Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1387

The Spotlight on Digital CIOs Nov. 2015

Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.1 million page views with about #2300th 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.

Modern CIOs have many personas and face numerous challenges. It is not sufficient to only keep the light on. Regardless of which industry or the nature of organization you are in, being a digital leader will need to master the art of creating unique, differentiating value from piles of commoditized technologies, but more specifically, what are the digital-savvy CIOs doing to run IT as a value creator and innovation engine? And which profile is yours as a contemporary digital CIO:

The Digital Profiles of Contemporary CIOs    Nov. 2015CIOs as Chief Innovation Officer: Nowadays information is the lifeblood, and the emergent technology is more often the business disruptor. And due to the changing nature of information & technology, IT is always in the changing environment creating unexpected situations and requiring quick and appropriate responses based on the conditions. As businesses embark on the “digital Era” of computing (Cloud, Big Data, Mobile, Social). how will IT have to change? What is the nature of the new IT leadership and what is the primary role of the CIO in harnessing the IT leadership?

CIOs as Transformational Leaders The majority of businesses today are on the journey to digitalization and globalization. The reason is that the world is becoming smaller every day and as a consequence every successful business has to sooner or later go beyond borders. At the same time, the global business landscape is only becoming more complex due to varied factors. And it is in this context that organizations build business verticals within to manage the complexity. So the logical concerns could be: What kind of IT leaders are on demand? Transformational or transactional? What’re differences between transformation vs. transaction? How would you define differences between transactional and transformational CIOs?

CIOs Leading as Conductors  At the age of cloud, CIO  needs to lead as a conductor than a constructor, in order to speed up and improve IT agility. A forward-thinking CIO will figure out a way to leverage the cloud to explore business options much more quickly. As the cloud era is also the age of innovation and radical digitalization, while IT provides an important structure and framework to streamline process and enable the digital transformation. Learning the business is a must for the CIO to come up with an experiential knowledge coupled with data for enabling and empowering the enterprise. For larger enterprises, their IT resources and capability are often the company's secret sauce and key to how they deliver value to the business.

CIOs as Chief Insight Officer: CIO is the information steward at enterprise today, however, data or information is means to the end, not the end itself; more importantly, CIO needs to capture business & customer insight from the abundance of information in foreseeing the future of business and continuously driving operational excellence. Therefore, CIO plays a crucial role as ‘Chief Insight Officer’ to provide data-based advice for business executive peers and corporate board.  

CIOs as Chief Inspection Officer:  The widely-popular Agile methodology provokes quite many debates upon software quality issues such as: Is it better to release code quickly ... or release clean code? Is bug-free software the goal?  Does Agile mean to poor quality delivery? As IT leader, what're CIO's strategy and methodology to balance quality and speed; flexibility and discipline; best practice and next practice? And how to apply Agile principles when managing software development or running IT as a whole?
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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IT Governance as a Vector of Quality

IT Governance is a vector of quality, for both the maturity of process and outcome.

Governance has been one of those concepts that has received a lot of "lip service," the speed of business is accelerated, opportunities and risks coexist, governance needs to be a complementary part of strategy management. But how to get it right - to steer IT, not stifle IT innovation and agility?





IT Governance is a vector of quality, for both the maturity of process and outcome. Eventually, as the company grows, so will the need for standard policies and procedures. Not just to cover the “Risk” management, but to create an environment where duties are segregated and often duplicated. In the startup, with few developers, one can say there’s little need for the burden of source control. Add a couple of more developers working on competing projects and all of a sudden source control and a regimented procedure for deploying solutions become necessary. Governance, risk, and compliance are not a single process, but a collection of processes with other governance mechanisms, such as roles and technologies.

Another area to practice IT governance might be the conception, development, and deployment of solutions. It’s a natural evolution as most initiative involves IT, therefore, IT will possess the companies widest breadth of view. As organization mature, the SME roles have to be pushed out to the user community, which means the end users need to become more responsible for the construction, testing, and deployment of their tools. This segregation of unit and system testing are first finished by IT; then user acceptance testing and implementation are done by the user community. Some view it as the battle between creatives and controllers/managers. Without focused business context, the deliverables from/by creatives may not be what the business needs, or may have been produced in a less efficient manner.

Effective IT Governance has innovation built in to harness innovation. Those organizations that feel stifled by governance may not have matured beyond operational risk and control. Controls feel stifling not because they are trying to be innovative, rather that they are undisciplined. IT departments that have their own house in order and have absorbed compliance and operational risk management can move on to greater, more strategic business needs. This is where innovation is needed, and a robust IT governance program can be the medium through which innovation is fostered. Proper IT Governance will have incorporated a process for change and innovation. This should allow for IT innovation to excel within the constraints of the hierarchy of the organization.

Governance discipline enforces agile decision-making. Optimal agile decision-making mechanisms ensure decisions occur as fast as they possibly can - with the speed being in perfect balance with cost and risk for the given decision situation. The problem is, governance is almost always associated with compliance and control. Given many organizations don't view governance as "decision-making optimization," their governance efforts usually devolve into time-consuming, costly, bureaucratic constructs. IT governance enforcement starts with understanding business for the dynamic complex and adaptive system that they are, is the starting point. Quite apart from anything else and without getting into a deep discussion about complexity, risk, epistemic uncertainty, consider that: unpredictability, uncertainty and the probability of surprising emergent properties increase with the complexity of the systems. Complexity is a measure that depends on the number of system components interdependencies] and their interactions, thus, the necessary governance disciplines enable the business to navigate toward the right direction.

The aspects of Agile operation can immediately be seen to have consequences for practitioners of IT governance: If the system of management lacks the understanding and requisite variety of the system being managed, how effective can it be? The high level of user involvement in development-related decisions underpins an empowerment to project teams to change and re-prioritize delivery plans, which can cause repercussions across a number of areas within IT governance. A dynamic development path brings about variability relating to cost and budget models. As development teams strive for the earliest possible delivery of working features that add value, governance practices need to be sufficiently informed and able to keep pace with what is going on. The joint needs of Agile projects and a commitment to governance will increase the extent to which a number of IT management practices have to participate in projects, with a consequent cost. Governance improves resilience. Resilience is indicative of a state of interdependence that has desirable characteristics such as self-organizing and self-regulating.
The best approach for IT governance has been the one which has aligned the framework approach with the principles and best practices, to improve the maturity of IT function and the expectations business leaders have from IT, to set immediate and long term priorities of organization right, to optimize decision-making approach in the organization, and to ultimately transform IT from a cost center to a value creator.

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The Characteristics to Build Great Leadership

Great leadership is inspirational: Inspiration includes visioning, influencing, innovating, motivating, trust, confidence, diplomacy, role modeling etc.

Leadership is about future, future implicates changes and innovation. Leadership is Influence: The leader’s influence is based on the courage to inspire, confidence to assert, wisdom to negotiate, and uniqueness to bridging. More specifically, what are the important characteristics to build great leadership?


Vision & Intuition: Great leaders have a vision, they facilitate the transformation of an organization, and its people, from the organization's current position to a position that best serves the interests of its customers, shareholders, and people. The means of 'facilitating the transition' is, what distinguishes a great leader and a great organization. A great leader is one that can trust his or her instincts and relies on them at a crucial moment. Not that you wouldn't let the facts speak for themselves, however, how many times does the leader simply take in all opinions surrounding them and at the end of the day must do what they believe is right for the situation at hand.


Communication: Even good leaders can sometimes assume too much. If people know and understand your vision they will be more willing and able to follow your lead. Always have the future in mind and develop staff for success both at the personal and organizational levels, and always use the most sustainable approach. It is important to know when you need to manage and when you need to coach and mentor. This is something that needs to be developed in future leadership. Leading and managing by power and control are never sustainable approaches. Keep it professional and purposeful!Ability to motivate and make people go where they have never been before, take the time to engage with your staff at every opportunity. As a leader, you know you must master the communication skills necessary to create change:-Building rapport -Motivating and inspiring others -Providing effective feedback -Persuasively presenting your ideas or vision -Reframing current challenges to your team

Reflection: Great leaders always take the time to self-reflect. Dealing with perceived manipulative situations, poor leaders demonstrating poor leadership skills, and just overall frustrations can change how you lead. Taking time to objectively reflect and see if you are meeting your expectations with your approach is a very useful tool to keep you on track with your personal vision, ethics, value and authenticity:L-LISTEN....patiently.E-ENABLE your team- make them champs.A-ANSWER to the most "weird questions". They may be of great help to someone in the team.D-DIRECTION-be the navigator and take responsibility of the journey.E-EMPATHY - being human, and to understand others as if you were in the other person's position.R-RESPECT -make respect a way of life in the team. We all deserve it

Creativity: Leadership is about change. Creative leadership is essentially anchored on the leader's overall multifaceted resourcefulness. That is, the multidimensional (including introspection) competencies to formulate creative (unconventional) alternatives or solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances. Great leaders are pioneers, innovators, and creators of a better context. Creativity becomes significantly important in the age with the advanced technologies because the leaders of the future will not be mere automatons. Creative leadership is the unique combination of leadership behaviors that develops and achieves high-quality results over a sustained period of time and risk tolerance.

Adaptability: Adaptability is to be understood as the ability of a system to adapt itself efficiently and fast to changed circumstances. An adaptive mind is, therefore, an open mind that is able to adjust its thinking processes according to changes in its environment, or a learning mind to absorb all necessary knowledge and abstract it into insight and wisdom. Self-adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational change. In an ever changing world and business/employment field, it's a challenge. Being adaptable to the business, workers, customers, and life is key. Adaptability through openness to personal transformation and evolution. Negotiating win-win outcomes, increasing self-confidence and performance in others, getting yourself and others into action.

Great leadership is inspirational: Inspiration includes visioning, influencing, innovating, motivating, trust, confidence, diplomacy, role modeling etc..It is a leader's job to keep the team/organization moving FORWARD, not BACKWARD.


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Three Aspects of Business Transformation

In many ways, the organization is a reflection of the personality of its top leader, or leaders.

Transformation is a leapfrogging change when the final result is not fully defined at the beginning of it and with the expectation to reach the next level of progression. The most difficult topic during transformation is managing uncertainty especially when you change many things: processes, culture, systems and organization at the whole in the same time. It is a complicated moment for all people in the organization at all levels and at the same time, the business has to operate as usual. If you do not get the organization trained and prepared before, the transformation probability of success decreases fast.




In many ways, the organization is a reflection of the personality of its top leader, or leaders. Every organization has a story: a set of beliefs, values, myths, history and judgments about the inner world of work, and the external environment around them. Many change agents omit this “story gathering” process before embarking upon change initiatives. Further, many chapters of the story are hidden with its functional units, when an organization becomes sufficiently large to warrant the creation of divisions. Organizations over time, as they grow by necessity, develop silos. Silos are a by-product of the need for functional specialization of knowledge, and in some senses, one could say they are a necessary evil. The neurosis of the siloed organization often has its roots in the inertia, weariness, the inability to make a decision or the physical or psychological absence of a leader, which creates a leadership vacuum. Where the situation becomes indicative of an organizational neurosis is when many of the following symptoms begin to appear over time: the hoarding of information, the need for control, the exercise of power over other divisions, the close guarding of “silo secrets”—all of these form the “collective psyche” of the silo, often the reflection of its leadership.


Performing an organizational change impact assessment is very important to understand the 'cultural current state' factors: then determine what the impact, risks and challenges of any proposed changes are. The bigger the 'change' the more important to take these into account early rather than late. Also, it’s very important for any high performing organization to get the best alignment and leverage the great human potential that exists or is needed to achieve great results and to tap into the passion of the people! Often change is proposed from one source in a way that people feel excluded from the decision. Active engagement of the team and working together to make a transformation roadmap would help a team to create successful change and transformation. A change champion is needed who is responsible for following through the roadmap and bring the team together on check-points.

Communication, Integration, Planning, and Training are indispensable when you are on the ride already: Many projects fail because of lack of preparations and beliefs that suppliers “know” how to make transformation within specific organization better than the “rider.” They don’t and they cannot do it for the organization. In most projects, the objective, scope and expected results to be implemented, are not properly communicated to all levels of the company and everyone involved in the transformation. Only if you analyze how identities and beliefs of the human beings are impacted by the change and address these changes, provide new identities and adapt behavior to new roles communicating and convincing the human being that this change is an advantage with a positive impact then something new and consistent can develop and scale up seamlessly.

During transformation scenario, although you can change an outcome directly, its overall effect is limited. It becomes much more powerful if you first change your intention, or thinking, behind it. The transformation has to go a step further, and involves internalization of the new values and conceptual model so that the newly acquired behaviors don't require the same kind of effort and vigilance. Instead, the newly established behaviors will be in harmony with the internalized values, the transformed person or organization as a whole, and ultimately achieve the new level of efficiency and lead to the next level of innovation. From the top down transformational leadership to bottom up culture of reflection, although you can not predict every event happening on the journey, surely you need to proactively create a vision, make a good strategy, and execute it via an iterative continuum, and create a business - talent synergy to accelerate the flywheel of digitalization.
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CIO’s Digital Agenda III - Running a High-Effective Digital IT

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.1 million page views with about 2300th 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.

Majority of IT organizations today are still running at industrial speed, stick at the low or mid level of maturity, although technology is more often than not, the disruptive force for business and industry innovation, IT organizations seem to have a tendency to align with the slow changing parts of the organization, so how should CIOs prepare for the digital disruption and speed up accordingly? Here is the CIO’s Digital Agenda with different flavors of digital IT:Running a High-Effective Digital IT1. A Value-Driven IT In many organizations, IT is still being portrayed as a help desk, back office function and cost center, a business outsider, while IT is supposed to be an integral and critical part of business. At what point does IT no longer have to deal with the continuing discussions that include the phrase "IT and the business"? How should IT build its value proposition, and gain a solid reputation as a value creator, an innovation engine, a customer champion, a talent master, a business catalyzer and beyond?


2. A Bimodal IT: More and more IT organizations are at the journey of digital transformation. However, such radical shift cannot be done overnight. Especially for those legacy companies and industries. The digital movement needs to have thoughtful planning and a good balance of two speeds: the industrial speed to keep the business light on, and the digital speed to adopt the new sets of minds, the latest technologies and proven methodologies for acceleration. To put simply, there are multiple perspectives for running a bimodal IT.  

3. A Cloudified IT The majority of organizations today has already adopted cloud-based IT services in a certain way. One thing for sure - Cloud is here to stay and it will be changing the paradigm for running IT and business as well. The simple fact is that CIOs have to consider the cloud within their long term strategy. However, cloud adoption depends on many factors including partner availability, costs, reliability, and connectivity. Is a cloudified IT less-cloudy? And how to push the cloud envelope with thoughtful planning & solid action?
4. A Hybrid IT? IT plays a significant role in modern businesses today, touches almost every key business processes, especially with the trend of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud), IT consumerization and internet of things. The effectiveness of IT can be derived best when overall IT Organization reflects on how the business is structured for responsibilities and accountabilities of key decision makers. In other ways, IT can not architect itself in isolation. So to effectively deliver IT capabilities, centralized, decentralized, or hybrid IT, which is the right way?


5. An Analytical IT Most of IT organizations today still have the reputation as a back office or help desk, as maintenance function rather than innovation engine. Big data analytics offers IT organizations a great opportunity to provide value to the business and earn respect by serving as a thought leader on the technology. How does IT deliver business value from managing Big Data projects, how does IT benefit from big data analytics as well? And from CIO perspective, how to run an analytic IT?

6 An Agile IT: Agile shift is a journey. There are many things that need to be done to make a transition a more Agile way of working. Changes in the sizing and structuring of teams, their decision making, and team members’ levels of accountability and responsibility are just a few of the paradigm shifts you will encounter throughout the transition to Agile teams. So is Agile in your organization more descriptive or prescriptive? Does it mean more discipline or less discipline? Are you only doing Agile or being Agile?

7. An Innovative IT: From industry surveys, the majority of IT organizations are still being perceived as maintenance center, most employees outside of IT don’t call their IT teams very innovative, yet most believe technology is growing in importance, so IT leaders are facing unprecedented pressures to transform their IT into value center and innovation engines, but how to run an innovate IT, what’re the roadblocks one need to overcome, and which capabilities IT needs to cultivate?
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.

Read More about The digital Themes of Modern IT:
A Value-Driven IT
A Proactive IT
A Bimodal IT
A Balanced IT
A High-Mature IT
A Digital Fit IT
Digital IT is Business
An Influential ITA Cloudified ITA Change Agent ITA Multi-Dimensional ITA Strategic ITAn Analytic ITAn Agile ITA Hybrid ITAn Innovative ITA Value Creator ITA Forerunner IT
A Transformational IT

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How to Apply Data Algorithm for Business Problems-Solving

An algorithm is a procedure or formula for solving a problem. 

An algorithm is a model of the real world. A good algorithm needs to be developed through integrating knowledge-based data into analytic models simulation testing, implemented for problem-solving. However, you need to keep in mind that underlying these algorithms are models, models with their own assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses. In addition, these algorithms require data and understanding the idiosyncrasies of these data are critical to model performance.

The model depended on the nature/structure of the data of the questions needs to be answered. The very first question that has to be asked before any modeling gets done, is what produced the data that you have? If you cannot answer that question, your effort has to be directed towards discovering what produced the data.The data gets produced by causal effects, data acquisition processes, and errors in observation. There is almost always a causal effect, there may be systematic effects due to the way the data was observed, and there will always be noise in the observations. After that is done, you can develop a math model for the causal effects using the data, so you can predict practically. The values of the parameters of that math model will depend on the data with the observation errors and data acquisition effects removed. In the intermediate step, you have to have models for what produce the observation errors, and for what produce the data acquisition effects, otherwise you have little ability to remove them.

The data model can take different forms: And then the data science models should preferably use data/information/experience/known scientific laws to formulate them, and the model should have a purpose, be based on the questions you want to be answered. But beyond that, models can take many different forms. Every single prediction depends on some kind of model. It may be a regression model, it may be a Gaussian process model for machine learning, it may be a Support Vector Machine model, it may be an Artificial Neutral Network (ANN) model, it may be a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) model, it may be a boosting model, it may be a random forest model, but every single prediction in the past or the future depends on some kind of model. Going a step further, boosting creates a model, but it is a different kind of model, with branches and leaves and splitting criteria. Still it's a model. You don’t have to write an equation to make a model. A model can be algorithmic. A maths model can be an equation or algorithm or anything which can be implemented in software. Or, it may be a big table with markers to indicate the position of squadrons. Still there is a model, still there is a lot of data analysis going on, still there need some experts. The problem is that without some domain knowledge, and knowledge of the data acquisition process, these effects (and the noise) are not separable, and whatever fits is done with whatever modeling process (a priori terms, algorithmically selected terms, or boosting,), the resultant math model terms (the output of all these) will absorb all of these effects.

There are two different kinds of data analytics models. There is an a priori model, the understanding of how the world behaves, however, approximate or loose it may be. At one extreme it may be a very complex mathematical modeling model. At the other extreme, it may be informal with some very vague beliefs, such as the age of people is often positive, and often below 1000 years. Hopefully, you do not build into that model any more assumptions than are necessary. Also, these beliefs are made explicit. And then there is the model arising out of the statistical analysis, where the analysis builds a statistical model, It may be a regression, boosting, whatever kind of model, and it may, or may not, choose which variables are influential. It is a generic abstract model. The tools to derive it are often generic and abstract, they have no knowledge of the semantics of the data, what the data means. The second type of model sits on the top of the first model (or maybe below, depends on which way you are standing).The final result is model A plus model B.Whether you call the first model a physical model, a causal model, business expertise, or plain common sense, is less important than recognizing that whenever you do any kind of data analysis you almost have these two models.

It’s important to do data investigation or any attempt at understanding the business context. The point is that humans should all have some humility and recognize the limitations of their expertise and partner them with the other experts to apply the analytical algorithms for problem-solving. Then there is the opportunity to make something great.
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Performance Reviews: Productive or Destructive?

Performance reviews could be productive if they really were used as a tool for developing people.

Often performance review or the umbrella term "Performance Management" has a negative connotation because it tends to label processes that the business sees as, at a minimum, administratively burdensome and at worst simply dreads. There is a danger of not having a process to "develop and nurture" performance, bias and favoritism are common in the workplace. It seems to be that the traditional approach with the one-size-fits-all process is more bureaucratic than it should be. So does a performance review more productive or destructive in your organization nowadays?

Performance reviews could be productive if they really were used as a tool for developing people. Many organizations have regular one to one review, following up and discussing the individual needs to develop with mutually agreed actions to take their performance to the next level. Treat employees as customers, to collect their feedback proactively. Unfortunately in many cases these reviews are instead a tick in the box exercise done once per year routinely without a tailored solution to fit each individual’s specific need to grow. In reality, many of current performance review programs have been ill-designed with little or no training support while using administratively easy-to-use systems that, worst of all, have little or no connection to the strategy or operation of the business. Many employees know very little about their strategy and have become disenchanted with the entire process.

Performance reviews also become destructive if there are no clear standards of what defines good performance. There has to be a scale of what is expected and which is well communicated to everyone within the team. Ambiguous standards left to the discretion of each manager make the process weak and at times painful. “Good, Better, Best” ranking just doesn't cut it when your definition of the best is an 180 degree from the other one’s criteria. Top and functional leaders need to team with HR and create a sustainable process including objective performance goals, "mid-year" or other pre-reviews, and add the ongoing positive feedback and documentation, then the foundation of a sustainable and successful effort is set. The real challenge is the leader must recognize his/her responsibility to develop the team. Measuring performance is part of this responsibility.

It’s all about having rigorous and sustainable evaluation process to be applied fairly and equally for all. The worthiness of the overall system, from the EMPLOYEE'S perspective, will rest on how accurate and how well the performance feedback is given to the employee throughout the entire performance year and the validity of the eventual skills development that directly relates to their job/career advancement and, from a BUSINESS/TOP MANAGEMENT perspective, how well the management objectives are directly tied to the achievement of the company's overall business objectives and strategic plan goals, and fairly related to compensation. The process shouldn’t be too rigid, inviting employees’ self-assessment and collecting feedback from them to continue improving the performance review effectiveness.

Provide pragmatic management training program for managers: (a) how to write a good objective mapping business goals, (b) how to evaluate and rate typical performance results achieved against the objectives, and (c) how to provide employee feedback on the performance results achieved and the competencies used to achieve them on a timely basis throughout the entire performance review period.  throughout the performance review period, there should be ongoing informal performance feedback as the key work results of the employee are achieved or on a known regular basis. Therefore, the end-of-the-performance period discussion should be more of a summary discussion that concentrates on talent development. Competencies or skills vary greatly from level to level so identify: (a) mindset - culture influence, problem-solving creativity  b) technical job -both quality and quantity and (c) management skills for each level and job- high professional and high potential, etc.  If the improvement areas in the current job are significant, the development should concentrate on them. When there are no major improvement areas, the development can concentrate on the next most likely job.

Take bias out of the process and use a set of 21st-century standards to evaluate your talent employees with forward-looking and holistic perspective. The performance review shouldn’t be just an annual routine, but an ongoing activity with more frequent and relevant performance reviews that line executives will "buy into" because it helps them achieve THEIR, and thereby the company, annual business objectives. Talent managers need to shift their mindset from developing performance management processes or implementation to developing a holistic performance management solution that adds value to employees, organizational goals (both short-term and long-term) and business results. These are essential aspects of developing very innovative, intuitive, fast and visual approach in improving employee engagement, capabilities, and performance.
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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 11/13/2015

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.1 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.


The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” Blog 11/13/2015 Is Leadership about Power or Empowerment: Power has many different formats; some visible, some invisible; some are earned, some are given; some are delightful, some are intimidating; here are a few different types of powers: position power is associated with people who are in a position to ‘boss” others. People fear the consequences of not doing what is asked of them. Expert power comes from a person’s expertise. This is commonly a person with an acclaimed skill or accomplishment. Influence power is associated with people who are well-liked and respected hold this kind of power. What’s the correlation between leadership and power? Is leadership more about power or empowerment?
See Through Talent from Different Angles : 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, so should we see through talent from different angles?

How to Overcome Innovation Challenges?  Innovation is to manage novel ideas and generating business value from them. Even innovation is the light every organization is pursuing, but often the term "innovation" has become so diluted or meaning it is hard to have even a basic conversation about it without problems of definition or interpretation arising - and perhaps in part why all sort of things can feel like innovation - even if they are faking it. So which factors are causes to innovation failure, and how to survive from innovation fatigue and pitfalls?

Agile IT Governance: Change is the new normal for businesses today, there are culture changes, process changes, or software change management, etc. Agile is about being able to efficiently respond to change. Various Agile methodologies exist to adopt different responses depending on the nature of the change, especially predictable unknowns, and unpredictable unknowns. Hence, governance practices need to be sufficiently informed and able to keep pace with what is going on. The joint needs of Agile projects and a commitment to IT governance will increase the extent to which a number of IT management practices have to participate in projects, with a consequent cost.
The Change Factors that would Improve the Business Results? The speed of change is up, but the majority of Change Management effort fail to achieve the expected result. What are the top things would you change in an organization that would improve the business result? If you can imagine an organization as a garden and the people are all forms of life in it, how can you as a leader or anyone contribute to maximum balance growth inside that little patch of Planet Earth?
Five Pieces of advice to Digital Leaders: Leadership is complex yet simple. Complexity is in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. The emphasis is on trying to determine which competencies or skills should be used in which combination and with what level of weight for each, for every different situation. The simplicity comes from knowing that there is no one competency more important than the other in the larger scheme of things and that we all have leadership skills within us. There are a lot of the negative symptoms and lack of effectiveness come from a prevalent view that leadership is power, top-down and unquestionable. So what’re the best advice you could offer to the leaders?
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

Innovation Governance

Innovation a mindset, and that's where governance comes in.

Innovation is about managing novel ideas to achieve its business values. Governance is to steer, oversight,  and monitor business management. Innovation and governance seem to be the opposite practice. Do individuals believe governance is essential to effective business innovation and that the two are interdependent? Or do individuals believe governance is incompatible wth or even stifle innovation and leads ultimately to company failure? Innovation governance, how to get it right?


Innovation Governance needs to advocate, steer, and sustain innovation:  Innovation needs a level of guidance, it has to deliver business objectives, but it needs the right kind of governance to thrive. Traditional business governance for an operational excellence enterprise will stifle innovation. When governance is done properly,  it actually is a great tool to facilitate innovation. A good governance standard provides a common corporate "language" as well as working instructions. In other words, proper standards, appropriate business and use cases, etc., may not let every idea through, but it will certainly bring the ones forward that make sense. Practically speaking: when there is an innovative idea; the governance mechanisms dictate how that idea is fostered from inception to retirement.


Effective Governance has innovation built in. Those organizations feeling stifled by Governance may not have matured beyond operational risk and control. Controls feel stifling not because they are undisciplined. The leverage point is to frame innovation and keep focused, but not adding too much complexity. Innovation can not be separated from a specific business purpose and in a broad context governance is critical for meaningful innovation. Look at innovation and governance as a continuum. What context "innovation" is used in? When you say innovation, you could really mean maximizing value to the business, when you say governance you could mean minimizing risk. So they are complementary to achieve a premium business result.

Innovation needs the certain level of guidelines and rules: Although breaking the rules is an important part of innovation, ‘business creativity’ such as using creative thinking for business goals, does require certain ‘rules.’ To get the best results, you need to structure the creative process. For instance, depending on where you are in the process, you might want to ‘force’ people to rephrase a challenge, let them view an idea from different perspectives, temporarily forbid criticism, set time limits, apply thinking techniques, each with their own ‘rules’ etc. It seems that the more integrated and culturally based innovation or imagination is, the more sustainable and productive such initiatives are. If an innovation department operates without being an integral part of every other department, it certainly could be counterproductive. Therefore, the right level of guide and process is important, but overly rigid process or too ‘pushy’ goals will stifle innovation.

Remember governance isn’t just about putting restrictions on what you can do, it is also about monitoring and knowing when things are not going to plan so that you can take appropriate action at the right time.  Innovation is doing something better than it currently is. Hence, it requires a sound and competent understanding of what is currently being done. Not what others are good at. It's a mindset, and that's where governance comes in. Governance needs to set the framework for innovation management, and it steers and sustain innovation to manage risks and maximize its business values.


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Agile Scale Up

Agile values, principles, and practices are tightly coupled.

Agile is historically a set of preferences and principles per the Agile Manifesto. Related practices already existed at the time of its manifestation. The interactions between Agile values, principles, and practices are tightly coupled. Many forward-looking organizations start scaling Agile to run a high-agile business in order to sense and adapt to change promptly and improve overall business competency.

To make Agile successful, the entire "organization" has to be agile. For agile to deliver considerable "maximum" benefits, it needs to work across the whole value stream. The whole value stream needs to be able to support an agile delivery model sufficiently. This includes service company, customer, operations, procurement, hr, finance etc. In a services situation, the "organization" is the amalgam of both the service company and its customer. If either side of that equation isn't agile, and then agility is not possible.

Agile success can improve the entire business competencies because they can do IT quicker and better. Corporations have to evolve, corporations that can't manage IT properly will eventually lag behind. Implementing a big change requires a buy-in and push from upper management. Once there is a support from them, then it becomes easy to get that change implemented. It does not mean that an agile delivery model needs to be selected for the creation of every product, service, or project, as there may be cases where actually a non-agile delivery model is a viable option. Agility also has little to do with metrics, distribution, history. The business model is relevant, however, an organization with customers who use a phased-development (waterfall) approach really can't take on an entirely different approach internally. For one thing, you won't be able to come up with a contract that will support things like loose schedules, changing requirements, incremental delivery, etc.

Agile will focus more on partnerships rather than pure vendor relationships. Transparency will prevail. It will be progress driven. Making mistakes should contribute to the learning process. There is more to be gained by doing the work quickly and efficiently. Change management and negotiation are a big issue when applying agile methodology to fixed bid programs. The agile methodology being applied have an umbrella contract between Vendor and Customer. And most projects that are executed in Agile methodology are in Time and Material mode. Only for a known customer where the expectation, process are all known and vendor executed few customer's projects, agile methodology attempted for fixed bid projects - it becomes easier to handle the changes in the requirements and priorities. Hence, Agile focuses more on partnership rather than a pure vendor relationship.
The Agile manifesto indicates the things on the left that are more highly valued than the things on the right. You can measure whether practices are being done and to what degree, but each team is different, hence, it isn't really prescription, but more guidelines and heuristics. The challenge and direction now are to bring agility, and design thinking holistically to the entire business. It's a journey for any company looking to digital transformation radically. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu