Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1373

Well Wish or Criticism: Which Contributes More to your Success?

One who criticizes is a critic. Constructive criticism is the criticism or advice that is useful and intended to help or improve something, often with an offer of possible solutions. But destructive criticism often performed with the intention to harm, shame, derogate and destroy someone's creation, prestige, reputation, and self-esteem. So during your journey of professional development or beyond, how do you deal with different opinions and attitudes, and well-wishers or critic: who is more important to your success?
Constructive critics are like mirror which not only shows our lacuna but also gives alert of forthcoming challenges we are facing. It is also important to know what context are we using the term "critic,” the constructive criticism such as good advices or timely feedback are crucial to our professional advancement. Even the right dose of shame effect might stimulate one’s energy to innovate and improve. Not to have Critics might make your path easy, but you might not be able to explore your true potential. However, pay more attention to those destructive criticism with negative intentions, and applying wisdom to handle it in positive way.
Both well-wishers and constructive critics can be motivators depending upon the real world scenario: It is how you manage criticism and keep moving forward is the mantra of success. In this path to accelerate progress, it’s the time when your Well wishers turn out to be "Well" wishers, and Critics your best Ally. And it is also a world where success is a result of support from those who are able check - WIIIFM... “What is In It For Me.” One who is able to sustain the undesirable situations, conflicts, oppositions and is able to make one's way would succeed in his/her endeavour.
Criticism from a "Competent and genuine critic" is really good for further improvement. One must be capable of imbibing such real criticism.A critic who is a well wisher will do good. If there are only well wishers, they could be blind followers or flatterers too..Well-wishers & constructive critics at the same time are most likely your friends.  And you need to stay away from those who are jealous of your potential success are your enemies, or just release negative energy.  Believe of what you do and perseverance make things happen, or your wish come true. No one knows better than you.
The constructive criticism and hearty well-wishes provide you excellent advice or feedback. The criticism with positive intention is that it calls to make a person much more self-aware and can fuel professional progress and personal growth. Treat them as information and perception, but you have the choice what story you put to it. The excellent feedback gives you accurate information to improve; great questions to self-aware; and keen insight to help you grow and mature.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Five Stages in Change Management

Digital is all about the change, and the speed of change is increasing. and it is multi-faceted. “Change Management” is the overarching umbrella, that encompasses extensive planning, communication, creativity, collaboration, measuring outcomes in a shared and trust environment, and being able to declare and end point and successful conclusion. But more specifically, what are the necessary steps in Change Management life Cycle:


Define: It’s important to understand the big WHY about changes, no change is for its own sake, the first step is to define the initial value proposition and determine demand and estimated pipeline. Change has different scope and effect, from small changes such as software updating, business process tuning; to large changes such culture innovation, or radical digital transformation. Often Change is “un” nature activity, you need to focus, also, make an effort to sustain it. So the newly established behaviors or the way to work will be in harmony with the well-defined value proposition, and change can maintain its momentum.
Assessing: It takes a lot of effort and resource to make change happen, therefore, it’s important it’s important to first understand how much change capability (people, process, and technology) is really required for the effort you are kicking off. An honest assessment of the lessons learned from previous projects could be a good place to begin.
Building: It’s also important to build a strong change leadership/management team and enable them with effective tools, methodology against the value proposition defined above. Change Management needs to be people-centric, shouldn’t just put emphasis on change tools. Unless you get the people side right even the most awesome plans and technical expertise still fall over! The implementation of any significant change process usually succeeds or fails because of the leadership of that change process. Leadership and management are two distinct and complementary systems of action and they have to be integrated seamlessly. Pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance are the logical steps in managing change scenario. Walking people through the process of resistance is key. The change should be based on planning strategy; there is long term mythology for big changes & short term mythology.
Collaborating: More often, the large scale of change takes cross-functional communication, as well as change management methodology/system integration. Cross-silo or cross-divisional collaboration is crucial to building dynamic digital capabilities. It is imperative that people be willing to seek out help, break down silos, and harness cross-functional collaboration as they work to make change happens, generate new ideas or solve problems. Communicate gratitude for others' contributions. Assure the goals to achieve changes are well communicated. Define and implement collaboration tools to be used. Designate duties or accept duties assigned, to make change management not fluffy, but substantial.
Get Result: Although many change management programs target on long term business transformation, it is also important to get some quick wins to demonstrate values, boost the moral, amplify the practice, and sustain the change effect. Staying positive is certainly critical as you move through change. Continue to brainstorm what people are happy about as a result of the changes going on. there is no growth without change. Change Management often goes hand-in-hand with Strategy Management and performance Management, it’s also practical to set performance indicators to measure the right things, as well as measure them right.
Change Management is no longer just a one time project, but an ongoing, multi-faceted business capability, there are varying factors in managing an effective change management program, thus, all stages must be handled with attend and proficiency to ensure success. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

CIO’s Digital Agenda XXX: The Pitfalls to Avoid in Digital Transformation

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.2 million page views with about 2300+ 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.
Digital transformation is a thorny journey, there are many roadblocks on the way, and numerous pitfalls lead to the failure, so how to identify and avoid them in order to drive digital transformation effortlessly?The Pitfalls to Avoid in Digital Transformation Five Pitfalls for Why Strategy Fails: Crafting a good strategy is more challenging than ever.  In a 2011 survey conducted amongst 140 companies, 54% cited market volatility and 38% mentioned alignment with corporate goals as the leading pressures facing strategic planning. From another cross-industry survey: 65% of organizations have an agreed-upon strategy. 14% of employees understand the organization’s strategy. Less than 10% of all organizations successfully execute the strategy. More specifically, what are pitfalls to cause the majority of strategy fail? Or does strategic planning need a strategy?
Five Aspects Why Major IT Projects are more likely to Fail than Other Business Initiatives:  Statistically, major IT projects are 20 times more likely to fail than other business initiatives, and the larger the project the (exponentially) much higher the risk. On one hand, it’s understandable, due to the complex nature of technology and rapidly change business dynamic; on the other hand, there’re many pitfalls which can be avoided if organizations can learn from other’s failures.
How Does a Senior Leader Deal With Blind spots? There’s knowing unknown, there’s unknowing unknown, so it's not a new topic about “Blind Spots,” everyone perhaps has some, but as a senior business leader (or any kind of leader), the blind spots will cloud your vision, trigger your negative emotion, cause your decision ineffectiveness, and screw your leadership competency. So what're the causes of the blind spot, and how to deal with them logically?
How to Avoid Micromanagement Pitfalls: Micromanagement generally has a negative connotation, it means the managers put too tight control on their employees or team or insignificant details, it perhaps causes more damage than benefit. And many management experts thought that micromanagement is indeed one of the most destructive patterns a leader - middle or senior - can have. And from a culture perspective, ”not being micromanaged" almost always comes up. So why does micromanagement cause problems, and how to avoid such micromanagement pitfalls?
Is Culture the #1 Root Cause to Fail Strategy Organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to manage, lead, yet most importantly to execute. Great culture saves even the mediocre talent and plans. Many companies fail in execution more than 70%, and culture is often the root cause to such failures. It is about many different matters like resistance to change, silos thinking with competing agendas, lack of clear and decisive leadership, leadership actions inconsistent with strategy, poor communication of strategy, lack of accountability on follow-through;
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

Three Practices of Digital Innovation

Generally speaking, innovation is to transform novel ideas to achieve their business values. Thus, innovation is a discipline and a set of practices as well. Innovation helps to tackle the complexities of business dynamic in the digital ecosystem, but often within itself, it needs to change and improve as well. Therefore, digital paradigm shift also includes the perspective of building a scalable innovation environment or innovation ecosystem. It is also important to fine tune innovation processes and develop a set of practices to manage innovation portfolio more effectively.
Systematic Innovation: Innovation can be viewed as consisting of many different stages: idea generation, development, and implementation. Creativity stage is generally accepted to be less structured than development strategy, and the later is likely to be far more process driven than the former. A systematic innovation approach is to depict innovation as a system rather than a traditional process, its performance depends on the alignment of various business components such as people, resources, information & technologies, actions, control, etc. Thus, systematic innovation practice means to manage innovation, not as a one-time initiative, but a structured way with fine-tuning processes and a set of practical tools used to create or improve product/service/process that deliver value-added solutions to customers or delight employees as well. Even for the “soft flavored innovations,” such as communication, management, or culture innovation, it is important to have some degree of a “hard-wired” innovation system to translate into business processes or change mechanisms with the proper metrics to monitor it. Though such structure or processes shouldn’t be overly rigid to stifle innovation. The systematic innovation is based on the in-depth understanding business issues,  it’s important to do the systematic analysis of the true business problems, opportunities, or dilemmas, and then the practice of systematic innovation can focus on mapping and aligning the important business elements to solve them in a structured way.
Intrapreneurship or Corporate Entrepreneurship: Compared to nimble startups, many well-established organizations are struggling with innovation, due to the legacy technologies or processes, silo thinking, change inertia, or rigid hierarchy. So what are the strategies or practices to advocate innovation in those companies? Intrapreneurship is considered as a relatively recent concept to practice innovation in large organizations to close the innovation gaps, especially for business model innovation, it runs up against a “not now, later” obstacle. For example, if a well-established organization identifies a new value proposition that requires the change on the business model or create the new one, then it’s strategically safer to develop the new venture and run it with faster speed. Now many organizations that are in the digital journey also run in bimodal speed, to strike the balance of stability and innovation, efficiency and agility. Overall speaking, corporate entrepreneurship is embodying risk-taking and more radical changes, but it helps the company  to develop either the new business or the new capability to create revenue and improve the to pline growth, and promote & sustain organizational performance and renewal the business energy to be a digital disruptor, rather than “being disrupted.”
Hybrid Innovation: We live in the world with both physical building and internet environment, the hybrid of many things from energy to technologies, etc. It is hard to think of any innovation at not a hybrid nature, a combination of something old with something new, or a number of new things. And digital innovation is mainly an incremental-radical innovation continuum. Often the potential benefits from innovation and risks are proportional: the incremental innovation starts with small objectives and aim to achieve business improvement (products/service/process), and brings short term value additions; while radical innovation often starts with a problem or a challenge, having no solution in the current situation, it may have more “creatively disruptive” characteristics, it brings something new, something that couldn’t have been possible without innovation, and it shows amazingly differentiated business value for the long term. Therefore, innovation portfolio management does require to keep the hybrid theme and leverage the variety of business factors, not just have the interdisciplinary understanding to connect the dots and see what’s possible, but also have the technical expertise to create the multifaceted values, even disruptions if necessary.
Either at the individual or organizational level, creativity and innovation become #1 important factor to achieve the strategy. It is the core activity of digital evolution. And the speed of innovation also needs to be accelerated. So the flow of innovation will have reached a new level, a level that can address the “VUCA” challenges of digital dynamic.

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What’s the In-Depth Understanding about Simplicity Principle in Agile

"Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential." - Agile Principle
"Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential." is an Agile Principle written in Agile manifesto. When you are Agile you think on value for the customer, end user you name it, you eliminate waste, so you deliver that value quickly avoiding extra code, extra work, features that nobody uses, etc. Many people want to adopt Agile because they think it will help them deliver software faster because of process improvement. But in reality, one of the reasons to see improved productivity is because of the simplicity principle. What’s further understanding about Agile’s simplicity principle?
Maximize the amount of high-value work you do, also, maximize the amount of low-value work you don't do. prioritizing on what you need to be doing. Deliver the fundamental core need, then assess if you need to go deeper, or move on to something else. Agile can handle the concept of opportunity and cost practically and gracefully.  his principle highlights the importance of identifying waste in the work -whether it is development or testing or any other activity in the project so that team is fully productive in achieving their commitment.You can implement features that no one uses, but when you take early feedback and focus on the customer being satisfied, you will know when to stop working on a feature and focus on other priorities.  
Another concept in Agile is the idea of "just barely good enough.” Agile is based on an incremental development approach to start with something simple and basic, get it done as quickly as possible, and then add to it incrementally as necessary to meet the need. That is called the "Minimum Viable Product" or "Minimum Marketable Feature.”  It's also helpful to know that adding functionality that is not absolutely needed by the business now often adds costs that are "not linear," due to "Feature Interaction." This can multiply costs. It simply means that you should not over-engineer a system. Develop only the functionality that is needed, using high-quality approaches and code, but do not add bells and whistles that are not needed yet, keep it simple by delivering quickly what is being asked and let the users validate that. “There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.” Peter Drucker
Agile requires a spirit of trust and partnership between the business users and the development team. Many people try to over-design or "gold-plate" something to make it as sophisticated as possible. Also, many users will ask for every possible requirement you can imagine - thinking that if they don't ask for everything, they may not get what they need and want. Teams need to simplify so that you can reduce waste. To do more with less is again to reduce waste. Teams need to find out the complexities within the system and break them down to simplify so that they can focus on things that are needed and eliminate those that are no more required to be done. Doing this successfully requires a spirit of trust and partnership between the business users and the development team. The users have to trust that they will ultimately get a solution that meets their needs if they work with the development team in this incremental approach.

In general, simplicity enforces agile values. It’s a call to scrutinize your working practices to ensure they are contributing towards agile values such as early and continuous delivery, responsiveness to change, a close and frequent collaboration between business people and developers.
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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 put simply, for what should they be right?
Q1: How well do you align skills, strength, interest, knowledge, and passion to the career pursuit, or from talent management perspective, how can you identify and develop the needed talent by digging into “who they are” ? Talent is neither just about busyness nor linear skills, you need to keep your hands on the wheel, eyes opened, and ears to the ground. People have the different working and living styles, some are busy with saturated plans of all different activities and hobbies; others may concentrate on a few important things matter to them. It’s hard to judge which group is more talented on the surface, and the important thing is about time management, discover your authenticity, and how can you build your professional capabilities via both diversification of skills, and have dedication to sharpen them through? How can you strengthen your strength, but also improve your weakness? How can you keep yourself passionate about what you are doing, and what you want to be? How to be a lifetime learner to not just accumulate knowledge, but capture insight and gain the wisdom? And from talent management perspective, how to build an authentic business culture to keep the positive energy flow, discourage unhealthy competitions, and encourage people to grow for both themselves and for the business’s long term prosperity. So the effort or work professionalism are needed to be best awarded when there is a line of sight to shape a high-performing culture and achieve a particular business outcome.
Q2: How can you set the priority, and strike the right balance of working hard and working smart?Talent and versatility need to be measured in both quantitative and qualitative way. Work hard and work smarter need to go hand in hand. To achieve success both as an individual and an employee, it is important that you understand your work environment, understand what is required to be done, have the right resources; including the appropriate mindset, and channel your energy into what is expected of you. Hard work is required to eventually be successful. Hard work is very important, but do not be a busy fool. The key of hard work is to be sure you are working hard on those things that matter and not work hard on those things that don't - the key to hard work is setting the right priorities and expectations and sticking with that philosophy. Working Hard is really working smarter, with the right mindset and attitude! In today's workforce demographics (Boomer, Gen X, Y and Millennial's), you must be clear on balancing the "Thinking & Doing" to improve Quality, Creativity, and Productivity, etc.. Hard work is relative, but what is important is to well manage the plan, effort, and time. With the right amount and type of effort applied strategically with good timing, you will dribble your way to achieving your ultimate goals.
Do you have a set of capabilities- recombinant, unique and differential, so such versatility is not just separate skills, but onion-like integral abilities?  Capability is not the same as your certificate, major, skill, or experience, etc. Say, reading, writing, or speaking are skills, but communication is capability; engineers, doctors, or accountants are profession, but problem-solving is capability; an integral capability is a set of relevant capabilities to solving more complex problems or achieve better result. Skills can be trained via instilling knowledge, but often capability needs to take time and situations to build: Thinking is an invisible, but “hard” capability which can not be taught completely; change/innovation capability goes beyond any professions, or put another way, any type of professionals need change ability to make continuous improvement. Not every professional is a sales person, but almost every digital professional, especially leaders, need to master at what to sell and how to sell  - ideas, strategy, influence, practices., etc.  Speaking multiple languages is the skill, but culture cognition and empathy are capabilities. Often people have different hobbies to gain the skills, but it’s harder to build the capability which become an integral element of their professional ability to do things differently. And sometimes it even turns to be a distraction from building their strength.
Capability  is something deeper that empowers or boosts skills, but how to identify it, acquire it, improve it, or stimulate it? It has to be identified as distinct from a skill, which is acquired by discovering the strength, learning and practice. And skills, certificates, experiences, etc. are just some subcomponents to build the certain level of capability or competency. Digital workforce is more dynamic and digital workplace needs to be more people -centric, identify, develop and amplify the collective human capabilities (the “business versatility”) is strategic for businesses’ long term success.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Three Characteristics of DIgital Strategy

Digital strategy planning is a living process, and a good strategy is not “superficial,” it needs to dig deeper and diagnose the root causes of emergent business issues, because digital organization is a part of dynamic business ecosystem that connects digital dots or resources inside and outside of the organization to create values for customers. So the piecemeal strategy of bolting digital channels to the business is no longer sufficient, and digital strategy needs to be shifted from top-down one-way direction to organizational inclusion, from static and linear strategy-execution scenario to dynamic strategy execution continuum; from a single strategy documentation often put on the shelf to an ongoing strategy portfolio. More specifically, what are the characteristics of an executable digital strategy?
Cascading: There are always a right balance of a long term strategy and short-term business goals. The length of strategy is situational - 5, 3, 1 year, etc. a good strategy needs to well reflect business’ long-term vision, and the ideal length of strategy should be long enough to well plan the company’s future with foresight and confidence, but also short enough to sense the urgency to execute is effectively. The strategy needs to be breakable down into goals and objectives, and then a series of tactical steps that further become nests fo doable operational tasks, and individuals’ daily work, if people can see a direct link what they do and what’re the strategic goals of an organization, they will be more engaged in the work and unleash their potential to align their career path with the business’s long term goals and prosperity. Also, strategy planning needs to become a “living process,: with more frequent evaluation, listening, and revision. Long-term planning has its place, but linearity and over prescriptiveness don’t.
Capability-based: Strategy makers have to have a clear understanding of the link between business capabilities and the companies’ strategies. A business capability is what the organization can deliver the certain result in the repetitive way via a specific ordering of people, processes, resources, information & technology,e tc. aimed at creating a defined business outcome. All business have certain capabilities, what matter is whether they are necessities or unique competency, and the maturity level, because the high-mature set of business capabilities can make  the company more adaptable and perform effectively with agility. So it’s important to prepare a strategic plan that point the business toward to a direction where it can maximize its performance and reap as many benefits (both short term and long run) as possible. And capability-based strategies are to well bridge “as-is” and “to-be” state, not only leading toward destination, but also building and optimizing the set of highly competitive digital capabilities on the way.
Action Effect: Execution is always part of good strategy. Strategy planning shouldn’t be done without thinking about execution at the same time. Because coming up with a new strategy is easy, but executing them takes tireless effort. And statistically, more than two-thirds of strategy execution fail to achieve the expected results. Therefore, the business needs to encourage the blend of strategic and critical thinking about the strategy management which includes strategy-execution continuum, demonstrates the evidence via analytics or performance measures that the business is actually doing things to build build differentiation, have the ability to implement well-setting goals and objectives and generate business improvement continuously. The “Action Effect” dimension often lags, but it’s the determinant of a good strategy.
Digitalization brings a flood of opportunities and risk for today’s businesses, it also raises many questions about strategy making and implementation. Successful digital transformations take good strategies to diagnose business problems, and reshape the organizations to take advantage of valuable existing strategic assets in new ways, and continue to planning, experimenting, scaling up, building differentiated capabilities and competencies in order to achieve high-performing result effortlessly.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 1/8/2016

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.2 million page views with 2300+ 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 in the first week of 2016 - to celebrate the New Year.
The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” Blog 1/8/2016CIO’s Digital Agenda XXVI: Go Digital, Like a Pro?  It’s the beginning of the New Year, also the dawn of digital age; and it’s the time for companies to step in and catch up,  proactively and effectively build core digital capabilities based on digital cognizance to adapt to digital normality, gain unique competitive advantage and execute with speed. Go digital, like a pro!
Culture vs. Strategy: Which Comes First? The strategy is like the business roadmap to leverage the company's resources and achieve its vision; and culture is the collective mindset, attitude, and behaviors of the group of people and it's about how people think and do things here. Many of us like Drucker's witty quote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” A strong culture can lift up a mediocre strategy, but a weak or negative culture will screw a superior strategy. So culture vs. strategy: which comes first? And what are the interwoven relationship between them?
Five Innovation Dilemmas in Running a Digital Organization, Generally speaking, innovation is how to transform the novel idea to achieve its business value. Innovation at the digital age is coming at seemly a much faster pace, more change, and more potential disruption, with broader scope, scale, and impact on the business’s surviving and thriving. Therefore, it's  more challenging to manage innovation successfully, innovation leaders and managers have to deal with the following dilemmas to achieve a long-term business result. because innovation is the “must have” strategic capability of their business. But how can CIOs deal with these innovation Dilemmas?Digital Master New Year Tuning Chap 7: Information, Knowledge, and Insight Management: We live in the world with the explosive data and the abundance of information. Every day, more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created through a range  of activities. And the average business expects to spend $8 million on data-related initiatives in recent years. So how to manage data, information, knowledge, and mind flow, to build a high-intelligent and high-effective organization - The real Digital Master?
Is Creativity an Addiction or a Phenomenon? Creativity is an innate ability to create novel ideas. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, and manifold knowledge. Creativity is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of uniqueness. So can creativity be taught, is creativity nature or nurtured? And is creativity an addiction or a phenomenon?
Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.
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Digital Master New Year Intense Tuning Chap 9: Five Aspects of Digital Maturity

Digital makes a profound impact from specific functions to business as a whole. the purpose of such radical digitalization is to make significant differences in the overall levels of customer delight and achieve high performing business result. The shift to digital cuts across sectors, geographies and leadership roles, and it is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and size to reinvent themselves. Here are five perspectives of digital maturity:


Customer Centricity: At the heart of digitalization, it is people and how to build an organization which delights customers. Customer-centric enterprise vision, strategy, and governance model should enforce alignment of various silos toward customer-centric products and delivery mechanisms. By understanding customers’ goals, digital organizations could also develop better interaction capabilities to enhance customer experiences.  It requires consistently digging deeper and have a different level of metrics in place to keep a pulse on the inner processes of the business.
Digital Agility: It is a dynamic business capability that enables an organization to respond change in a timely, effective, and sustainable way when changing circumstance require it, With increasing speed of changes, it is a strategic capability for businesses to sense both opportunities and risks, promptly solve problems and optimize business resources, identify additional capabilities, processes, and technologies that need to manage cost, improve profitability, reduce process cycle times, improve quality, and ultimately achieve high level digital maturity.
Digital Balance: We live in the hybrid world, many organizations are running in bimodal speed, the majority of people work in a workplace  between something old and new; with the industrial pace and digital speed; physical locations and remote environment. In order to survive and thrive amid rapid changes, companies must reclaim the right balance of standardization and flexibility; efficiency and innovation, competition and collaboration, and management must share the holistic view of a living organization that promotes deep understanding of core processes, risks, and transformational opportunities - so digital leaders can approach change confidently.
Digital Intelligence: Digital smartness is not just about going to social platforms or building a fancy website, or playing the latest gadgets. It more about the advanced analytics to figure the “Big Why,” and you should care much about it because it will tell you what will happen tomorrow and you can respond to it in a proactive way. As computing resource have continually evolved,  and data is the lifeblood of businesses, data-based decision making, and analytics need to be promoted as a way of reducing, not eliminating or explaining uncertainty in both strategic level and tactical daily base.
Digital Resilience: Business resilience is the business capability to make organization more risk intelligent, not just controlling, but managing it effectively. Because businesses are faced with more opportunities and risks at the digital era, being resilience is about failing fast, failing cheaper, and failing forward, also recovering more promptly. High-mature digital organizations can identify ways of realizing the end-to-end monitoring of key performance indicators, develop more effective GRC principles, processes, and practices of improving business resilience and agility.
Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that it’s a multi-dimensional planning and orchestration. You have to transform the company’s underlying functions and build a unique set of digital capabilities in order to adjust to the digital speed. Digital Maturity matters, because digital transformation is not just a one-time project or a stand-alone initiative, it requires a vision for why and a solid strategy for what and how you want to transform radically; from doing digital to being digital; from digitally disrupted to a digital disrupter, and ultimately grow as a fearless digital master.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

CIO’s Digital Agenda XXIV: IT Performance Measurement

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.2 million page views with about 2300+ 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.
Most of IT organizations measure IT via system performance, IT project on budget and on time, or IT department cost commitment, but the most debatable IT measurement discussion is how to measure the VALUE IT delivers to the business, or put simply, customer satisfaction, do IT measure the right things to present to the right audience? IT Performance Measurement


How to Set “SMART” Goals Smartly? S.M.A.R.T  (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely) goals play an important role in modern management discipline, what’s the pros and cons of setting & measuring S.M.A.R.T goals, and how to manage it effectively?

How to Measure IT VALUE Effectively? VALUE, is not something that can easily be measured and is very subjective. Remember that IT is there to deliver the programs that the business wants and states that it needs.

How to Measure KPIs in Agile? Agile is not about free thinking or doing without structure, Agile is the complementary methodology of Waterfall, add the flexibility on the rigidity; accelerate the speed of the hierarchy; create cascade from the steep slope, etc. Agile does not take less discipline, but needs more engineering and management discipline, thus, how to measure KPIs in Agile is also critical in Agile project success

What’s the Most Important Process Metrics for C-Suite? Organizations large or small are climbing their maturity ladder, from efficiency, to effectiveness, and then getting the optimal level of agility, therefore, as the C-suite turns their attention to business processes and starts measuring what matters, what matters most with business processes though?

The Promise and Peril of Metrics: We can only manage what we measure. Metrics provides feedback. Metrics is part of transparent visual management allowing pulling. There are many great things about metrics. However, there are people extremely obsessed by metrics who end up creating a huge and sophisticated set of meaningless metrics and that some managers may put a lot of energy on getting better indicators, just because they want beautiful numbers to report and not because they're genuinely interested in helping their teams to improve. So what’s the pros and cons, the promise and peril of metrics?
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