Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1360

CIOs as Talent Master: Three Aspects of Retooling Talent Management

Talent Management is and should be the agent of change.

People are always the most important asset of the organization.The digital dynamic continues to evolve with increasing speed of change and rapid integration of the business across the globe. Talent Management is throwing fresh challenges and calls for radical change to be embraced. Talent Management has adapted to the changing workforce in the changing workplace and added additional best of breed talent and engagement systems to their existing core. Talent Management is positioned to make a true impact on the bottom line with the shifts from managing the human resource to investing human capital.Talent management is no longer the responsibility of just HR: All functions in the organization have a stake in strategic talent management practices. It requires cross-functional collaboration between HR, executive team, managers, finance, marketing, IT and others. At the dawn of the digital era, what are the emergent trends and how to retool talent management to optimize the collective human capabilities?

Talent analytics is no longer 'nice to have,' but 'must have,' practice for the digital organization: The analytics brings important indicators on how talent and organization should focus and invest in human capital and organization efforts on people. In HR, you need to make this activity as HR's routine work and spend a lot of efforts to tuning and practicing. Data-driven talent management will bring business leaders together across the organization to share their experience and insight wherever there is a GAP in the system, help to streamline and identify root causes immediately, and give practical guidance for improving talent management and using it in creative ways to gain predictive insight and competitive advantage. Talent management should determine its orientation more specifically in the forthcoming era. Is it business management oriented or "people" oriented? The talent analytics scenario includes the following steps: 1) creating a vision and path for workforce analytics. 2) Engaging workforce planning, deployment, and development based on performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. 3) Doing social network analysis to improve effective communication and collaborative innovation. 4) Embracing futuristic trends such as visualization and proactive presentation. Focus on talent empowerment, not just “data boom.” 5) You also need to utilize available data and leverage analytics to inform decision making. HR often falls short in this area. So it has to work collaboratively with IT to utilize technology to gather the data from multiple sources and allow sophisticated analytics, with the goal to manage talent lifecycle effectively.

Multichannel recruiting: The term social hiring, social media hiring, social recruiting etc. are interchangeable. You can define it as a process for quickly attracting the appropriate candidates using a number of current technologies and messaging platforms, in an integrated manner. One of the keys to success is integration.Talent management needs to be well integrated with culture management, knowledge management, and performance management more cohesively. In the company of the future, we need to move from Information Age to the digital era where action and empathy (emotion) are re-emphasized for competencies going forward. Leveraging digital talent management pipeline and take integral approach becomes more strategic imperative. Social computing provides a convenient platform to engage diverse and intellect minds in brainstorming and sharing the wisdom. The thought leaders or social influencers emerge because their voices get amplified by “who they are,“ not just “who they know." Digital tools are becoming more widely used, and more companies adopting social media platforms, Social touch in recruiting is a phenomenon, it is not just a fad, but an actual characteristic of how "C"-the connected generations from baby boomers to Z-Gen communicate and collaborate, how the new knowledge gets created, how the work gets done and how the challenging problems get solved. And digital footprint of individuals or organizations become their identity and brand. More often than not, the inability to attract good candidates is caused by ineffective social hiring or digital recruiting. The main purpose to leverage multichannel recruiting is not to catch the trend, but to discover the authenticity, and improve talent management effectiveness.

Develop and grow talent via the mix of formal and informal training or position rotating: Each organization must be able to articulate clearly what constitutes “talent.” There is different talent requirement to fit in different positions. Talent is not equal to experience, just like wisdom is not always proportional to one's age. What you can and should do is to provide the opportunities (talent development) for people to hone their talents and let them shine. The key point is to customize training to the needs of the organization. Identify areas of improvement individually (tech strengths), provide training on the specific aspect. Have a couple of training sessions which enable them to jump to next level of hierarchy or band. It’s not enough to just invest in dollars on an employee, and not just training for the sake of training, but training that will help company and employee to align the corporate strategy with the employees' career goals. The focus should be on trust, being patient, understanding the person's abilities (strength /weaknesses) and keeping the monetary bit for the last. Take advantage of the latest digital technology and online training, develop the tailored training solution in the most effective and efficient way to match the needs and demand. Over the short term, there may be savings from lack of employee training, but eventually, it will hit the top as well as the bottom line: employees not at their best performance levels will impact not only winning new and repeat business, but also meeting or exceeding customer expectations. A successful high-performance team is good for business and an important factor in employee retention as well. The newer thoughts, newer trends, newer knowledge are all that captivates learners with new curiosities to learn and quickly absorb and adopt so that it becomes easy for the coming generation to adjust to the needs of the changes necessitated with the evolving new thinking and trends. It's all about to cultivate the culture of learning with the growth mindset.

