What are the opportunities to change, how you shall interact with customers and each other. Think like customers and let the business know how mobile, social and cloud can change the way to do business. In short, instead of focusing on controlling computerization, use it as an opportunity to reboot IT mentality as a business enabler and catalyzer.
Refresh IT Leadership: IT leadership also shifts from transactional to transformational driven, from reactive to proactive mode. IT leaders must know how to promote their organization by "selling the right things right," to have the seat at the big table to envision the radical digital transformation IT can catalyze and the culture of innovation IT shall enable. IT includes the organization/people, technology, and processes that are in place; anything less would be a misnomer or at the very least relinquishing responsibilities. If the focus is on operations and controlling only, it is no wonder non-IT executives consider IT as an obstacle. The forward-looking organizations should empower the CIOs to co-create strategy and encourage IT leaders to be the change agent to drive the digital transformation.
Reinforce IT-Business relationship: To bridge the gaps and reinforce the partnership, Business and IT have to work together to achieve their goals. The CIO has to work with the senior executives to understand the business, the business drivers, long-term objectives, and strategy and then ensure that he/she is providing input to support these. This, in turn, will lead to the development of related IT strategies / initiatives. IT is not just part of the business; it is a critical, integral component of the business. The CIO sits in a unique seat of having the opportunity to see across the entire landscape of the business. Ultimately, what the CIO and IT, in general, must truly understand the business visions and goals. The method that is used must deliver the results that are consistent with the business values and goals.
Reengineer IT process: IT is at the unique position to oversight business processes. The process of changing a good business idea into an effective IT solution has become awfully complex and messy in many larger organizations. You can not deliver value without "de-complexitizing" and make transparent on what is being delivered and how or what is being delivered. IT plays a crucial role in process improvement and standardization (where possible) and master data harmonization, through both, leveraging industry best practices and identifying/ implementing innovative process specific to the business, which will increase efficiency, competitiveness, and profitability.The benefit of IT is reducing the TCO (total cost of ownership) as it reduces a lot of redundancy in the business process which ultimately increases the customer satisfaction (internal and external) and employee productivity and engagement.
Renovate IT Capability: The Focus of digital IT needs to provide business capabilities, not just services or solutions. Businesses need IT as a strong partner who is passionate about exploiting information enabled by technologies to work at the heart of the enterprise. IT needs to transform itself from a service provider to business solutionary, from a cost center to an innovation engine, from process tuner to a capability builder. IT is a key enabler for a set of capabilities business need have in order to compete for the future. Such as transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, agility, innovation, flexibility, scalability., etc.
Reinvent IT culture and organizational culture as well: Change is the very nature of technology, and technology is more often than not, the driver of changes, it is also the tools to enable changes, IT workforce as a group of talent knowledge workers shall play change agent role in cultivating culture of learning, as learning agility is the willingness and ability to learn, de-learn and relearn, and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations. People who are learning agile continuously seek new challenges, solicit direct feedback, self-reflect, and get jobs done resourcefully. Digital IT talent is visioneers, imagintects, curious explorers and change champions who can catalyze the culture of learning across the organizations and beyond.
Reshuffle IT organizational structure: Due to the hyper-connectivity of digital nature, the trend toward softer and flatter organization structure is clear. And surely it is the right direction, as speed is a key imperative these days and “silo” mentality as a product of rigid hierarchy hinders flexibility.  Limited hierarchy works best in a creative environment where the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of success. The IT organization needs to be realigned to ensure the people are in the right positions; they have better focus to execute what is needed of them. The focus of duties makes it much simpler to hire and scale the organization as the business rapidly grow. Other than that scenario, you realign when the business strategy changes, re-org should be seen as just another project, not for its own sake, but justify a solid business case, subjected to reality-based cost-benefit analysis, well align people, process and technology, to make change happen not only on the structural surface, but really ensure the culture is harmonized and the right people are in the right position to take the right tasks, and organization as a whole is optimal than the sum of pieces.
