Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1367

Digital IT Management Goes Beyond Alignment

IT connection with the line of the business has been a discussion and need for a long time now. It's no secret that this need is still unfulfilled and requires serious attention. Most IT organizations can barely keep up with their existing workloads to even think about ways to transform themselves. Furthermore, the concern is whether doing business-IT alignment is mature enough for IT to become a business’s strategic partner; does IT still stick to back-office, cost-center reputation, or is IT ready to transform into the higher level value center? What are more expectations about IT for going beyond IT-business alignment?
IT-Business Integration: What should be focused on is the integration of IT into the business decisions and processes, IT involves co-creating business strategy. This will allow IT to shine in both roles –as enabler and driver. IT proactively works as an integral part of the business to capitalize on opportunity via leading the transformation, or IT delivers the best solution to the business problems which meet business’s requirement or tailor customer’s needs. IT should facilitate the business partners to the right solutions and helping to implement them. Neither of these is wrong or right and choosing which is best should be dependent solely to the situation at hand. It takes time, vision, and the willingness drive to change. While companies recognize the need for IT to integrate into the business, it is a task that eludes many organizations. The sustained change will require cultural changes at all levels. Most of all, everyone must be willing to commit. It takes a very concerted and organized effort and a strong desire on both sides to make it happen. Over communication is a key. It also generally starts at the top with senior executives leading the way by setting the goals and strategy and ensuring that they are adhered to through measurement and metrics. Keep the focus on communication. Making sure every move in putting action to non-core and core initiatives is properly communicated to IT and beyond in a systematic way.
IT Engagement: IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. Some leading companies already move beyond IT/business alignment stage, well jump into IT engagement era. and the new mission of IT could be: How to become a game changer to catalyze business growth through proactively engaging in strategic making  and execution.  IT has moved from providing largely back-office support to becoming the prime facilitator, enabler, and orchestrator of the total business.An effective IT organization should more focus on vendor/customer relationship management, process optimization, project portfolio management, governance, business Intelligence/analytics, and make an influence on the culture/change management via the technology enabled platform, to create differentiated business capabilities and bridge today and tomorrow of business. In addition, the real Paradox is that IT depends on the business to define their technology requirements but the business does not understand the capabilities of technology and it is difficult for them to provide functional requirements for applications. In order to engage in the business more proactively, IT needs to understand business problems and provide consultation and recommendations to the business on how to leverage technology in problem solving and innovation.
IT Optimization:  IT is about using technology to lower costs, improve operations, and increase revenue. Effective IT management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process. It is through this comprehensive understanding that a CIO would be able to identify true cost savings, workflow optimizations, and additional revenue opportunities. IT Transformation is on the horizon to improve IT Maturity. The paradigm shift from IT being a reactive, engine room culture to one that is agile and develops the capabilities to drive business growth and perpetual improvement. It might include things like portfolio rationalization, enterprise architecture roadmaps, operational reliability metrics / dashboard and human capital management strategy.
IT continues to reach a higher level of maturity, from alignment to integration, engagement and optimization. IT Transformation is the journey to pursue business effectiveness and agility, to enable operational excellence, new service/product innovation, customer experience optimization and employees satisfaction, which are the pillars in building a high-performance enterprise and the ultimate goal of the digital transformation.
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Three Big “How”s of Change Management

 Change becomes fundamentally difficult in most organizations because it is treated as something distinct from running the business, evolving performance and increasing results over time.There are many reasons for changes, and perhaps, even more, reasons for resistance to changes as well: It may be a shift in power, a need to learn new skills, to manage a different team, to adopt the new way (mindset, methodology or process, etc) to do things etc. Besides three big “WHY” about changes, three big “WHAT”s about changes, and here are three big “HOW” about Change Management?  