Talent Management is and should be the agent of change. They need to be involved in all steps of change. Talent Management continually needs to show their value. Well define the set of competency to tailor your organizational needs. So it has become necessary to develop strategic core competencies for digital professionals. Leverage the new digital technologies, be open minded for the changes, embrace the new way to do things, and retool talent management to unleash both individuals and businesses’ potential.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

CIOs as Talent Master: Three Aspects to Retool Talent Management

People are always the most important asset of the business. The digital dynamic continues to evolve with increasing speed of change and rapid integration of business across the globe. Talent Management is throwing fresh challenges and calls for radical change to be embraced. Talent Management has adapted to the changing workforce in the changing workplace, and added additional best of breed talent and engagement systems to their existing core. Talent Management is positioned to make a true impact on the bottom line with the shifts from managing the human resource to investing human capital.Talent management is no longer the responsibility of just HR: All functions in the organization have a stake in strategic talent management practices. It requires cross-functional collaboration between HR, executive team, managers, finance, marketing, IT and others. At the dawn of digital era, what are the emergent trends and how to retool talent management?
Talent analytics is no longer 'nice to have,' but 'must have,' practice for the digital organization: The analytics brings important indicators on how talent and organization should focus and invest in human capital and organization efforts on people. In HR, you need to make this activity as HR's routine work and spent a lot of efforts to tuning and practicing. Data-driven talent management will bring business leaders together across the organization to share their experience and insight wherever there is a GAP in the system, help to streamline and identify root causes immediately, and give practical guidance for improving talent management and using it in creative ways to gain predictive insight and competitive advantage. Talent management should determine its orientation more specifically in the forthcoming era. Is it business management oriented or "people" oriented? The talent analytics scenario includes the following steps: 1) creating a vision and path for workforce analytics. 2) Engaging workforce planning, deployment, and development based on performance. 3) Doing social network analysis to improve effective communication and collaborative innovation. 4) Embracing futuristic trends such as visualization and proactive presentation. Focus on talent empowerment, not just “data boom.” 5) You also need to utilize available data and leverage analytics to inform decision making. HR often falls short in this area. So HR has to work collaboratively with IT to utilize technology to gather the data from multiple sources and allow sophisticated analytics.
Multichannel recruiting: The term social hiring, social media hiring, social recruiting etc. are interchangeable. You can define it as a process for quickly attracting the appropriate candidates using a number of current technologies and messaging platforms, in an integrated manner. One of the keys to success is integration.Talent management needs to be well integrated with culture management, knowledge management, and performance management more cohesively. In the company of the future, we need to move from Information Age to the digital era where action and empathy (emotion) are re-emphasized for competencies going forward. Leveraging digital talent management pipeline and take integral approach becomes more strategic imperative. Social computing provides a convenient platform to engage diverse and intellect minds in brainstorming and sharing the wisdom. The thought leaders or social influencers emerge because their voices get amplified by “who they are,“ not just “who they know. Digital tools becoming more widely used, and more companies adopting social media platforms, Social touch in recruiting is a phenomenon, it is not just a fad, but an actual characteristic of how "C"-the connected generations from baby boomers to Z-Gen communicate and collaborate, how the new knowledge created and how the work gets done and how the challenging problems get solved. And digital footprint of individuals or an organizations become their identity and brand, and more often than not, the inability to attract good candidates is caused by ineffective social hiring or digital recruiting. The main purpose is not to catch the trend, but to discover the authenticity.
Develop and grow talent via the mix of formal and informal training or position rotating: Each organization must be able to articulate clearly what constitutes “talent.” There is different talent requirement to fit in different positions. Talent is not equal to experience, just like wisdom is not always proportional to one's age. What you can and should do is to provide the opportunities (talent development) for people to hone their talents and let them shine. The key point is to customize training to the needs of the organization. Identify areas of improvement individually (tech strengths), provide training on the specific aspect. Have couple of training sessions which enable them to jump to next level of hierarchy or band. It’s not enough to just invest in dollars on an employee, and not just training for the sake of training; but training that will help company and employee.  The newer thoughts, newer trends, newer knowledge are all that captivates learners with new curiosities to learn and quickly absorb and adopt so that it becomes easy for the coming generation to adjust to the needs of the changes necessitated with the evolving new thinking and trends. The focus should be on trust, being patient, understanding the person's abilities (strength /weaknesses) and keeping the monetary bit for the last. Take advantage of the latest digital technology and online training, develop the tailored training solution in the most effective and efficient way to match the needs and demand. Over the short term, there may be savings from lack of employee training, but eventually, it will hit the top as well as the bottom line: employees not at their best performance levels will impact not only winning new and repeat business, but also meeting or exceeding customer expectations. A successful high-performance team is good for business and an important factor in employee retention as well.
Talent Management is and should be the agent of change. They need to be involved in all steps of change. Talent Management continually needs to show their value. Well define the set of competency to tailor your organizational needs: So it has become necessary to develop strategic core competencies for digital professionals. Leverage the new digital technologies, be open minded for the changes, embrace the new way to do things, and retool talent management to reach both individuals and businesses’ potential.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Running IT as a Niche Player

Digital provides significant opportunities for the business growth, and IT plays a significant role in digital transformation. That means IT has to reinvent its brand from a cost center to a value creator; from an order taker to an idea shaker, and from a commodity service provider to an innovation engine. But more specifically, what are perspectives to run IT as a niche player?
CIOs’ niche leadership: As information is the lifeblood and technology is often the innovation driver, The CIO as Chief Initiative Officer has become necessary to manage strategic alignment from concept to post-implementation of all initiatives from the C-level to the front lines. Hence, digital CIOs have to understand both business and technology well. Historically CIOs have been frontrunners in business transformation initiatives, and it is anticipated that they'll bring their learning, best practices and knowledge and expertise of past transformations into newer initiatives. CIOs are also quite eager and enthusiastic to drive challenging transformation initiatives. Most of the executive peers do not have a deep understanding of technology/process while effective CIOs have to know both the business and the technology side of things. You cannot know only one piece of the equation. It means the CIO’s niche leadership is based on the strategic mindset, multifaceted knowledge, anticipated leadership styles, and further, CIOs need to present high “PI” -the Paradoxical Intelligence, because CIOs need to deal with constant ambiguity, they naturally gravitate to a leadership role when things are unknown, things will change, technology is involved, a tough problem has to be solved, etc. As when things go wrong, and they usually do, the CIO can be blamed. The strong CIO leadership can close the business-IT gaps and innovate IT to maximize its value.   
Core capabilities: Running a niche player IT means you need to build a set of core capabilities which underpin strategy implementation and bring business advantage. The business capabilities cut across all functional pillars, they are fundamental building blocks for business transformation. The capability is a useful composite concept that is fairly specific in its bounds, and can be used as an analysis tool. Processes underpin business capabilities; and culture nurtures capability coherence. The “core” capabilities can be determined via the questions and reasoning: (1) Is a capability core because it offers a competitive advantage in delivering the products or services? The core capabilities could be those which are identified as delivering the competitive products/services/solutions, or customer experience than competitors. (2) Is it core because it supports your strategic direction and enable strategy implementation? Senior leadership defines a strategy, and IT strategy is an integral part of business strategy. In order to meet that strategy, management and technique expertise should describe a set of capabilities needed to meet the strategy. This involves some decision on tactics, etc. The current environment is evaluated to understand which capabilities already exist and which must be developed or changed. (3) Is it core also because the company excels in delivering that capability than competitors?  Must the core capability be delivered by the company itself? In today's multi-sourcing at the cloud era, the core capability does not have to be delivered by the company itself; the key point is the speed of delivery and overall business agility and maturity. Hence, a niche player IT should become more capability based and customer-centric, to unleash its potential and bring value to the organization growth.
Competitive uniqueness: Digital is the age of customers. Running a niche player IT also has to be customer-centric, in IT’s case, includes both internal users and end customers. From a customer perspective, if the business is not different, you are a commodity, either for IT or the business as a whole. Assuming the company has a great product, creating meaningful, relevant, and compelling differentiation in the mind of customers is the challenge. This is the foundation in which brands are built. This is the strategy that "helps" to protect the brand and products from the low-priced competition Today’s digital business environment is unprecedentedly dynamic, complex and uncertain. There are always players starting with different resources and competitive position. And there are always different complexities in the different time. Thus, the organizations have to build the two sets of business competency: The competitive necessity and competitive uniqueness. More often, technology is a differentiator and creative disruptor. The differentiation provided by innovative technology usually is more long-lived than differentiation provided by marketing actions that can be copied easier. It just means that opportunities for cost-leadership as a strategy are now much harder as everything moves so much more quickly. At the same time, the differentiation provided by innovative technology allows companies to reach the "long-tail" customer that previously was impossible or uneconomic. And technologies can push you out of business if you are not agile enough to change your business model. Hence, running a niche player IT means IT is agile enough to adapt to changes and nimble enough to ride above the change curves, and IT is the business competency.
A niche player IT is not a business “guru,” but glue to integrate, innovate, optimize and modernize the business and make the business more responsive to the increasing speed of changes. A niche player IT  also focuses on achieving business intelligence, building value proposition, and improve organizational maturity, etc. It is the way to run a digital IT and ultimately grow into a high-performing digital leader.
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To Celebrate #2600th Blog Posting: Five Wisdoms to Deepen Leadership Influence

It is the beginning the month, also the time to celebrate the #2600th blog posting of the “Future of CIO” blog. Many think Digital is the age of people, the age of choices, the age of innovation, the age of empathy, the age of continuous delivery, and the age of wisdom. Wisdom is application of knowledge at right time, and it is the intelligence to make use of that input in right manner, and wisdom it the ultimate level of intelligence. From leadership and management perspective, what are the broader understanding of wisdom, how to bring wisdom to the workplace, and how to deepen your leadership influence via wisdom?
Creativity wisdom: Creativity is about thinking beyond conventional wisdom. Creative thinking is unique and original than many other types of thinking: some are the habit, repetition of memory, the way of least resistance, emotional reaction, social conformity, approval seeking, dogmatism, pedanticism, following, mendacity. The range of scholarly interest in creativity includes a multitude of definitions and approaches involving several disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, education, philosophy, technology, theology, sociology, linguistics, etc. Creativity is a higher level of thinking which could leads to wisdom because it often imposes a higher cognitive load as you think 'harder' and consciously use different kinds of thought processes and thinking tools like association, perspective shifting, opposites etc., when you are wanting to come up with a creative solution to a challenge. A certain mental, psychological and conditional chemistry is needed to break-away from thoughts that others have thought about. So creativity appears to be beyond the conventional thinking - where you have left the confines of other people's thoughts. Creativity is context - dependent, so it could means a type of contextual intelligence.  When you are at a higher plane of thinking you are not confined by walls. You may see others confined by it.  Creativity appears to require two styles of thinking, "associative" and analytic. The first seems to be more perceptually based, related to the "aha" phenomenon, and can be below conscious awareness. The second is more cognitively based and entails labored working through the products of the associative process. That creativity in the human sense is not due to connecting of two shallow pools of knowledge, but the ability to dig deep and to make deep connections and build on those connections. Hence, creativity wisdom is critical for finding the new way to solve the old problems or creating the new knowledge or capturing fresh insight based on accumulated human wisdom.
Strategic wisdom: Strategic thinking is the ability to think on a temporal plane. Strategic thinking is about where you are, where you want to be, identify the gap and create the alternate approaches to anticipate and provide solution. Strategic thinking is more about making decisions directly towards achieving defined outcomes as a purposive activity, so it is the “keep the end in mind” thought process. It is the wisdom because strategy is often the guide and roadmap to navigate us in the right direction. The road to somewhere can be arrived at by many different routes. Therefore, people want to follow the footsteps with a leader presenting highly strategic wisdom. Managing complexity is a misnomer. Life has always been complex, but a few things serve to make modern complexity a different situation: the prediction of what will happen, the speed at which things happen and the connectedness in the business environment. These factors make managing in complexity or managing in complex situations, a difficult skill to master, leaders with strategic wisdom will have clear vision step into the uncharted water, well thought-out plans to adapt to changes and perseverance to keep laser focus, it is the application of knowledge and intelligence to solve problems with long term perspectives.  System Wisdom: Systems thinking is a way of understanding complexity. Systems Thinking by definition is a cognitive process (thinking), a profound thinking process to embrace holism and nonlinearity. Systems thinking is a type of synthetic thinking with complex mix of several components; typically it includes: Dynamic thinking (positioning your issue as part of a pattern of behavior that has developed over time); Scientific thinking (using models to test hypotheses and discard falsehoods, not just to ascertain ‘the truth’); Cause-effective thinking (constructing a model to explain how the problem behavior arises), ‘Forest’ thinking (seeing the ‘big picture’ and taking a more holistic view of that system); Analytical thinking (analyzing how things actually work, the cause and effect relationships, and Quantitative’ thinking: (quantifying not just the hard data but also the soft variables that are operating in the system). To put simply, Systems thinking is nothing more than the good combination of analytic and synthetic thinking, see the trees without missing the forest; quantify not just the hard data, but also the soft variables; go beyond the surface to dig through the root cause of problem arising, and take a scientific approach to explore the nature and universe. So it leads to wisdom by which the complex situations can be managed in a systematic way, as only systems thinking allows you to act with the network in mind. Although each random event is not predictable, the general pattern or distribution of events is. Without the right set of System principles, the white can be taken as black, the round can be perceived as square, and the good can be translated into evil. Systems Thinking is a holistic, balanced and often an abstract thinking to understand things profoundly.

Decision wisdom: Majority of leaders and professional spend significant amount of time on making large or small decisions in the work and life. It takes wisdom (and often collective wisdom) to make effective decisions. Making good decisions starts with framing the right questions. Inappropriate framing is being the root cause of most bad decisions. It’s also due to the lack of inquisitive minds. People need to ask questions. The thinking approach being used is informed at some level on subjective, intuitive sources of information, but it was calibrated and employed in the structured guiding process that got everyone to slow down and think through the implications of their intuitive, subjective assumptions. Regarding not having time to stop and think in a crisis, this is one place where different styles of thinking make a difference. There is fuzziness in the decision because there is fuzziness in conflicting criteria. At digital age, making data-based decisions,  means to leverage analytical thinking , advanced analytic tools, the human’s intuition, and add the “wisdom” in the decision process to improve overall effectiveness of decision making.
Culture wisdom: From business perspective, culture is the way how we think and do things around here, it is the collective mindset; with digitalization and globalization, culture wisdom is the type of intelligence for tolerance of ambiguity, a set of capabilities for cultural flexibility, learning agility, handling complexity, communicating virtually, and working across cultures. The definition of culture is 'the mindsets, attitudes, feelings, values and behaviors that characterize and inform a group and its members' Culture stems from the mindset and behavior of the leadership. The spirit of organizations comes from the top, and culture is the collective mindset and behavior stem from the 'mainstream' mindset and behavior of the leadership. Hence, high level culture wisdom should make leadership influence more profound. For example, if leaders demonstrate thoughtful risk taking and reward thoughtful risk taking - even when the outcome is not all that was hoped for - then that culture will permeate the organization - to the extent that it can give the innate nature of the organization's population. The leaders with a high level of culture of wisdom in the global stage will present high empathy- the ability to connect the minds via multi-disciplinary touch point and multi-angle understanding. The empathy is the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person's feelings; or the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. Therefore, culture intelligence become more critical for digital leaders and professional to work in today’s multigenrational, multicultural and multi-devicing work environment, it is the wisdom to bring understanding and workforce harmony.
The ultimate aim of knowledge is wisdom. There are lots of smarts, lots of ability, and lots of attitudes - very, very little wisdom. "But how do we get wisdom”? it’s the century-old question. There is no shortcut, you just have to climb the information-knowledge-insight-wisdom pyramid, you have to not just see, but perceive; experience and learn; and make every step of your life as a journey to discover, not a destination. When you feel truly humbled, wisdom might just come upon you, and lift you up….Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Leaping Digital Leadership at Leap Day

The substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about future and change. Either past, today or future, there's no magic formula for leadership effectiveness, because every era has its own opportunities and risks. It is the leap day today, but how to leap digital leadership to achieve the next level of leadership maturity in the leap year and beyond?
Synthesizing leadership: Digital is about hyperconnectivity and interdependence, synthesis is understanding a thing by examining it as a whole. It is to understand how the “part” interconnected with the”whole.” From a leadership perspective, this is always a good start when working to break down the silo mentality, go beyond crunching numbers, harness cross-functional communication, build cross-functional collaboration, understand where each is coming from and have some trust from them, with the ultimate business goals to ensure business a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. Via synthesizing leadership, interconnections, and interdependencies are distinguished, wise choices and decisions are made via the full cycle of analytics and synthesis. Solutions are also made from a much broader and encompassing view that is not possible in linear or analytical thinking only. It is both detailed and holistic pictures. Synthesizing leaders master at contextual intelligence - anyone can find themselves leading effectively if they find themselves in the right place, surrounded by the right people, at the right time and they recognize this and seize the opportunity.
Cognitive leadership: Many leadership pundits advocate diversified or inclusive leadership, at the deeper level, it’s to promote leaders with the cognitive difference. “Cognition" is a word that dates back to the 15th century when it meant "thinking and awareness. The traditional concept of diversity can not fill out the gaps caused by cognitive difference necessarily, the culture intelligence, and the strengths of the problem-solving capabilities people bring to the team. Minding the cognitive gaps can benefit with any organization to make a sound judgment, and generate innovative solutions, to improve your company’s agility and maturity. In order to build a high-effective leadership team, foresightful organizations should always look for the complementary mindsets, capabilities and skills that they don't have so that they can build a winning team and complement each other. Empathy is one of the most important attributes of being a great leader -have the ability think as if you were in the other party's position. In such a global climate, those businesses that are unwilling to GENUINELY embrace “thinking differently,” are unable to know how to tap their diverse resources, and be inclusive and recognize merit and ideas, no matter where they come from, will not be able to survive, leave alone thrive.
Creative leadership: Creativity is emerged as one of the top leadership qualities. Creative leaders are the one who are capable of predicting future trends, manage the presence and delegate the past. In each context, a creative leader is always conscious of the changes needed to connect the past with the future, prospecting and communicating tangible such as resources and intangible such as cultural changes needs and identifying the proper vision for each cycle in the life of a corporation. Creative leaders are futuristic and forward thinking. Realizing that what has worked in the past isn't today's best solution and having the vision to see what it has now become. Creative leadership is more global than local, global leadership is shifting toward grooming historic digital leadership skills embodying effective communication in networks of global conversations that inspires creativity in diverse domains of expertise. Be courageous to take risks -Creative leadership is the unique combination of leadership mindset, behaviors that develop and achieves high-quality results over a sustained period of time and risk tolerance.
Leaping digital leadership is a journey. Transformation is the change, but on a grand level, from transactional to transformational; from mechanical to organic; from local to global; from sympathetic to empathetic; to always 'keep learning' is a must. A leader needs to know what resources are available and how best to utilize these resources. But this doesn't change leadership principles, they are timeless.


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Running IT as the Digital “Whole Brain” of the Organization

