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CIO’s Digital Agenda XXXIV: Silo Effect: How to Breakdown the Barriers

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about 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.
There are different definitions of the silo, by nature it’s about isolation. The segmenting or sectioning of work by skill/knowledge/type/etc, is a necessary component of complex work or large workplaces. But silo mentality is fundamentally about keeping the mind static and keeping the people separate rather than keeping work separate. So what are different angles to understand silo effect, and how to breakdown the barriers to run a holistic digital organization?
       Silo Effect: How to Breakdown the BarriersDigital Master Tuning #73: Why does Silo Happen and How to Bridge It: There are different definitions of the silo, by its nature it’s about isolation. The segmenting or sectioning of work by skill/knowledge/type/etc. is a necessary component of complex work or large workplaces. But silos are fundamentally about keeping the mind static and keeping the people separate rather than keeping work separate.Is Silo Eating your Strategy for dinner: Many of us like the witty quote from Drucker: “culture eats strategy for lunch.” The strategy is indeed in the face of more risks than culture, could it be the SILO – the symptom of industrial management mindset will eat your strategy for dinner?
The Silo Effect in IT Management: There are more than two-thirds of IT projects fail to achieve the expected result. IT organizations are suffering too much from the "siloed" effect to accurately define and deliver the promises of many IT projects. The "failure" of an IT project can be defined as (1) Completely behind schedule, (2) Beyond the budget, and (3) Fails to deliver the value or services which the project was promised to deliver. There are many reasons for these things to happen, silo thinking and decision making is one of the significant root causes project failures and low-level IT maturity.
Is Hierarchy Good or Bad for Systems?  Systems Thinking is the ability to think the "whole," and understand the interconnectivity of its parts as well. As complexity is pushing the boundaries of the thinking and traditional systems, what we do know is "that larger and more complicated systems" do not have the requisite agility to adapt to more complex and adaptive environments.The more nonlinear, interconnected, and interdependent the environment, where uncertainty and emergence become more prevalent, hence accelerated rates of change, the less likely ordered hierarchical systems are to be the answer due to the rigidity. Hence, we need to adapt to the Systems Thinking and reimagine the digital organizational structure.
The Cause and Effect of Silos? Silo is perhaps one of the most paradoxical symptoms in running business at the industrial era, on one side, most of the organizations are still operating in the functional base to improve efficiency; on the other side, the digital nature of hyperconnectivity and interdependence makes it inevitable to break down the silo, because more often than not, the silo thinking becomes the root cause of ineffective leadership; the silo team fragment the strategy, stagnate execution, motivate the unhealthy internal competition and cause more problems than benefits. More specifically, what’s the cause and effect of silos and silo thinking?
Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Five 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 blurring the functional, organizational, and geographical borders in the business ecosystem, it could mean less restrict 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 control, but more clarity on  "why we make decisions the way we do” and what’re the expectations of your work performance.  From IT management perspectives, guiding principles let the organization know what to expect when dealing with IT, and serve as a yardstick by which to measure IT internally and externally, and can spur some great discussions with fellow C-suite members and business unit management. Here are five principles to run a digital IT organization.
One Size Does not Fit All:  The CIO has to be able to navigate the business objectives and corporate strategy, and lead the creation and execution of the corresponding technical strategy for the company. A lot depends on the corporate structure and the culture of the company here. Should IT be completely centralized, or embedded into business units to certain degrees? Should IT put more focus on internal customers or end customers? Should CIOs act more as a Chief Innovation Officer or a Chief Intelligence Officer? When should IT take the orders, and when should IT be a game changer?  There is no one size fits all solution though. Thus, IT leaders need to have the ability to think analytically and synthetically to set IT principles right and manage business solution via high-performance IT team; build the strong business orientation & ability to bring the benefits of IT to solve business issues; cultivate he ability to align the business requirement with the IT capacity. It means that the CIO is able to constantly and dynamically lead an IT structure that will seamlessly support the business and well ahead of the business requirement; the ability to interact with business on their processes and pain areas, the ability to bring out a customer-tailored and technology driven solution, driving adoption of applications (though part of change management, the most difficult piece), be the spinal cord for the organization - integrating various departments, to simplify & unify processes across functional boundaries, and often across the entire enterprise.
“KISS” Principle:  “Keep it Simple” is one of the most important principle and agile philosophy to run a digital IT, though by its nature, IT is complex, it doesn't mean IT should continue to complicate the matters or increase unnecessary complexity without disciplines. Simplicity is a behavioral attitude to see things as and what and where they are and be content and cool as it is. Complexity arises not from nothing. Humans create, though unintentionally in most cases their own problems. Therefore, they have to untie the knots they made themselves, how could you shoot the tangles to see from the different angle, how could you leverage creative thinking to discover the alternative way for problem-solving, and how could you apply Systems thinking to manage complexity via consolidation, optimization, integration, modernization, cloudification in IT management scenario. There are still layers of complexity in simplifying, but you know the elegant solution when you see it.
“SMART” Measurement Principles: Simplicity is surely important, but at times there is a need for complexity in the right place to incorporate the right elements in the calculation, to make the KPI a true indicator of performance. Fortunately, that's what computers are for, to take the grind out of complex calculations. If you follow the SMART principle then you won't go far wrong - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. First measure the right things, and then measure them right. From a business management perspective, IT is business, thus, IT measurement needs to have a strong business focus, not only via the metrics to keep systems on but also via the lenses of business growth and innovation. Irrespective of whether the KPI is simple or complex, the selection of KPIs should be done regarding these three criteria: relevant, clearly defined, balanced (‘RDB’ Criteria),  KPIs need to be specific and measurable and, therefore, logical. It very much depends on how much data you already have. KPIs are normally set based on historical data, benchmarking with other companies either internally or externally or through time and motion studies to determine a baseline. Do not just measure the cost of IT but all the return that it provides.
Doing More with Innovation: The popular IT mantra in the industrial era is “Doing more with less.” But digital is the era for innovation, “doing more with innovation” needs to be one of an important IT management principles to improve the organizational maturity.  Why the innovations happen and who is the strategic partners to drive innovation? Innovations happen because of specific business needs. Unique challenges become more appear as we push the limits of the available technology, which pushes us to find a solution to the problem on hand.  Either disrupt or being disrupted. IT is at an inflection point to lead organizational level digital transformation because it is at the unique position to oversight business processes and processes underpin business capabilities. IT is the key element of business innovation capability, either for catching customer delight or achieving business optimization. IT innovation capabilities directly impact how it helps the business gain competitive advantage and capture upcoming trend to compete for the future. Information technology should be seen by any business as a “digital transformer and focus on VALUE proposition to run a digital IT.
DO NOT let “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”: There are many different perspectives of culture are presented along with diverse ways and means of dealing with it. The healthy workplace culture decreases the need for restrictive policies. Smarter hiring practices and attendance to daily and measurable healthy workplace culture dramatically decreases the need for control and excessive or restrictive policies. Experience between positive performing cultures and mediocre or negative cultures is that they evolve from the platform of trust and respect that cascades from the top. IT plays a critical role in fine-tuning business culture because IT enabled digital process and platform can help bridge silo thinks and harness cross-functional communication and collaboration. Regardless who is setting the principles, to maintain the positive environment, a set of guiding principles can be written on a page. It will be supported by the bulk of employees in defining the boundaries they also wish to maintain.
So setting guiding principles help to provide greater clarification of mission / vision / strategy at a more detailed level: Setting guiding principles is not to manipulate (HOW), but to clarify (WHY);  the guiding principles frame the right questions to ask, not just about searching answers only. There needs to be a pragmatic way of applying whatever principles to the problem in a consistent manner, otherwise, it is a waste of effort to even state them. Principles, Processes, People, Practices, Performance, etc are all critical factors to run a high-performance digital IT. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