How much do senior leaders need to support Change Management? Change Management is a leadership game, and leadership involvement is a must. More often than not, however, leaders do support the change but radically under-estimate the importance of their active and visible support for the change. Many seem to believe that if they make the decision to implement the change then the rest can be left to the project team. Nothing is further from the truth The weak support from senior leaders is the most common reason for failure. Sometimes key leaders actually do not support a change and actively undermine that change. More often than not, however, leaders do support the change but radically under-estimate the importance of their active and visible support for the change. Senior leaders need to gain an in-depth understanding about changes, especially at the strategic level.
How to handle change inertia with empathy? Organizations are a huge melting pot of various personalities and depending on the generation the comprised employees belong to, 'change' is probably the last thing on their minds, regardless of how enthusiastic the management team is. People often resist changing because they don't understand how it is relevant to them. Looking at the change in a way that addresses empathy. Resistance is the outcome of an inward mindset. Empathy is the key as it allows each person to get where the other person maybe at. What they are experiencing and how they see it through their eyes.Sometimes it helps to get people talking about positive change they have experienced and what made it positive then how they can use that to make small transformations towards the new goals. As Leaders, empathy is the key to great leadership allowing you to speak to a person from the space they stand not where you think they should be.
How do you well tune the 'Change Management' process? Change Management always fails when management thinks they get all the answers, and they come up with a plan in a vacuum and try to sell it. First of all, Change Management is all about balancing the main elements impacting change: People ( most important one), Strategies, Processes/ Procedures and IT. It’s important to have the team own a process by bringing them in early and getting their involvement in creating the process. Change Management is all about balancing the following main elements impacting change: People ( most important one), Strategies, Procedures and IT. And you have to maintain and fix any imbalance in those elements by establishing a committee to involving the management in the HR, IT and operations. Secondly, you want to emphasize on the Human Resources role in the change management because people is always considered as the real axle for the organizational movement. In order to execute a successful Change Management process, there is a need to delegate roles and responsibilities of the process, and have a strong-honest communication plan in place. Make each individual feel responsible of the success of the plan, engage them actively and make sure that your new proposal solves their current problems, and provide better working environment. During the whole process, make sure that all staff is aware of the plan/process, timely updated, and responsible for something.
Change capability is one of the strategic capabilities which underpin successful execution, and move organization from efficiency to agility,Thus, change should be part of a company’s culture and should be stimulated by the top management, it is resulting in a flexible and dynamic organization able to adapt to new and unexpected situations and market demand and execute strategy more seamlessly. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Three Quality Aspects of Digital IT

As Drucker wisely put: you can only manage what you measure. The quantitative measurement helps management continue improving IT efficiency. Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service is consistent, efficient, and meet customers’ expectation. And the quality of IT management has multiple aspects:


The quality of data and Information Management: An information System (IS) is "a system" that deals with Information Management: collecting, storing, and processing data and delivering information, knowledge, and digital products. Too many businesses are data rich but information poor. Or they spend so much time and energy collecting data for that "just in case" scenario. Information Management quality means quality data, quality management, and quality measurement. By “quality data” – it means clean, organized, actionable data from which to extract relevant information and insight. Data quality does not end with managing the incorrect entry of information, but the logic of data has to be taken into account too. Poor information management implies not understanding what raw material they have to play with; or poor measurement -not applying worthwhile evaluation to it to reveal the inherent value, You can walk through all the various dimensions of data quality such as accuracy, consistency etc, but business context is indeed a very important perspective. Data by itself is meaningless until it’s interpreted and analyzed. Information is raw material when you manipulate the raw material in meaningful ways, which give you business insight to interpret and utilize, then you have established a value.
Software/Project/Product Quality: Software can be subjective; it means various things to the different roles: As the product owner - quality may mean how many features you can deliver that are not buggy and how long does it take. This probably holds true for the customer as well. Software quality begins with the quality of the requirements. It is impossible to deliver an acceptable application to a business without a clear understanding of what is to be delivered. This is a simple idea, but capturing requirements at the level necessary to get it right the first time is difficult and potentially expensive. A better user interface can make the high-quality software, even more, qualified, many times, lack of user adoption is one of the issues to fail new software apps. And what you measure gets cared about and only focus on defects is too limiting, perhaps the good approach is to measure the 'health' of software projects, trending the well-defined metrics to see how you're managing rework, defects, automation, documentation and customer satisfaction, to name a few. So the measure is not about counting defects. Knowing what the quality of the product to be delivered will be, and take action if that quality will be insufficient early at lower costs.
People quality: People are always the weakest link in organizations. Therefore, high-quality people should also improve the quality of products, services, and overall organizational maturity. Quality employees are the ones who can work independently, have excellent problem-solving skills, well disciplined, have a "customer focus," and bring positivity and wisdom to the workplace. High-quality leader or employees are great in attitude, aptitude, and altitude -a winning mixture composed of character, intelligence and competence in a humble frame of self-esteem which makes aware of his/her quality without needing to show them. They must be anchored to a full professionalism; also made of personal qualities such as, independent judgment, critical thinking, professionalism and the sense of responsibility and balance through which it becomes possible to earn the role of trust and guiding the organization in which they work, the respect and trust of others. and become a value constructor. Quality leaders and employees demonstrate both intellectual understanding and emotional maturity.
Quality is defined by a number of factors, and to effectively lead an organization into good practices to focus on quality attributes takes work and a level of credibility within the organization. From information management perspective, if IT focuses on obtaining information and not just data for data's sake, the business decision making would be more relevant and informed; from measurement perspective, it is having that capability to capture real metrics that often drives quality improvement initiatives; from talent management perspective, if performance management not just focuses on quantitative numbers, but also qualifiable factors via the lenses of innovation or customer centricity, IT can bring high-quality products/services/solutions to satisfy customers and improve its business competency and maturity.
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CIO’s Digital Agenda XXXVI: Setting Principles to Run a Digital IT

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. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom.

Principles are general rules and guidelines, intended to be enduring and seldom amended, that inform and support the way in which an organization sets about fulfilling its mission. The style of the principle should be short and recognizable. Its definition describes "what" the principle means in the language understood by stakeholders. The motivation describes "why" the principle is important to achieving the organizational mission. The implications describe "how" the principle changes behavior.
Setting Guiding Principles to Run a High-Effective ITFive Principles to Run a Digital IT-: Principles are statements of values. Things that define why one make a decision one way or another. These core decision values guide the behavior of individuals within an organization. Digital does flatten  the organizational hierarchy and blur the functional, organizational, and geographical borders in the business ecosystem, it could mean less restrictive rules or bureaucracy, but it also means the guiding principles become more crucial  to be defined as core decision values and behavior guidelines. It is less about controls, but more about the clarity of  "why we make decisions the way we do” and what’re the expectations of employees' work performance.
Three Change Principles: Statistically, more than two-thirds of change effort fail to achieve expected result. All efforts at having other humans act as you would like to depend in large part on circumstances, the number of actions/tactical moves, action sequence, and "action coordination" vary. Therefore, change is situational, these differences have to do with who the people are, what they plan, what and HOW they execute. Although there is no “one size fits all” formula for changes, you can set principles to make Change Management more effective and cohesive.
The Principles and Practices to Encourage Creativity: As businesses get more cut-throat in the face of fierce competitions and unprecedented changes, this puts stress on the labor force that is not conducive to creative, experimental thinking. As a business leader, what are the common solutions to encourage creativity? Will you allow people to make mistakes? Spend time on something with no guarantee of  ROIs? Work on what interests them? Which type of work activities, roles, industries, require great deals of creativity? How do you, as leaders involve all people in creative thinking and actions? And how can you help improve the harvest of the creative seeds? Doesn't the real solution to innovation, creativity begin with inquiry? Would it not be prudent to focus on ensuring all levels of the organization are well founded on asking learning questions?
Seven Principles in Managing Agile: Project With Agile has been adopted by more organizations, there’re also many debates upon weather it causes software quality issues. "Blaming Agile" is the mentality to resist changes, or make it broader, it's still the culture issue, the collective programming of mind for group of people to think and react. Agile isn’t the answer to all things either but it surely isn’t the problem. The point is that unlike a physical product that may not be functioning correctly and therefore breaks down and fails, a process or methodology like agile is people dependent. Agility is all about people and change! ?
Simplicity as a Principle: People are complex by nature, but to dwell on complexity is to complicate an implicate order that is naturally simple. Getting to simple is not easy for most people because they rather follow the traditions and set rules and regulations in the society. They don't bother to remove the dust around them, or want to question the unknown, or challenge the status quo, out of fear. So how to address complexity, and what's the advantage to set simplicity as a principle and live with it?
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

How to Avoid Pitfalls in Innovation Management

Innovation is both art and science. Innovation is a systematic way of applying creativity in the real life and business. In general, business innovation is a discipline. And innovation management has overall very low success rate. The reasons why failure occurs vary widely. It is no wonder why many leaders are reluctant to act on bold ideas with good business potential due to the high likelihood of failure, thus, what are the pitfalls in innovation management and how to manage innovation more effectively?

Process Pitfalls: Lack of systematic processes or having overly rigid processes are both the causes for innovation failures: Innovation is, generally speaking, a discipline because it is a systematic way to applying creativity in the real life and business. However, should innovation processes be standardized, or is it innovation process an oxymoron? On one side, innovation does take systematic processes from idea management to innovation implementation. On the other side, the term innovation process implies an openness to innovative ideas, with an accepted interface into the organization to actually develop and exploit the ideas as they come about. An obsession with the rigidity of efficiency stunts the innovation creation process. Innovation is fluid and should not be straight-jacketed. Many process innovations will be concerned with increasing and optimizing efficiency and maintaining existing skills and linkages. Efficiency and short-term goal orientation often divert focus from innovation in general; and innovation, especially radical innovation will benefit in the long range return on investment. So innovation is often dependent on business insight because you can't change an organization without insight, the organization adapts exclusively to the insight you provide to it.
Lack of Change Management: Every innovation includes change process. Consider any new idea as an innovation, mainly if such new idea will change, optimize or improve any existing technology, service, treatment, process, politics, etc...There are quite some terms that are vital for successful creation of innovations that are misinterpreted, misunderstood, overused/misused. Too often people do not understand the nature of change, why it's critical for organizations to remain competitive, and how they're part of the change in order to realize positive outcomes. Innovation has become a buzzword to that point that those who truly understand it cannot get the real message out through the "hype" and truly implement innovative change. Not every innovation includes "technology in all its scope," but every innovation includes change process, and successful management of this change process is vital for the successful creation of innovations. It must be new, ‘new’ means it must force at least a minimum of a change process in adaptation to its target, this change process can be everything (thinking, communication, behaviour, use, etc.) the more complex the change process the “target” faces the more radical it becomes (difference between incremental and radical innovation).
Lack of talented innovators and lack of risk tolerance culture: Although due to the complexity of modern business and technology, nowadays, innovation more often comes from teamwork, not just one individual’s effort. One of the biggest pitfalls for innovation failure because they lack cognitive ability to think new way to do things and also organizations are lack of the culture tolerance. In addition, to TRUE sustained management support, businesses need to think hard about how their FUNCTION can be performed in other ways. It takes a combination of wacky and less risky ideas to balance out a robust portfolio worth investigating. There is a myth that innovation may come out of a process and not individuals / innovators and the innovation is not properly adopted or innovated to be adopted by the target audience.Certainly innovation that brings out new products or spots a niche should be rewarded. Failure should not be an offence and actually, if there are not a few failures, then you are not trying hard enough. The job of management is to help when a failure happens to turn it around as a team. However, in many organizations, creativity, curiosity, trust and strong relationship with consumers, that should be leading any company's decision, come to the bottom of priorities ladder.
Innovation processes need to be rigorous, not too rigid; innovation is change, therefore, change management needs to be an integral part of innovation management. And last but not least, culture of innovation means to encourage learning and discovering, cultivate the new generations of innovators, have risk intelligence to manage both opportunity and risk accordingly, and ultimately, the business growth is accelerated by innovation, and their innovation is enabled by their ability to orchestrate people, process and technology, to catalyze and scale up with a new capacity to create prosperity.
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How to Think Critically

Critical Thinking is the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion. There is only a very small fraction of true Critical Thinkers.and it’s complex. So what are the characteristics of Critical Thinking, or how to think critically?


Thinking Slowly: There’s time for thinking fast, and there’s time for thinking slowly. And Critical Thinking fits into the second category, you need to think slowly to digest information without bias and leverage multitude of thought processes to think thoroughly. Critical Thinking needs to combine different thinking processes, to gather a mass of information, break it apart and reconstructed with a level of accuracy projecting futuristic events, numbers, etc. Breaking a routine forces Critical Thinking on a constant basis in order to act. Often, there are two extreme states of thinking: 1) thinking too much (even critical thinking) and 2) thinking too little. It would be good to think critically more often than we do concern our actions, If we don't, half of our life routine part becomes "unexamined" and unnoticed by us. If thoughtful reactions and pro-actions are key to sustainable relationships and innovations, maybe we would benefit from discovering what in our Critical Thinking moves us beyond thinking and into transformative action.
Critical Thinking and Creative Thinking goes hand-in-hand: Critical Thinking evolves deep thinking process usually with Creative Thinking embedded. So experience is inside the box, Critical Thinkers live out of the box. and it’s complex thought processes involving thinking differently, or thinking out of the box, it is about breaking the rules that have been created through experience. Critical thinking is essential for making decisions based on open up with diverse viewpoint, careful and comprehensive analysis and synthesis, and getting input from a broad range of personalities and cognitive difference of people on the particular matter. it could also include imaginative or resourceful thinking. The combination is truly powerful to conceptualize, communicate, develop and execute solutions, not just based on evidence, but on trends and discovery of hidden connections.
Digging into the Root Causes: Critical Thinking is a crucial thought process to see underneath the symptoms and dig into root causes. There are only a very small fractions of true critical thinkers who can always dig through the root causes of problems. Problem solvers who can leverage critical thinking are always chasing root cause. Critical thinking requires to starting with a mentally neutral position; no biases or emotional quandary.Critical Thinking needs to combine different thinking processes, to gather a mass of information, break it apart and reconstructed with a level of accuracy, projecting futuristic events, numbers, etc., Critical thinking, like Systems Thinking, allows for more holistic thinking. Because we "steer away from “conventional wisdom,” question individual, collective, social assumptions and reframe the inquiry. There are two sides to this, at least in terms of our basic epistemic goals. One is getting to the truth, the other is avoiding falsehood. So Critical Thinking is associated with the metacognitive disciplines that steer one away from believing falsehoods, more so than steering one toward the truth. 
Critical Thinking requires an ability to be able to not only ask the right questions but rather absorb information forecast potentials; risks/benefits; mitigation and compare and contrast options, facts, ideas against logic and creativity. Critical thinking is an important thinking capability for business leaders and professionals to surviving and thriving in “VUCA” digital dynamic today.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

CIOs as Chief Improvement Officer: How to Leverage DevOp to Improving IT Agility

IT plays a significant role in building the organization’s change capability to adapt to the digital new normal. Need for agility arises due to changes in underlying assumptions. Every CIO may ask self: Is IT responsive and proactive enough to find answers and solutions in case of emerging chances? Does IT have a platform which is scalable, secure, resilient and well interconnected? For achieving agility, IT leaders should both apply the new management philosophy based on a set of Agile principles, but also leverage DevOp and develop a series of  practices to improving IT effectiveness and maturity.
Automation:  Many IT departments operate in silos with separate teams delivering separate functional tasks: backup, risk monitoring, IT asset management, user administration. Effective automation should first examine these functions and understand the connections and define any constraints in the system. Identify and remove the inefficiencies and rationalize the manual actions first. the goal for practicing DevOp is to bring both IT development teams and operation teams together to break down the silo, make continuous integration, implement test automation via the deployment of automation tools, and the real DevOps style productivity now becomes a possibility.
Standardization: Like anything else you do in business, there should be some justification for standardization or integration.  Standardization should be done at the solution level and should only occur when the functional requirements for the different groups are the same or where there is a core set of functional requirements that all groups need and additional requirements are easily added without having an adverse impact on the performance of the solution for those groups that do not need these added functions. Therefore, DevOps has the better setting for making standardization process going more smoothly because it encourages and enables cross-functional interaction and communication.  To try and standardize just for the sake of standardizing, or where doing so requires compromising on the functional or performance needs of one or more groups involved, then obviously it is not a good idea.
Adaptation: DevOps is the real thing because it lowers the technical barrier to producing the full construct; it improves the chances for many to learn about what actually "happens" upon deployment, instead of wondering what "would/will" happen. It is possible to see what enables a self-adaptive organism is an information-driven process feeding and sustaining it. DevOps explorement makes it possible to turn organizational “theories” into tangible management processes that use “relations between people” as the loom on which to create management structures and processes that support self-adaptive problem-solving, build “recombinant” business capabilities and improve business efficiency.

Innovation: DevOps at its core is all about culture and about breaking down barriers between Dev and Ops teams. It's about helping the business be more efficient, productive and innovative in these areas. .here are situations, experiences, challenges, etc. the operations face that development doesn't and vice verse. Having an understanding of both and open communication between the two, helps to foster new ideas that ultimately develop better solutions. Devops is understanding that EVERYONE works in customer service now. Devops is communication and figuring out how to make the answer to the customers' questions default to yes by tailoring their needs. Thus, DevOps helps to build a culture of innovation and customer centricity.
Experimentation: DevOps techniques and technologies allow to produce and consume full constructions of the software product at each unit of effort - so that it can be tried out more often and by more people, such that people may learn more, earlier and more often. DevOps inspire the learning culture. Agile is based on the empirical control process (develop – inspect – adapt), which is also common sense. In this way, you always assess, experiment, and respond to change, to provide the customer with added value software.
Continuous Delivery: DevOps ideas expand the focus to delivering real value quickly, DevOps is the natural result of organizations taking agility past their development processes to encompass the entire software lifecycle, including deployment and maintenance. So, in the same way, Agile teams break the silos between quality engineers and software developers, instead of the development organization throwing finished software over the fence to the operation organization, everyone retains a stake in the overall cycle. Developers work on the deployment and monitoring tools, hardware engineers are part of the original design team, etc, they work more seamlessly to make the continuous delivery.  
Transparency: DevOps breaks the invisible wall between development and operations, to open up a dialog and optimize the whole process in ways that perhaps were not possible before. The very goal is to harness integration, interaction, and innovation. Most of its practices at the end of the day are common sense approaches, but it overcomes change inertia and accelerate digital flow.
DevOp is the IT management instrument which  brings in a cultural shift to an organization to not only develop but also to maintain the application with continuous changes in place. Devops as a natural consequence of applying agile thinking not only to development but to the whole lifecycle of a service  and solution that has IT-components as central assets. And it’s the great practice to run a digital IT with productivity, agility, and innovation. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Three Big “WHAT”s in Change Management

Everything changes continuously and the rate of change is accelerated. Change is no longer just a one time initiative, but an ongoing capability. Change capability is one of the strategic capabilities which underpin successful execution, and move organization from efficiency, effectiveness to agility and maturity. Besides the Big WHYs about change we discussed earlier, here are three big WHAT about Change Management.
#1 What’re the top key factors in Change Management?  The most critical element is a shared VISION for the organization. Change is usually required when an organization is expanding its business, its mission, or is installing/implementing some new technology. In all these cases, a vision provides the guiding light and direction. COMMUNICATION is 'critical' to Change Management rather than the most important or only important factor. Besides communication, one in particular that jumps out is the need for STRATEGY and planning the change. Many Change Management research point to SPONSORSHIP as #1 in importance to successfully managing changes. Upward FEEDBACK is absolutely necessary. Then they need to communicate their understanding and the contributions they expect of their parts of the organization to their teams/ and employees. ASSESSMENT & MEASUREMENT: A change manager needs to assess and evaluate every specific scenario to create the change program success.
#2 What’re People’s Psychological Responses to Changes? There is so much psychology in openness to new ideas and perspectives, change or business transformation: There is not a one size fits all approach to addressing the different psychological responses and thereby reducing anxiety, because there are different psychological perspectives. For example, there are those who think logically, others focus bigger picture, and others are a lot more emotional in their decision making. It takes slightly different approaches, timescales and skills to unlock the anxiety. It is all about perspective. What is more interesting is what drives people's perspective. Those lack of vision are either incentivized incorrectly to focus only on the short term; inexperienced outside of the small field in which they operate; too focused on their own self preservation; or have no energy or desire left to think longer term. People neither love nor hate "change," they hate to be changed. They need to figure out the big WHY about the change, and “What’s in It for Me”?  The differentiator is that people embrace change if they understand the value adding to them.
#3: What are major concerns in driving changes or business transformation?  First identify key driving factors for business transformation, generally speaking, the key driving factors of any business transformation are: (1) Automation and standardization practices. (2) Organizational culture reinvention and (3) the transformation of data into relevant and timely information; or transform the computer systems and technical programs that are being used to take advantage of the latest digital trend; and then business transformation needs to be carried out within the company's system and apply design principle accordingly. In addition, you cannot transform the organization without considering the human factors thoughtfully, it appears as the biggest area of neglect and the major reason why there is a lack of overall improvement in the business. Change is complex and multi-faceted these days, it is more than change agent alone that are essential for transformation. There are perhaps a number of people usually internal to the business appointed by an organization to work with an external/internal Change Manager and act as the "voice of the business," and be the conduit into the business to help with communication, process and organizational changes.
Changes at any level within an organization (individual, team or organization) or across business ecosystem require intent. In order to ensure a successful initiative and capture the full intent of the “change,”  and build a solid change capability for businesses, after pondering big WHY about changes, you also have to figure out some significant “WHATs” in driving change more seamlessly.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Five Focal Points in Running a Digital IT

Digital IT keeps digital flow from top-down to bottom up; from branding on the surface to tuning the processes underneath... Many IT organizations are accelerating from the industrial speed to the digital speed, it also needs to sharpen its image from a back office support center to a front yard of digital innovation. IT-business alignment is also shifted to IT-business engagement. But what are the emergent trends to run a high effective digital IT, and how can IT become more customer-centric, high innovative and agiler to adapt to rapid changes and frequent disruptions?

Self-Service business solution delivery: With the emergent SMAC digital technologies, digital IT can be more tailored to different business needs and provide the self-service delivery mode for business functions. Cloud is here to stay, and cloud solutions are becoming more mature, there is real value and every business should get their feet wet and learn what the questions or decisions are, so they can use the tools available when the need arises, but you have to consider all aspects. Tailor cloud solution to meet different business needs. Cloud has different flavors and types, Hybrid, private, and public; SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, etc. There are important considerations such as mission criticality, integration requirements, data volumes, pricing model, and competitive differentiation required. For example, if there is a need for an application to support a business function where you have to maintain competitive differentiation, then the public nature of a cloud application may not be the best choice. Still, Cloud is a journey, it takes well planning and optimized processes to move up seamlessly.