Reform IT Talent Management: The organization needs to be realigned to ensure the people are in the right positions; they have better focus to execute what is needed of them. The focus of duties makes it much simpler to hire and scale the organization as business rapidly grow. IT needs to bridge both mind gaps and skill gaps, Bridging so many gaps in IT talent management is obviously not an overnight job, it’s a thorny journey and takes the thought out planning and practices. IT should embrace the new digital mantra to practice analytics-based talent management. Weather IT can attract the brightest talent or not also depends on how effective the CIO is marketing his/her organization as a contributor to the corporation and society as a whole.
Last but not least, refocus on IT value proposition. IT is, and will continue to be, a critical department. The real question is whether IT is seen as a necessary expense - a provider of devices and software - or a true strategic business enabler and a game changer. It is critical that IT be an active & even proactive participant in business decisions. The CIOs or other IT leaders sitting at that table must be engaged, understanding the business and always thinking and socializing how IT can bring value that will ultimately help the company achieve a competitive advantage over company's competitors to boost the business prosperity from long term.


Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Intellectual Curiosity

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” ― Albert Einstein
Innovation is the light every organization is pursuing, and creativity becomes #1 most wanted skill for digital professionals. Creativity is an innate ability to create novel ideas. Would you consider that creativity is a response to a stimulus and that individuals will manifest different thought processes and behavioral responses to that stimulus depending on their individual experiences? What are the personality traits or working environment which decide how creative the individual or team could be?  If creativity is like a plant, perhaps curiosity is like the seed, so how to assess a person’s intellectual curiosity, and further evaluate his/her creativity potential and problem-solving capabilities?
Can you frame the right questions? Though there are no such things as stupid questions, framing the right question is often the halfway of problem-solving. How to ask the right questions is not only just the raw intelligence to reflect human’s intellectual curiosity, it becomes the new skills need to be sharpened and focused on, in order to co-solve the common problems and co-create the better world.  The art of questioning is to ignite innovative thinking, the essential to questioning also stimulates the creative sides of our brains in order to find answers. People with intellectual curiosity are more like to ask those open questions such as “What if,” “Why not.” etc.  From leadership perspective, a great leader is one who has all the questions but not all the answers: How to see the things as a whole, from management perspective, it’s to see through the spirit of organization,  it’s to ask the open-ended questions about the structure, the process, and the culture, it inspires the fresh thinking about the legacy issues, the new angles to see the unsolved problems.The science of questioning is about asking the right question at the right time to the right person for the right information.
Do you have an inquisitive mind to always dig through the root cause or find a better way to problem solving? An inquisitive mind with confidence does not accept things at face value and find a better/ alternative solution, and intellectual curiosity is one of the key ingredients to spark innovation and catalyze the culture of creativity. Keeping mind free for creative thinking is something that you can learn. And a heterogeneous team setting with inclusiveness can stimulate each other’s intellectual curiosity to see things from different angles. Diversity and curiosity are crucial for innovation, the team should embrace visionaries, futurist-minded, problem solvers, idea creators, well mix people from different positions, backgrounds, etc. The team is just like plant and flower seeds, it's the only hope for innovation blossom. Beside innovative culture for changes, an effective team with gifted people, with a range of expertise and disciplines and, most critically, who are still curious, can make a significant difference by doing things innovatively.
Do you have the “discovery eyes” to observe and learning mind to explore unknown? Discovery is a process of revealing unknown facts. You cannot envision a discovery as it is still not known to you. Every discovery must be supported by sound rational and logical certainty that can be accepted without any doubt whatsoever. Discovery is 'the journey of life' as each day we discover something previously unknown to us. The word "Discovery" refer to "knowledge," because the more you read and learn, the more you will realize that there are more you don’t know yet.Discovery starts with an open mind with intellectual curiosity and fresh eyes with a broader vision, it is a new way to see and perceive the things, and it is a life experience and adventure.
Life's a journey, we might lose a lot of things on the way, but do not lose the character because it is our personal identity and brand; do not lose intellectual curiosity because it keeps the life interesting and meaningful. Each one of us has an unknown amount of creativity, innovation, and productivity as well as an unknown amount of intelligence, knowledge, experience, and energy, so do not lose the courage to discover them, do not lose the passion for pursuing them, and do not lose patience to sharpen them.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu