“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 2 “CIOs as Digital Visionary” Introduction

The Digital Era makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people to process, to technology, both horizontally and vertically. In many forward-looking organizations, IT plays a pivotal role in such a transformation. CIOs as IT leaders also are visionaries and become a strategic leadership role in co-creating business strategy and reinvent IT as a growth and innovation engine of the organization. More specifically, a visionary CIO plays the following roles:


The “Strategy Shaper”: Vision begins with an end in mind. Transformation requires first shifting your mindset and perceive what the future needs to look like, and then seeing what intrapersonal /interpersonal transformation are needed to achieve organizational transformation. There are three levels of impact organizations can make in the journey of digital transformation, organizations have to create synergy by building a positive culture, and making smooth transformation via building a set of unique capabilities, which IT is a key ingredient. Digital is the age of customers, so lean on customer value, focus on creating value for customers in every step. IT plays a crucial role in orchestrating the digital transformation via integrating hard elements such as process, technology, and soft elements such as culture, communication channels seamlessly. Hence, IT leaders need to be a skilled strategy shaper and relentless implementer.
The “Problem Framer”: In traditional IT industrial setting, IT is often blamed as part of the problem, due to its tarnished reputation as a cost center with the slow response to changes. A high mature IT organization has to reinvent its image as a solutionary to business problems. And the first step first, IT needs to be the problem framer, a solution is useless if the problem is not perceived. Therefore, creating the awareness of the problems is the first step to making a solution be understood and accepted. By being the “problem framer,” IT leaders need to have business acumen and customer insight to well interpret business initiatives to IT enabled solutions, to dig through the root cause, not just fix the symptom, and to frame the right questions before answering them right.
The “Gap Minder”: One of the huge barriers to improving IT maturity as well as overall organizational maturity is the gap between business and IT; strategy and execution, and communication gaps across silos. First, identify the mentalities that enlarge those gaps, and then retune the digital mindset to bridge them. Because compared to regular Change Management, digital transformation is more likely to be a sweeping approach to altering the business factors underlying the surface, So clarification is important in helping leaders and staff to discover, then consciously manage the communication gap between self-perception and the perception of others. IT is in a unique position to oversight business processes/capabilities, hence, as a “gap Minder,” IT leaders should be the “business polyglot” to be fluent in multiple dialects for communicating and influencing effectively, and avoid “lost in the translation” syndrome. IT needs to be more than “superglue,” more as an “integrator” to ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.
A digital organization can bring greater awareness of intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, processes, people dynamic, resource alignment, etc. IT like the “digital brain of the organization, should always be in the “thinking mode,” and visionary CIOs need to continuously wonder: What can we do differently? What’s stopping people from being autonomous, pursuing mastery, and bringing wisdom the workplace, and how to unleash the full digital potential of IT, with the ultimate goal to run a high performing and high mature digital organization.  
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