Organizations large or small on the journey to digital transformation, IT plays a critical role as a digital brain to drive changes and build a high-effective and high-intelligent digital organization, because IT is the steward to manage business information, IT is like the business’s nervous system to ensure the right information getting to the right people at the right time to make the right decisions. IT also helps the business to optimize processes, cost and capture the business insight for growth opportunities. Does digital IT more like the left brain, right brain or the whole brain of the organization?
Be rational as the “left side of the brain”:  “keep the light on” with efficiency is still fundamental for IT to be a business enabler. IT needs to take logical steps from making alignment with the business to engaging and integrating with the business. Most dictionaries divide alignment into two categories; arrangement and alliance. Those organizations that have a more mature alignment maturity outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to these changes. Alignment goes beyond conformity and order taking, it needs to include a close partnership with interpersonal communication, value analytics, and governance. The alignment also shouldn't mean the rigid business processes to stifle innovation, it means more about business working as a whole to improve communication, harness partnership, demonstrate value and engage employees. Whatever term you prefer, it is a persistent and pervasive problem that demands an ongoing process to ensure that IT and business strategies adapt effectively and efficiently together. From finance perspective: Does the CIO have the budget? Most of the budget is allocated to cost/value proven tech and projects. Senior IT leaders weigh the risk / reward / ongoing maintenance (labor) equation all the time whether conscious or not. - budget cut, priority changes, resource reallocation, technology diversion, etc - which force CIOs to be more rational and logical as a “right brainers,” but it doesn’t mean CIOs should be reactive and mechanical to only act as an order taker.
Be creative as the “right side of the brain”: Digital is the age of options and innovation, it provides the opportunity to think the new way to do things. So it forces IT leaders to get really creative in how they architect and implement change, to ensuring IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next while, at the same time, being so tactically pinned down by existing legacy infrastructure and inefficient/outdated business processes. While nowadays, technology is more often the business disruptors regardless of sectors, and IT needs to become innovation engine to catalyze their business growth. IT will get opportunities to transform from mere enabler to accelerator of business. Boldness needs to become the part of the digital CIO’s personality profile.  The role of the CIO is to drive the corporate vision and strategy through effectiveness and innovation in the knowledge and information channels. The CIO has to look forward and actively position the business in the right place to take full advantage of opportunities. DRIVING is not a passive activity, but a proactive effort. Though it may not be so fair to only have the CIO shift the mindset, from board room to front desk, new thinking means new learning attitude, from business side, it means to show the constructive dissatisfaction, understand the risks and potential bear traps; for CIOs, from "No" to "Yes," it takes positive thinking as well as enterprise-wide supporting. CIO should proactively understand business and customer first to avoid changing for technology’s sake, IT leaders are often at the right position to oversight business processes and set the right policy for their business’s technology and information usage, identify the critical business issues by working closely with a business partner from a long-term perspective, and leverage technology to manage innovation across the enterprise boundary. IT can drive all sort of innovations, proactively pushing ideas on how to leverage technology to drive revenue growth, increase business productivity, flexibility, and agility.
Digital IT needs to be the “Whole Brain” of the business. Because IT is shifting from a controller to an enabler to an accelerator of the business for top-line value, growth, and profitability. Only functioning as a whole brain, IT can strike the right balance between stability and agility, creativity and standardization; innovation and risk intelligence, with the ultimate goal to run a high intelligent and high mature digital organization.



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The Monthly Strategy Highlight: IT Strategy as an Integral Part of Business Strategy Feb.2016

The strategy is the light to guide you ahead, not the hand to walk you through.
The strategy is the focal point of the “Future of CIO,” and the pillar of organizational existence, its design, structure, functions, vision, and mission. A real strategy is neither a document nor a forecast but rather an overall approach based on a diagnosis of a challenge. It brings up new functions, roles, and responsibilities, collaboration, demand for intuition and emergence, complementarities, philosophy, neutron sciences, and trans-disciplinary businesses. But these are not new per se. The frameworks of thoughts, consciousness and maturity assessments apply to strategy, then, now and in the future. Here is the monthly strategy highlight of the “Future of CIO” blog
IT Strategy as an Integral Part of Business Strategy  Feb. 2016IT Strategy as an Integral Part of Business Strategy: The biggest challenge now is the increasing rate of change, and this isn't going to change! The objective of the IT strategy is not just to be aligned with business strategy, but the IT strategy is an integral part of business strategy. IT strategies, services, and solutions, absolutely need to be able to respond in an agile way and change themselves! In detail, how to craft a good strategy, and how to execute it effectively?
CIO as Strategist: What’s in your Strategic Planning? The whole purpose of the strategy of any kind is to envision the future success, then figure out how to execute to that end. IT strategy should always be an integral component of corporate strategy. What would be a good content for IT strategic plan? Should CIOs simply develop IT plans to support existing business strategy or should they, in addition, be working in the business to identify areas where IT can make a positive contribution to the bottom line and top line growth?
Is IT Strategy Equal to Digital Strategy? The biggest challenge now is the increasing rate of change, and this isn't going to change! The current strategy making methodologies are out of date mainly because digitalization is driving unpredictability, demanding a more rapid strategy methodology that quickly can adjust to new market conditions. So how relevant is the Digital Strategy for the organizations today? And is IT strategy equal to digital strategy?
CIO as Strategist: Is One Page Strategy Practical: For many organizations, the business strategy documents are “shelf-ware”, not shareware. Albert Einstein’s simplicity principle: Keep things as simple as possible but not simpler; should also be applied to strategy making, but is one-page strategy practical or too empty? The concept of a one page Strategic Planning is good, as it means that there is clarity in thinking, having reviewed and distilled all the various scenarios and desired outcomes. It is also great for communication and getting the organization engaged. One pager is also handy for your quarterly reviews. Markets are very dynamic these days particularly for global companies, that regular review is critical. This will ensure you are on track but also reflecting on external changes.
How to Weave IT into Corporate Strategy?Most companies have no effective strategy. That is mostly because organizations lack focus and clarity on what they do. Rare business is ready to cognize itself and achieve self-consciousness (develop a strategy), and perhaps its leaders are also a lack of self-reflection upon who they really are. Thus,  this is not because of business - this is because of human nature. In order to reach higher business maturity, how to craft a good corporate strategy and how to weave IT into a business strategy to deliver high performing result?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. 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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Five Frictions to Stifle Business Agility

 Many organizations are doing agile, and very few organizations are being agile. Agile is the mindset, the philosophy, and the methodology to not only manage software but to run today’s business. The point is how do you make radical management transformation from a traditional setting to agile; and what types of frictions do you experience with Agile? And how can you overcome the barriers, build TRUST to improving the business agility?