Brand Recognition: Most of IT organizations have been perceived as a cost center and slow to change in their organization in the last couple of decades. Therefore, running a high-performing digital IT means to re-imagining IT as a digital brain of an organization, and rebrand IT as a business value creator and an innovation engine. And there should always have substance behind branding message. Some CIOs are looking at the idea of creating logos and slogans not only to convey who IT is and what it can offer, but also to ensure that business clients won't forget it. The key is: Branding and internal marketing campaigns can not be just puffery or publicity. If there’s no substance behind your key messages, if you cannot actually deliver the services you’re supposed to deliver – there’s no point in starting. Branding is also not something that takes time away from the fundamentals of operations, execution, and management. It is instead a methodology, a different way of looking at how you do these things and innovate the better way to get things better.

People-centric process management: Customers are at the center of a digital organization. Customer Centricity is built upon rigorous business’s capabilities and processes. In order to improve business processes, questioning the reason for the existence of the business processes in the first instance, ask the questions; Should this process even exist in the first place? Or is it an inability to imagine a different perspective that could be the big resistance to Customer Centricity taking a firmer hold? Overly rigid process is an outcome of using rigid process approaches where they don't belong. Also, there should be enough collective experiences in any organization these days on Change Management to take the changes with systematic steps and measure the results accordingly. But often all along implementation, the same business, and user community put its complete resistance as the majority of the time, management has not made clear about their intentions and goals while embarking on such IT initiative. In very few implementations, customers are making the effort to ascertain how a "day in the life" of any worker at any level. from labor to management, will be impacted due to this IT initiative. Process approaches fit for service, but don't restrict – they should support by getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

Data-information-knowledge-insight Management: Fundamentally, IT is shifting from a technology custodian to an information steward, and to ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time in the right locations. Information and decision-making are intimately connected and interdependent. For decision-making to be effective, the decision-maker must have enough knowledge to make their decisions rich in information and significantly different from the available data. With digital flow, both data and knowledge are being convergent in terms what action ensues (for example in analytics), whereas information is divergent as the decision-making process essentially is, and knowledge is where the cultural and social context alignment or misalignment with the information that precedes it. Information is situated between data and knowledge. Knowledge is information in use, an expression of understanding relating information and experience accumulated over time. And ultimately it’s knowledge that supports the decision-making. Therefore, IT needs to manage data-information-knowledge-insight life cycle efficiently to maximize information value and improve decision-making effectiveness and achieve business results.

Working-Learning-Innovation: If the mantra of a traditional workplace is to improve the productivity of people, and then, it’s still not enough to run a digital IT, because digital is also an age of innovation, the importance of creativity for organizations is well-known. Either being a disruptor or being disrupted, innovation needs to be well embedded into the business culture, and process mechanism in order to run an IT as an innovation engine of the organization. Creativity in the workplace is fundamentally about the mental production of new ideas - not just any new ideas, but the creation of ideas that are both original and valuable to business growth. After researching what happens when business managers use lateral thinking, the requirement that creativity in the workplace also requires the deliberate creation of valuable ideas when they are needed - they need to be created on-demand. People have to be given the opportunity to be creative, they have to become empowered to work, learn and innovate.‘”Survival learning” or what is more often termed “adaptive learning” is important – indeed, it is necessary. But for a learning organization, “adaptive learning” must be joined by “generative learning,” learning that enhances your 'capacity to create.’ Because, for a learning organization, it is not enough to survive only, but for thriving, ultimately running an innovative IT organization.
Therefore, running a digital IT is not just about playing some latest technology tools or gadgets, or following the trendy practices, it has to keep digital flow from top-down to bottom up; from branding on the surface to tuning the processes underneath; from data-driven decisions style to customer-centric mentality, It is the shift from doing digital to being digital.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Five Trends in Running a Digital IT

Many IT organizations are transforming from the industrial speed to the digital speed, it also needs to sharpen its image from a back office support center to a pivot of digital transformation, so even business-IT well alignment is not mature enough to adapt to the changes, so what are the emergent trend to run an high effective digital IT, and how can IT become more customer-centric, high innovative and agiler to adapt to rapid changes?
Self-Service business solution delivery: With the emergent SMAC digital technologies, digital IT can be more tailored to different business needs and provide self-service delivery mode for business functions. Cloud is here to stay, and cloud solutions are becoming more mature, there is real value and every business should get their feet wet and learn what the questions or decisions are, so they can use the tools available when the need arises, but you have to consider all aspects. Tailor cloud solution to meet different business needs. Cloud has different flavors and types, Hybrid, private, and public; SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, etc. There are important considerations such as mission criticality, integration requirements, data volumes, pricing model, and competitive differentiation required. For example,  if there is a need for an application to support a business function where you have to maintain competitive differentiation, then the public nature of a cloud application may not be the best choice. Still, Cloud is a journey, it takes well planning and optimized processes to move up seamlessly.
Brand Recognition: Most of IT organizations have been perceived as a cost center and slow to change in their organization. Therefore, running a high-performing digital IT means to re-imagining IT as a digital brain of an organization, and rebrand IT as a business value creator. And there should always have substance behind branding message: Some CIOs are looking at the idea of creating logos and slogans not only to convey who IT is and what it can offer, but also to ensure that business clients won't forget it. The key is: Branding and internal marketing campaigns can not be just puffery or publicity. If there’s no substance behind your key messages,  if you cannot actually deliver the services you’re supposed to deliver – there’s no point in starting. Branding is also not something that takes time away from the fundamentals of operations, execution, and management. It is instead a methodology, a different way of looking at how you do these things and innovate the better way to get things better.
People-centric process management: Customers are at the center of a digital organization. Customer Centricity is built upon rigorous business’s capabilities and processes. In order to improve business processes, questioning the reason of existence of the business processes in the first instance, ask the questions; Should this process even exist in the first place? Or is it an inability to imagine a different perspective that could be the big resistance to Customer Centricity taking a firmer hold? Overly rigid process is an outcome of using rigid process approaches where they don't belong. From Change Management perspectives, there should be enough collective experiences in any organization these days on change management to take the changes with systematic steps and measure the results accordingly. But often all along implementation, the same business, and user community put its complete resistance as the majority of the time, management has not made clear about their intentions and goals while embarking on such IT initiative. In very few implementations, customers are making the effort to ascertain how a "day in the life" of any worker at any level. from labor to management, will be impacted due to this IT initiative. Process approaches fit for service, but don't restrict – they should support by getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
Data-based Decision Making: Fundamentally, IT is shifting from a technology custodian to a information steward, and to ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time in the right locations. Information and decision-making are intimately connected and interdependent. For decision-making to be effective, the decision-maker must have enough knowledge to make their decisions rich in information and significantly different from the available data. With digital flow, both  data and knowledge are being convergent in terms what action ensues (for example in analytics), whereas information is divergent as the decision-making process essentially is, and knowledge is where the cultural and social context alignment or misalignment with the information that precedes it.  Knowledge is information in use; knowledge is an expression of understanding relating information and experience accumulated over time, it is about known facts and past events. Information is situated between data and knowledge. And ultimately it’s knowledge that support the decision-making. Therefore, IT needs to manage data-information-knowledge-insight life cycle effectively to maximize information value to achieve business results.  
Working-Learning-Innovation: If the mantra of an traditional workplace is to improve productivity of workforce, and then, it’s still not enough to run a digital IT, because digital is also an age of innovation, the importance of creativity for organizations is well-known. Either being a disruptor, being disrupted, innovation needs to be well embedded into business culture in order to run an IT as an innovation engine of the organization.Creativity in the workplace is fundamentally about the mental production of new ideas - not just any new ideas, but the creation of ideas that are both original and valuable. After researching what happens when business managers use lateral thinking, the requirement that creativity in the workplace also requires the deliberate creation of original and valuable ideas when they are needed - they need to be created on-demand.   People have to be given the opportunity to be creative, they have to become empowered to work, learn and innovate. Thus, for a learning organization, it is not enough to survive only, but for thriving. ‘”Survival learning” or what is more often termed “adaptive learning” is important – indeed, it is necessary. But for a learning organization, “adaptive learning” must be joined by “generative learning,” learning that enhances your 'capacity to create,’ ultimately running an innovative IT organization.
Therefore, running a digital IT is not just about playing some latest technology tools or gadget, or following the trendy practices, it has to keep digital flow from top-down to bottom up; from branding on the surface to tuning the processes underneath; from data driven decisions style to customer-centric mentality, It is the shift from doing digital to being digital. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu