How to Run a High-Mature IT with Digital Sophistication

Organizations large or small are on the journey of digital transformation, the characteristics of the digital era are velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. IT organizations play a critical role in leading such a business transformation. How can IT knit all important business elements such as process, technology, talent, culture, etc. into differentiated business competency with necessary digital sophistication (developed at the higher level) in order to prepare for such a paradigm shift?
Digital leadership sophistication: Sophistication is an interesting word which is different from complexity. Complexity can be managed and optimized from technique perspective, and sophistication needs to be cultivated with both soft touch and hard discipline. It implies intelligence, profundity, uniqueness, urbanization, and multidisciplinary understanding. Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and highly influential. Digital ecosystem is complex and volatile, thus, digital leadership sophistication is crucial in complex problem solving, understanding context is often the first and the important step in understanding, create the relevant context to make a more lasting solution, without it, you are working without any boundaries, or basis for understanding what you are doing. Organizations not only need good managers to take care of today’s business but also have to grow the future leaders with sophistication to deal with the digital “VUCA” reality. The emphasis of leadership sophistication is on trying to determine which competencies or capabilities should be used in which combination, and with what level of weight for each, for every different situation, in order to improve leadership effectiveness. It’s also about the multidimensional competencies to formulate creative, unconventional alternatives or solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances. It is the thorny journey of digital transformation, to clear the path, whether that be the elimination of obstacles or to provide coaching and guidance and make an influence so that the talent employees are limited only by their imagination.  
Digital capability sophistication: A business capability is a specific ordering of people, processes, technology, resources, information, and aimed at creating a defined business outcome; and the unique set of organizational capabilities with focus is business competency. The necessary business capabilities are often developed reactively to competitive threats, strategic opportunities, and environmental changes. So all businesses have certain capabilities, what matters is sophistication (hard to copy, uniqueness, complexity) and maturity (efficiency, effectiveness, and agility). The high-mature set of business capabilities can make organizations more adaptable agile, and high competitive, to fulfill their strategy. As sophisticated capability is an acquired and organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place, it can therefore not be transferred because of the degree of organizational learning and organization that goes with it. At the organization level, the enterprise consists of a set of capabilities. The organization then uses these capabilities to understand the markets / environment, create new products and services and then deliver products and services. A core competency is a harmonization of multiple capabilities with digital sophistication such that it permeates the entire organization with a focus, and in alignment with the resource-based view, it is valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate. Digital capability sophistication and maturity will differentiate a digital leader from laggards.
Decision Making sophistication: Decision making is one of the most important and sophisticated activities for business leaders and professionals today, and at strategic level, the outcome of decision making will directly make impact on the survival or thriving of the business. With abundance of information and increasing speed of changes, Decision making needs to strike the right balance of “Thinking Fast,” and “Thinking Slow.” In order to bridge the gap and decide effectively, from IT management perspective, IT has to step into business with knowledge and confidence to become the key strategy/decision-making; because more often technology is the growth engine for any businesses, 'seeing' the context you are 'part' of, allows one to identify the leverage points of the system and then 'choose' the 'decisive' factors, in the attempt to achieve the set goals and achieve the best possible outcome.
Digital Ecosystems generally do not ‘think’ in the way we understand thinking; ecosystems are complex systems, behaving by way of interactions among the various constituents, it follows from this hypothesis that sophistication appeared rather suddenly within the history of human evolution. From management perspective, so many companies and "managers" focus on the tangibles, but they lack the in-depth understanding and leadership sophistication of the intangible things; just getting them to consider the list of intangibles would be a breakthrough. In fact, leadership, culture, innovation, customer centricity and brand, all are the key intangible elements, or some call the “soft factors,” which can be “hardened” at the certain level, as better drivers of solid business results. From survival instincts to thriving sophistication, it’s not quantitative accumulation, but quantum leap.
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