Lack of agile transformation leadership: The key difference is a transformation from "command and control" to "digital leadership” -trustful, innovative, holistic, empathetic, and solution-driven. Being agile is the mindset, which shapes by the top leadership. In the workplace, trust means trusted to deliver. To begin establishing trust especially with a newly adopted methodology going through a shift in how work is approached. And building two-way-both top down and bottom up trust relation is crucial to succeeding. Agile approaches require evolution within organizations, especially in regards to governance. Managers will need to relinquish control. If you were an Agilist, you know that the primary success factors will not be related to agile. Leadership effectiveness, team maturity, and team member competency are all important than the specific process/approach. It must be determined if the current leadership and team have the competency for the proposed effort/project and someone with technical aptitude must accept responsibility for that evaluation. Then, being agile becomes a reachable journey even with some challenges on the way.

Stifled business culture: Consider the culture and how it needs to change organization-wide. People are more influenced by their environment then environments by people. Being agile is a transformation which needs something of a quite bigger and most likely organization level culture shift. Remember Deming's advice: 95% of individual problems can be boiled down to systemic issues. So, if you're going to pilot a cultural shift, and you want to use it to change the culture from something mechanistic to something more organic, the last thing you should do is treat people like replaceable parts. The key to agile is not to just implement agile practices, but to actually BE agile. Implementing agile with people who still subscribe to old practices will not likely lead to success.If the team is dysfunctional, you need to see why the trust is not there and address that. Sometimes managers have unrealistic expectations and in rare occasions the team is wrong. It is important to help EVERYONE makes the transition to adopting the agile mindset. When the team and management are all on the same page, you are more likely to succeed.

Narrow perception about Agile: Agile viewed as 'something for technology', rather than as something for the business. Agility won't fix what being call "technical problems." It is a way to organize work. You still have to be good at doing the work. If anything, it requires better engineers but it entirely removes the need for 'negotiations' in the confrontational sense. If problems happen, why not take some time to look into the root cause of the technical problems and late deliveries. Most likely attributed to a system problem and not a team issue. If doing Agile is more about managing a software project which is still a business initiative to achieve business goals, and then being Agile is to follow a set of agile principles to run a business, and business agility is the upper level characteristic of organization maturity.

Focus on tools and processes, rather than people: Tools and processes are definitely going to be add on, in being agile, but they are not mandated to become agile. Agile is about people, not tools and processes, being agile means respectful to each other, open to others’ views, being a good listener, being collaborative. In practice: on one hand, organizations focusing on artifacts, metrics, ceremonies without ever understanding the why from the inside, will not get far. On the other hand, evangelists of agile who lose touch with business, do agile for its own sake. Agile is an open mindset, where you are open to fail and learn from mistakes, start by offering training to the management. They need to see what is asked of them to provide the right environment for an Agile way of working. I suppose that won't be a problem because they expect to be around long enough to warrant training.

Lack of trust relationship between management and the team member: Often the rationale for agile transformation is not well understood or articulated. People do not come to work with the intention to do a bad job, to make life difficult for coworkers. Agile provides the guidelines to empower people to work more creatively and proactively, to make iterative communication, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous improvement and delivery. People should ride on the excitement that agile has generated in the management team and suggest that in the spirit of agile, would they at least be willing to try an experiment and then reflect and adapt based on the outcome, and make the journey more adventurous and advance. To overcome mistrust, you need to see why the trust is not there and address that. Sometimes managers have unrealistic expectations and in rare occasions the team is wrong, if you can figure out the root cause of the actual problem, it’s easy to communicate with actual data points. The only way to gain trust, particularly in a difficult environment is through successful delivery, you have to prove it.

Doing Agile is just a first step; being agile needs to have a totally different mindset, and multidimensional perspectives. Move out of your regular communication patterns since you should work close together with people in all positions: step out of your comfort zone since agile encourages creativity and improvement; and connect the dot between agile and many other success factors of the business, such as flexibility, trust, accountability, quality, innovation, prioritization, and maturity, etc.


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The Monthly CIO Debates Collection Feb. 2016

Due to the changing nature of technology, IT leadership role also continues to involve & shift the focus, to move up the maturity level. More and more CIOs are requested to take more responsibility and many CIOs present the breadth of leadership competency. The proactive IT debates help IT leaders to brainstorm innovative and better ways to do things, and improve management capabilities. Here are the monthly CIO debates collections on Jan 2016.
The Monthly CIO Debates Collection Feb. 2016Is IT an Enabler or an Obstacle to Getting Things Done in Organizations? In many organizations, IT has been perceived as a controller, a cost center, or even an obstacle to getting things done in the business. What’s the reality of your IT organization? How do you get the non-IT stakeholders to recognize and support the notion that IT and Business are not separate or independent departments? How do you get all stakeholders (IT and non-IT) to encourage the notion that IT and business need to work together to be successful? How do you get non-IT stakeholders to focus on collaboration, transparency, respect, and providing clear leadership?
Why is IT so Reluctant to Look at itself? With the rate of change is accelerated, it’s very important for contemporary organizations to continually do “self-reflection’ upon the business effectiveness, process efficiency, strength and risks, culture and brand etc. IT is a critical component of the business, commonly IT self-evaluation ability is a reflection on overall business culture within the whole organization. Some say IT is so reluctant to look at itself, is it true?
Is Business & IT Gap ‘Artificial’? The “gap” between business and IT is always a hot debate, and the conclusion is also controversial, some say, the gap is definitely shrinking, as IT is gradually becoming engrained into every aspect of business these days due to internet, technology developments etc. The clear cut divide that used to be there between IT and business in the olden days is vanishing fast; the opposite opinion is that indeed the gap is deepened  because the “shadow IT”-business bypassing IT oversight to order SAAS service on their own, causes serious governance issue and communication gaps.
Can The Cloud Cut Your Business Costs?More and more CIOs are crafting their cloud strategy, but before pushing their ‘cloud envelope’ further, understanding the clear business goals is first things first to watch over the cloud, and well-planning is half way to success.
How to Promote IT Effectively? It is no secret that IT can often only be noticed when things are broken, the CIO and his/her team should be the leading persons driving that message of IT value throughout the enterprise. They are, after all, the face of the IT organization. The key challenge is to demonstrate what you provide can help the client achieve some critical purpose of theirs.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.2 million page views with 2500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. 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

Digital Innovation Premium

Many say digital is the age of innovation. With the increasing speed of changes and fierce competitions, at present days, innovation is the “Must Have” element of the business strategy if the organization want to stay competitive on the market. Digital organizations are complex adaptive living systems, which are comprised, in part, of people (who are also complex adaptive living systems, all such systems function, grow and prosper by continually: learning, innovating, adapting and evolving.  Creativity has just become indispensable. From a business management perspective, how to build a high competitive organization with digital innovation premium?
Create an open work environment with the culture of agility: Digitalization stipulates companies work together in a hyper-connected and continuously converging environment that provides structural analysis and a certain extent of serendipity. Digital means flow, there is more flow of creative ideas, the better opportunities to reap the benefit from innovation management. Digital organizations also follow the agile principles to focus on three “I”s -Interaction, Improvement, and Innovation. Agile is a fantastic way of working to involve everyone in the process of creation and delivery. Innovations simply benefit from being developed in, and subsequently commercialized in a more open ecosystem, it makes the pie of creative ideas grow bigger. Organizations need to be getting used to these forms of working and commercializing value at the digital era with the new characteristics of hyper-connectivity and convergence. The evolution of innovation only exists in the more open environments that create insights, take advantage of all sources of creativity in a more open way and leap innovation management to the next level.
Develop the tailored best and next practice to stimulate and scale innovation: Innovation is a management process, not just a serendipitous magic. things. More and more firms are learning and implementing best practices in innovation, Originally, all best practices were industry specific and evidence-based, meaning they were based on data. And practice is always a combination of both people and processes- how they are used to doing things in the organization. Not every innovative company uses every best practice. Not every authority agrees on every best practice. Perhaps it is a better approach to strive for using good practice - good for a certain organization and for the specific situation and challenges that are faced and that actually requires different priorities as compared to others. Some "next practices" continue to emerge - after all, the people who use today's best practices are innovators. Still, there is a recognizable core of approaches and activities that produce profitable innovation, hence, the forward-thinking organization needs to both learn from other innovative leaders across-industry, as well as develop the tailored best practices to fit for its own circumstances.
Build an "ambidextrous organization," which can manage innovation portfolio including both radical innovation and incremental innovation:  An "ambidextrous organization”  is an organization that can handle innovation streams for different purposes and with different time frames. From innovation management perspective, obviously, there are organizations that are better at "ambidexterity" and those that are worse, but to say that corporations can't do disruptive innovation while executing is perhaps a bit exaggeration. What does it mean of achieving "innovative ambidexterity" The ambidextrous businesses may separate a disruptive idea-generation from the implementing and sustaining innovation. Innovation explorers develop unconventional and disruptive solutions, then, when ideas were fully developed and a prototype built, other people – innovation builders or operation gurus - took over and worked on serial production and sustaining innovation to make products or services more reliable, easier to make, and cheaper.  All those processes in combination favorably affected the outcome= true ambidexterity.

For cracking serendipity code to achieve digital innovation premium, the key to success of innovation effort in an organization is to have the right people in place to manage the process, using experience, insight and judgment to rigorously make the needed decisions, cultivate the culture of agility, well integrate innovation strategy into business strategy, and manage the innovation portfolio in a systematic way.
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