CIOs as Chief Influence Officer: How does a CIO Make a Digital Influence

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, the process to technology and capability. IT plays a pivotal role in digital transformation. Given the power of SMAC technologies to fuel business innovations, so how does a CIO make a digital influence, like a Pro?
Innovation Focus: IT is an important element in building innovation capabilities in an organization. IT leaders need to identify the issues associated with innovation in an enterprise and actually have developed a unique model and platform for managing innovation portfolio in a systematic way. IT leaders are often at the right position to oversight business processes, and 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. Innovation as the creation and development of new ideas causes meaningful change for customers and the company. This isn't always a new product or service but can also be an improvement in processes, employee satisfaction or the environmental impact. If it makes your customers happier, and your employees more creative and productive, and the firm will eventually also benefit from that! So IT leaders are at the unique position to orchestrate business innovation symphony.
Software Eats the World: “Software is eating the world.” The digital mantra for CIOs is to run IT as a software business.The software is eating the word, Software Engineering is no longer just an isolated discipline only a few geeks work on it, but a common practice everyone has the chance to play around it, it has permeated into every business in every location, and it underpins the business capability and brand of every digital organization.  IT is shifting from “T” technology-heavy to “I” information savvy; CIOs need to deliver value to the organization. many IT organizations are also doing more with App development to keep IT in a continuous delivery mode, delight customers, and adapt to changes. Application development projects need to bring up the most business value. The performance and innovation provided by Applications Development reflect not just on the CIO, but the whole IT sector. Many predict that the applications will:-Be more user-centric, the user will do the programming and the programmer will build the systems and infrastructure to enable this.-Applications will become more interrelated as we move to a world of systems-of-systems where constraints govern how and what we develop.-Machines, tools, and environments that programmers use will become more powerful, easy-to-use and knowledge-base.
Customer Analysis: IT as an information steward of the business plays a critical role in customer analysis. Customers including prospects should be studied and observed and gain the insight upon. Deep understanding of the user through empathy and observation with the innovator using a more inductive approach such as predictive analytics to what the customer wants to accomplish "next." This involves gaining a deep understanding of the motivational construct of the customer, in order that the innovator can become "anticipatory" of what the customer will likely "want next." There are still quite a bit of work to do in turning analytical results and connecting to the customer satisfaction and business achievement. More often, the analytics team in the company correctly recognizes the customer value, but that knowledge is still only within the analytics team. There are plenty of organizations doing the analytics, but not yet have matured the process enough to drive the front end systems. Some customer analytics focuses on alluring new customer, with the ignorance of long term loyal customers. There're analytics gaps need to be filled out for both developing new customers and delighting the current customers as well.
IT Modernization: In many well established IT organizations, legacy IT systems and processes are critical for business’s survival, but also drag down the business speed of changes, and make their IT organization as a cost center, not a value creator.  IT System complexity arises from the interaction of dynamic components, and can be layered and intricate. Even simple interactions can create amazing complex systems. But IT needs to overcome complication. The complication is a better antonym for simplicity. Complicated systems will no doubt have layers of complexity as well, but can be simplified by reducing the number of components or changing the way they interact. Therefore, IT consolidation, integration, modernization, cloudification, and innovation are the necessary steps in IT management life cycle. The CIOs have to master at conducting such a hybrid digital orchestra. The "conductor" has to lead the in-house musicians and has to take into account the time lag (a fraction of a second) of the orchestras on another continent. They have to keep the in-house order, and must, simultaneously, coordinate with distant contributors; otherwise, the "music" will jar the ears.
Digital Talent Pipeline: IT skill/capability gaps do exist, and people are always the most important asset, especially in IT organization.  IT knowledge life cycle has been shortened due to the changing nature of technology, thus, when assessing talent, more dynamic and balanced approaches are needed, instead of just searching for keywords. Every organization must address their common and unique IT skills requirements and map that out through some sort of skills/competency matrix within their organization. Too often, leaders are allowed to complain generically about what they mean by skill and competency gaps and often they pick the symptom, not digging through the root causes.Digital IT needs to leverage the emerging talent pipelines and shift mindset for understanding talent with empathy, recognize raw intelligence through wise eyes. Forward-looking IT organizations need to discover and develop talent for tomorrow, rather than just hire for yesterday. Data-driven talent management can leverage different variables and evaluate talent and manage performance in more transparent and systematic way. And talent management needs to be well integrated with culture management, knowledge management, and performance management more cohesively.  In addition, whether IT can attract the brightest talent or not also depends on how effective the CIO is marketing his/her organization as a contributor to the corporation and society as a whole,
T today, there is now a greater need for a CIO to understand business drivers and equip with digital mindset,  apply digital technology to speed up IT and build business competitive capabilities, make digital influence which touches every aspect of the business, from customer delight to employee satisfactions, from operation excellence to innovation blossom, to practice digital disciplines and improve organizational agility and maturity.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

How do you Assess “Superior Mindsets” ?

“Hire for characters, and train for skills,” is one of the popular quotes to inspire talent management innovation and break through the routine way to do things either for people management or overall business management. The character is not just about personality, more about how people think and react the circumstances, and capability is, even more, critical than skills due to the nonlinear nature and the shortened knowledge life cycle in the digital age. So the revised mantra could be: “High mindset, and build capabilities. But how do you define “superior mindset”? And can you qualify and quantify characters or mindsets to hire the right people in the right position at the right time?

