IT at Cutting-Edge, CIO leads as a Bridge

The modern organization is like the mini-city, with its own sophistication: the silo functions, the sea of data, and the pool of talents. 

For us not so far away from San Francisco, once a while visiting could be both entertaining and educational: running out of suburb’s fresh air, blue sky’s simplicity, diving into urbanized sophistication and cultural quintessential.

Not to mention, the other unforgettable scene: Golden Gate Bridge—the most beautiful bridge in the world. Though you may not walk it through at every visit, surely, there are always opportunities to watch it over from different angles, see it edge out of the fog or stretch up to the cloud, it becomes the landmark, the symbol, the spirit of city: the openness, the brightness, the style, and the strength, it reflects and enhances the natural beauty of San Francisco Bay.

The modern organization is like the mini-city, with its own sophistication: the silo functions, the sea of data, and the pool of talents.  To envision the organizational view of purpose, the synergy, and harmony, it may need the effective leadership as a bridge to re-energize the spirit of our working environment, re-imagine the wonder of the business world and re-kindle the passion of work. With cutting edge technology as a silver lining, can CIO lead as such a very bridge?

Bridge the Business and Technology: Modern digital technology is beyond the utility (the water or electricity) of the city, it’s also the brain and heart of the business, the strategic IT leadership bridges the silo functions, overflowing data ocean and over-specialized talent pools via effective communication. As Drucker pointed out: the spirit of the organization comes from the top, the effective leadership will help bridge multi-generational, multicultural workforce into the same conversation, bridge the invisible culture into more visible, measurable performance results via the open platform, it also bridges the business and technology through the lens of social value, the common customer language, sustainability, and the unique brand reputation.

Bridge Data and Insight: Instead of facing the Pacific Ocean, modern businesses are now facing the Ocean of Big Data, the effective IT leadership need bridge the big opportunities and potential risks, the focus and the distraction, also bridge the gap between exponential growing data with insufficient analytic talent. The purpose of IT leadership bridge is also to transform data into information, from information into knowledge, then capturing the wisdom to evoke the further imagination, pull collective wisdom together, blueprint and build up the smarter business and better world.

Bridge the Organization & the Digital Ecosystem: The modern digital technology such as social and cloud not only empower talent to step out of their own comfort zone, to become the thought leaders or domain expert, but also enable business to think beyond their shareholders, it bridges the business with its community such as bigger city or the full ecosystem more seamlessly, the technology and effective leadership can also bridge up the platform to exchange the wisdom, update the policy, enforce the governance, to influence the industry and the whole ecosystem positively. If the purpose of business is to create a customer, now the customer is also including fellow citizens to benefit from the business’s prosperity or the world citizens to embrace humanity.

Bridge Today and Future: What is the future? No matter it’s a social business, smarter city or developing planet, future is about connectivity, intelligence, sustainability, and cultural understanding & collaboration. Fashion fades away, technology trend will keep emerging and last, to bridge today’s uncertainty into tomorrow’s conscious progress & advancement, to bridge today’s control-driven corporate culture into tomorrow’s trust-based, self-management team; to bridge pyramidal hierarchy into more flatter, agile business structure and to bridge the multi-channel communication ways. From DIY (Do It Yourself ) to BYOD (Bring your own Device) business perspective, the latest technology such as mobile/social is bringing enterprise technology with the consumerization of IT, customers need to be tailored with personalized service & solution, future is already here!

Bridge Yin & Yang: From Wikipedia "yin and yang," is used to describe how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. This ancient philosophy well reflects the world we live in economically, socially, politically and environmentally. Modern business and technology are crafting a more democratic framework to create the synergy from Yin and Yang: to embrace and advocate the diversified leadership, to respect, appreciate and complement our cognitive difference such as human attitude, action, culture, and wisdom, and to lead through influence.

Golden Gate Bridge, one of the seven wonders of the world, unify our aesthetic standard, shining as the man-made miracle; Modern leadership, like such a legendary bridge, can broaden our vision about human potential and possibility, and brighten our common future via wisdom and openness.

Posted in: CIO Debate,CIO Leadership,metaphors