The definition of "superior mindset" is probably not a single construct: Whether for selection, career development, promotion, or self-development, the conventional assessments are really about ascertaining the individual's "current state." A snapshot of where they are at in that moment of time. To dig into the mindset level, it’s perhaps helpful to break down assessment types: critical thinking, creativity, cognitive skills and decision-making biases; motivational drivers and passions. Behavioral styles and patterns, etc. Altogether and combined, they give you a well-rounded baseline of they "character,” or even deeper, why does a person thinking in a certain way, how does he/she get things done? Does he/she have intellectual curiosity, or the desire to learn new things? You then know what types of individuals they will have challenges with, how inclined are they to guide/inspire/develop other people, what types of roles and careers they connect with, and much more.
All power is in the assessor, not in the tests: The quality of assessors is critical to the quality of assessment result. It’s hard for a small measurement tool to measure the bigger things, it’s also difficult to see the broader vision via narrow lenses. Most talent managers and recruiters keep hanging in the duality tests, that show preferred behavior. It's of course not a surprise that the learning points are the opposites. All assessors had hardly more baggage than Freud, Maslow, and Belbin. How are these people capable of judging others and their capacity as long as they do not know the measurement starting points (= themselves).  The assessor is just as important as the testing tool. Any tool, like a hammer, can do harm if used by someone who was incompetent in how to use the tool well. Some assessors use their tools to make profits. Some assessors are trying to create positive impact. And it’s the assessor that needs to assist in creating helpful action plans and programs for the assessed individuals.
One needs to understand that character oozes out of, thought processes, expressions, actions, and so on so forth. Within every human being, there are core ways of thinking that, when activated, genuinely and authentically unlock their maximum potential to create value in any situation. The character is fed by the heart and mind through the blood running in one’s veins and the heart and mind are guarded by the subconscious. Thus, in order to allow a correct assessment the guard has to be lowered and in order to understand correctly, you really need the acumen and insight to probe in a profound way. This is particularly important to explore character-based personal leadership.  The understanding character is very relevant and timely for those leaders who are seeking new ways to maximize themselves and human capital initiatives in their organizations. For enduring success, we must respect, embrace and then go beyond traditional (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) measures, to individual and collective attitudes, beliefs and commitment principles. CHARACTER or CQ, the Character Quotient!
The assessment not only measures thinking, but teaches the person how to tap into their most powerful and brilliant modes of thinking anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. It raises emotional intelligence to the level of emotional wisdom. It's not about fixing weaknesses, it's about maximizing good thinking and eliminating the negative influence of "weaknesses" and habits so that maximize value (in all forms) can be created. The character or mindset assessment is NOT just a stand-alone assessment. It is the foundation of a full-blown, structured personal and leadership development process. It is also used to assess the "character" of entire organizations -the collective mindset, behaviors and actions. So it’s about how to build and amplify the collective human capabilities and accelerate business growth and innovation.  
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The Multitude of IT Management

Digital IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the driver of business change. It is not just about the fancy new tools or the help desk with monolithic hardware, one of the fundamental goals of running a high-effective IT is to ensure the right people to get the right information at the right time to make the right decisions. From a management perspective, what are the focal points and priorities for IT leaders and management to work on for running a high-performing IT in a systematic way?

Performance Management: As Drucker wisely put, “you can only manage what you measure.” Therefore, it’s important to measure IT value which truly matters for businesses. It’s dangerous to impose metrics just because the focus on what’s measurable is manageable.Distinguish between quantitative and qualitative performance objectives/KPIs.  There are indeed qualitative objectives where the basis for rating performance is the set of criteria that address the question: “what does it mean to achieve this objective?” In some cases, these may also be action plans. Keep them focused on drivers of performance and, appropriately weighted. Further, to populate the scorecard with too many metrics for the sake of measurement is also unproductive. KPIs and the associated metrics drive priorities and behaviors. Selecting the right KPIs is one of the most important steps in measurement, and overall performance management.
Change Management: Digitization on itself often requires huge cultural change. If digitization does not succeed in changing the mindset, beliefs, and behaviors of management, the change efforts will be deemed to fail. Hence, Change Management is seldom effective, because many companies try to build the highly valued building before ensuring there is a sufficient "foundation" to support them. In addition look at problems in a proactive way to make the right policies. If an organization really needs substantial change, it is because the leadership has not provided the necessary factors of success.  It’s the question every change leader should ask himself/herself almost every month, if not week. And there is no need to look at it in a reactive mode as a ‘problem,’ but it would be desirable to look at it proactively and have a ‘policy,’ to catalyze changes. Therefore, select potentials, reform them, then go by such multiplicators. So if you have the right balanced insight, knowledge and experience needed to create trust and confidence and believe that we are all in this together in the same boat, then employees should not show resistance, and then you can utilize tools to help with efficiency, communication, structure and control, but you need to get the basics right first.
Process Management: Strong business processes have better chance to deliver a better result. Therefore, process management is not a one-time project, but a tough journey that the senior executives should understand and navigate through, because processes underpin business capabilities, and capability underpin strategy execution. Important business processes reviewed regularly, refined regularly and is transparent across the business should help bring into alignment most of the key parts of the business. However, many organizations do not have alignment between strategic intentions and their ability to execute those intentions. "Digitizing" the BPM thinking is a must; because it brings not just automation with improved efficiency but real time measurement which allows real empowerment of people and this opens a new door. So it is up to new pioneers/challengers to create the supporting software that addresses these issue bringing simplicity and power to the business in their language….quickly and delivering tangible added value to the business
IT Project Portfolio Management: IT is the business. There should be no such thing as IT Projects. Each level of business transformation management -portfolio, program and project management should focus on different business objectives but works cohesively to deliver business value with effectiveness and efficiency. Project management is doing things right, focus on delivering a tangible outcome from an individual project; The result is that organizations deliver projects on time and within budget, but the value delivered from those projects is not optimized or aligned to the organization’s strategy. Program is the intermediate layer that is focused on the delivery of business benefits through the identifying interdependence of a series of interrelated projects. Portfolio management is doing right things via focus on the decision-making process around which programs and projects should be executed based on their alignment with the goals and objectives of the organization, and therefore, getting increasingly more attention with large organizations that have poor visibility and control over their project portfolio. Once you start treating projects that way and measure success of business project portfolio as a whole, rather than keeping technology ones separate with silo thinking, and ensure that all business units required for the success of the project have requirement clearly defined with engaged stakeholders and with senior business leaders on the steering committee, you will see success of all projects increase and keep running the healthy IT portfolio.
Quality Management: As a degree of quality is in everything people do and experience. People as the actors in the quality process determine the extent to which the business desire to achieve quality. What is required is clarifying the purpose and engaging all the people involved working together as a team to excel in the delivery of product/service, because quality management is to help them in doing what they are doing better, easier and cost efficient, this is particularly critical for IT because statistically it has low project success rate and is often struggling with overloading tasks and under staff challenges. The principles of quality depend on the people employing them. In order to get quality out of anything whether it is people or process, you need to provide investment, dedication and commitment. Quality is not one specific department's job, it's the holistic management discipline, and you have continuously improve upon it.
Talent Management: People are the most critical asset in organizations and digital is the age of people. Business is also moving from treating talent as a human resource to thinking talent as human capital, not just the cost, but the investment for the future, and from extended research, there are clear linkages between strategic talent practices and improved corporate performance. The speed of business is accelerated; the talent demand for IT department is also never ending. However, the crux of the problems is that IT tends to employ the wrong people, and HR often plays 'buzzword bingo' because they don’t really understand what they have been tasked to the source. Besides hiring, retaining great people, and measuring knowledge worker’s performance is perhaps more tougher than measuring IT performance, because there are so many variables and intangible factors to leverage, traditional competency model more focuses on quantified result, with ignorance of qualified or innovative effort; or only measure short-term productivity, without enough consideration of long term skill set matching, Therefore, bridging skill/capability gaps and innovating talent performance management is one of the significant challenges facing IT management.
IT Budget/Finance Management: With the accelerated digital speed, IT faces the pressure to transform from a cost center to value creator. Therefore, it is more critical than ever to keep IT fit and run a financially healthy digital IT. However, in the well-established typical enterprise, 70% of their IT budget is being spent on “keep the lights on” activities, leaving only 30% available for innovation. That is perhaps the very reason the majority of IT organizations are running in a react mode and stick to the lower level of IT maturity. IT leaders need to strike the right balance of “run, grow and transform,” and from the budgeting perspective, continue to figure out what’s an ideal ratio to both “keep the light on” and drive innovation and business growth. Corporate IT has no choice but to embrace transformational change or literally face extinction.
IT needs to sharpen all different management capabilities and play a different role to the situation at hand. 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. With the multitude of manageability, IT can proactively work 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 needsFollow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Running IT as an Innovation Engine in Digital Organizations

Organizations large or small are at the digital journey, and corporate IT is also shifting from a support center to an innovation engine, because more often information is the lifeblood, and technology is the disruptor to push the business world into the digital paradigm. Hence, for any forward-thinking organizations, IT mantra is shifting from “doing more with less,” to “doing more with innovation. But more specifically, how to run IT as an innovation engine to accelerate digital shift?


IT as the catalyst of business innovation: The definition of innovation is simple - to gain benefit by doing something different. Innovation is to have a new perspective of things. Innovation follows basic rules, which are adapted depending on the company's situation and ambition.  Innovation can be categorized as empowered innovation (creative disruption), sustainable innovation (better version of product/service) or efficiency innovation (process improvement). IT can drive all sort of innovation, proactively pushing ideas on how to leverage technology to drive revenue growth, increase business productivity,  flexibility, and agility. Often IT department are so busy in mundane day to day activities, they lose the sense of creativity over the period of time. Hence, CIOs have to learn the right and real things about organizations, not just via IT lenses, but via business lenses. Because then, he/she can practice that knowledge in the field to start innovating at the organizational level.
Process Innovation: Nowadays, technology is often the innovation disrupter, 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. The challenge is to come up with a systematic approach that does not add more burden to an organization that is already dealing with productivity fatigue. Therefore, IT plays a critical role in business process innovation and strike the right balance between innovation and standardization. Standardization is inside-the-box (ITB), and Innovation is outside-the-box (OTB). Hence, organizations indeed need both, and, in fact, cannot realistically exist without a healthy balance of both. That balance, ought to actually be strongly in favor of standardization at the vast majority of the time!
IT staff as innovation champions to revitalize the business culture: Due to the changing nature of technology, IT staff also needs to be in a continuous learning mood to challenge the old way to do things, being able to become innovative or close is being able to think, and create new things based on its own needs, true knowledge is the optimal solution. Innovation is all about doing things better, differentiate yourself from your completion, run, grow and transform the business. So educate IT team on the business and encourage them to engage with business counterparts in a value-oriented manner. Building an environment where the only thing you get fired for is not asking hard questions. Often the most disruptive person is the one you want to harness. IT does play a significant role in not only innovating the hard element of the business such as processes, but also the soft element of the organization such as culture.  
IT is the key component in catalyzing digital innovation and building up differentiated business capabilities nowadays. When IT Executives move beyond commodity management and begin to show higher level strategic value and dedicate more resources on innovation, then IT is lifting up its maturity from reactively responds to the business’s order to proactively enable strategy execution, and from a support center to an innovation engine.  
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Talent Management Brief: See Through Talent from Different Angles III Jan. 2016

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3+million page views with about #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, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates.
People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. “Hiring the right person to the right position at the right time,” is the mantra of many forward-thinking organizations. The question is how would you define the right people? How do you define wrong, average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person? Or put simply, for what should they be right? Traditional Performance Management focusing on measuring what an employee does (mainly being told to do) in a quantitative way is not sufficient to identify high performance or high potential, should we see through talent from different angles?
See Through Talent from Different Angles Three Questions to Assess an Employee’s Brightness. The majority of us like brightness and fear darkness, because the brightness reminds us of the sunshine, love, and optimism. In our data-driven modern society, can we qualify and quantify brightness? When we compliment someone bright, does it more refer to physical healthiness, intellectual smartness, or spiritual maturity? Do extroverts look brighter than introverts because it seems they are more visible, talkative, more prone to action than contemplation, and generally show warm interest in their surroundings? What are the good questions to assess an employee’s brightness? And what kind of brightness can truly brighten our surrounding and even the world?Three Questions to Assess an Employee’s Versatility? People are always the most invaluable asset or human capital in organizations. And businesses need to continue to develop their talented employees, unleash their potentials, build and amplify the collective human capabilities to compete not just for now, but for the future. The question is how can you identify their talent, versatility, to put the right people to the right positions at the right time, and how would you define the right people? How do you define wrong, average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person? Or to put simply, for what should they be right?
Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Flexibility Digital organizations today are hyperconnected and over-complex, with well mixed physical workplace and virtual team setting; multicultural, multi-generational, and multi-devicing workforce. The organization of the future is a business designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of the strategic imperatives of the 21st century. The work is not the place you go, but a live organization and an experiment lab you can connect the future dots. Thus, flexibility has emerged as one of the important characteristics for both digital leaders and professionals. But how to assess a person’s flexibility via questioning?
Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Discernment Organizations and society as a whole go deeper and deeper into digital dynamic with “VUCA” characteristics (Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), either being a digital leader or a digital professional today, it’s more important than ever to have strong discernment and sound judgement to make effective decisions and bring wisdom to the workplace. Discernment means the ability to judge well. The verb ‘discern’ simply means to detect with the senses. So how to assess a person’s discernment via questioning?
Three Questions to Assess an Employee’s "Digital Fitness"? Digital workforce is multigenerational, multicultural, multitasking and multi-devicing; digital workplace is more flexible and productive, propelled by technology to affect where we work, how we work and at what time we choose to work. However, it doesn’t mean you are perfectly fit in because you can play the latest digital gadgets, or you are an active user at multiple social platforms. So how to assess an employee’s digital fitness via inquiries?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.See through talent from different angles II Dec. 2015See through talent from different angles I Nov. 2015Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Five Views from the Vision

Generally speaking, vision is a future state of beings, it is to zoom into the future as if it were closer. Organizations large or small are at the journey of digital transformation, therefore, the vision thing does matter, it is one of the important leadership traits for driving toward the right directions. More specifically, which views do leaders see or perceive via their visions?

A Predictive View: Visionary leaders see possibilities before others, but they also need to tackle great challenges with grand consequences over long time spans; they convey a vision based on principles that lift humanity. They intuitively draw on the timeless wisdom and cognizance and present it in a new synthesis and frame the fresh picture to meet the particular need of the times. Vision is a future state of being, vision makes you feel passion about what is going to happen - the opportunities, it is a clear choice among future scenarios that promotes certain behavior. A visionary mind has the ability to think the past, perceive what is now and foresee the future.
A Multidimensional View: The more dimensions the lens has, the vivid leaders can manifest a vision. Vision is something you see, others don't, and a visionary mind is able to and not afraid to leverage contrarian views to shape a holistic picture. Visionary leadership is based on a balanced expression of the spiritual, intellectual, emotional and cultural dimensions.  It requires core values, clear vision, empowering relationships, and innovative action. That also said, a visionary leader might be a futurist, but a futurist may not be a visionary leader.
An Alternative View: The "aha" vision is an "entrepreneurial" attribute; the ability to envision a solution to a perceived or not-yet-perceived need. It takes versatility to shape new, new box, especially noted for transforming old mental maps or paradigms, and creating strategies that are “outside the box” of conventional thought. They embody a balance of right brain and left brain thinking.  They would ask “What if we do things in a new way” or 'How can I make things better for the whole?' A good leader asks the questions anyone would want to ask, if only you had his/her perspective.
An Inquisitive View: A great leader provides the vision to achieve the results that all would want to go if you could define the challenges. An effective leader should not only ask a deep “WHY” - to diagnose the root cause of problems but also ask the positive “Why NOT?" -The refusal to be bound by constraints and limitations  and a pursuit of possibilities rather than impossibilities seems to be a hallmark of great leadership achievements. A true leader has vision and insight to ask “What If & How about.” You could say their inquisitiveness leads to the vision, or their vision further drives their inquisitiveness to see things differently.
An Outliners’ view: A visionary is often an outlier - the one who steps out of a conventional thinking box, or linear pattern,  therefore, they could see things further or deeper. In statistics, an outlier is an observation point that is distant from other observations. When data scientist and analyst collect data, sometimes there are values that are "far away" from the main group of data. Are outliers real data or error? If outliers have a story, shall you listen to? Understanding outliers is important for forecasting. Indeed, how to deal with outliers when one's focus is on forecasting or classification? Now if your focus is on forecasting, you need to understand outliers, and perhaps refine your model.
At the digital age with “VUCA” characteristics, vision becomes more important to both catch opportunities and manage risks. The vision should be attainable; however, the vision shouldn't be a fixed target. It should be stable enough to make it worthwhile to make a concerted effort to attain it and dynamic enough to be able to react to any change in business direction or context. An attainable vision is necessarily not setting precedence to constraints. A vision should be attainable subject to current times and its ability to adapt to changing times. The vision thing does matter more nowadays.
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How to Close the Gaps in IT Talent Management

People are always the most invaluable asset in any organization, and having the right person in the right position at the right time is always one of the biggest challenges facing in any business. This is particularly true for IT, due to the changing nature of technology and abundance of information. Some fresh mindset, new skills, or integral digital capabilities are needed every day because we live in a time of rapidly changing digital dynamic. So how to identify and close the gaps in IT talent management more specifically?
Skill Gaps:  There are skill gaps existing in modern IT organization because IT is no longer just a support center or help desk. IT needs both talented specialized generalist to connect the dots, have an in-depth understanding about business, and do more with innovation; IT also needs specialists to keep the light on and focus on technical excellence. It’s important to identify the skill gaps and define the  technical/functional competencies required to achieve business goals. And then training (the mix of the formal and informal train) is one of the practices to close the gap for talent development.  It's often the case that organization’s training without defining the value impacts what they are looking for. If you know what is done now, what the results are and have been, and you know where you need to be, you can plan for several options.
Capability Gaps: If closing skill gap is tough, and then bridging capability gaps could be more challenging. Because often skills are linear, but capabilities are more integral. Skills can be trained via instilling knowledge, but often capability needs to take time, inner drive, and situations to build. For example, thinking is an invisible, but “hard” capability which can not be taught completely, especially multidimensional thinking. There exist a stereotype about the skills set an individual is perceived to possess. But in the reality, there can be more or even less than expected. There are talent arenas such as synthetic capability, not very specific skills, can't be easily analyzed and hence, a recruiter fails in fitting the right person to the job. They might even sometimes reject the correct person for the job based on the same stereotyped perception. If these organizations are not finding qualified talent for their roles in a variety of verticals, you then need to start looking at the recruiting process. Hire talented, intelligent people who are ready and able to continuously learn without needing hand-holding. Understanding the talent availability from capability lens helps the business make more strategic HR decisions and look at longer term talent pipelining, so they are ready to access to labor pools full of well-educated and life-long-learning employees.
Cognitive Gaps: Many organizations take initiatives about diversity programs, in essence, it’s not just about bridging the gaps at the superficial level, but to closing the cognitive gaps. The traditional concept of diversity can not fill out the gaps caused by cognitive difference necessarily, and the strengths of the problem-solving capabilities people bring to the team.The heterogeneous team with the cognitive difference is more innovative than the homogeneous group setting, as good ideas are multi-dimensional, they take root in unsuspected places and they evolve with time and by unexpected connections. 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.
Communication Gaps: Today’s business is complex, not only business and IT speak different languages very often, even within the IT organization, different IT specialists may speak their own dialects or jargons, and “lost in translation” becomes the very barrier for effective communication and collaboration. Speaking common business language to enhance cross-team and cross-functional communication is important for solving business problems because IT not just a technical challenge, but a business enabler.  More critically, IT leaders need to learn the executive language and advocate IT value proposition, and must do this from the angle of C- level executive concerned about the core business drivers first and not the tools and trappings of its management.
Culture Gaps:  IT leaders always should ask themselves whether the workplace is healthy enough to attract the best and brightest. If any talent gaps existing, what’s the root causes behind it? Is it caused by out-of-date IT geeky image? or is it caused by outdated culture ingredients? An unhealthy workplace is usually identified by the lack of morale evidenced throughout the organization, the  characteristics may include un-professionalism, unsatisfactory communication, and in general, the low rate of employee engagement. These are just some of the characteristics -- and the numerous possible combinations thereof -- would make a workplace more or less healthy. Therefore, it is important to expand the talent pipeline, innovate talent management and performance management, and attract and sustain the bright, capable and positive people and bring wisdom to the workplace.
Bridging so many gaps in IT talent management is obviously not an overnight job, it’s a thorny journey and takes the thought out planning and practices. Weather IT can attract the brightest talent or not also depends on how effective the CIO is marketing his/her organization as a contributor to the corporation and society as a whole, IT knowledge life cycle has been shortened due to the changing nature of technology, thus, when assessing talent, more dynamic and balanced approaches are needed, and more innovative and forward-thinking practices need to experiment. Because nowadays, IT is no longer just an order follower, but a digital champion in the organization. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 1/21/2016

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. Here is the weekly insight of the “Future of CIO” blog for the third week of 2016.

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” Blog 1/21/2016“Future of CIO” 2500 Blog Posting Sum Up Slides, Video: In the industrial age, CIOs are the second class executive who often does not have a seat at the big table to make strategy, and who spends most of time and resource on “keeping the light on.” However, digital means the increasing speed of changes, data abundance, and hyperconnectivity, technology is often the very disrupter of innovation, and information is the lifeblood of organizations, many forward-thinking organizations empower their CIOs to be the frontrunner, digital transformer, recognize CIOs as communication hub and change agent due to the unique position they hold to oversight business processes, and interweave business capabilities.
Digital Master One-Year Anniversary Sum Up Slides, Video, Blogs: The purpose of “Digital Master” is to envision the multidimensional impact that digital philosophy, technology, and methodology will have on the future of business and human society.
Three Traits to Bridge Digital and Global Leadership Gaps: We are at the age of digital dawn, now the physical barriers can no longer be the walls to separate people from communicating and sharing knowledge and insight, are we on the way to recognize the best of the best, or simply blend the variety of perspectives into the new ideas and solutions, and more critically, what are emergent traits to bridge global leadership gaps, and develop the new generation of digital leaders and managers who can gain respect, win hearts and minds not just locally, but globally?
Three Trends in Digital Leadership  More and more organizations are heading to the digital journey, it takes digital leadership to encompass the right direction, empower the right talent and enable the long-term transformation. People tend to make leadership very complex, but in its most simple form, leadership is about the future and direction, innovation and improvement, and it is about how to practice and amplify positive influence. Now we live in the hyperconnected digital age with always-on businesses, interdependent ecosystem, and multi-level digital communication channels, what are emergent trends of digital leadership.Three Agile Aspects in Strategy Execution: Making strategy is important because it navigates organizations toward the right direction for businesses’ long-term success, but strategy execution is more challenging because it consumes so many resources, business /human capitals, and there are so many pitfalls or hidden risks for doing it effectively. Execution has seemingly increased in priority as the result of the rising frequency of digital disruption and turbulence today. And strategy execution success is more dependent on the business's agility to response to changes. So how to apply agile philosophy to manage strategy execution more effectively?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