Five Digital Impacts on Modern Business

Digital makes a profound impact on a specific function to business as a whole, with the goals to delight customers and achieve high-performance. Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Given the power of the cloud, social, mobile and analytics digital technologies to fuel business innovation, capability orchestration, and employee collaboration, digital...

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Empathy is a Fundamental Component of Design

Empathy is the core foundation in Design Thinking, and Design Thinking is a process of empathy building. We live in a fast-paced digital environment of rapid technology development and utility obsolescence; it is also the era of customer centricity. As the saying’s going: Empathy is a fundamental component of the design. How have you developed an empathic relationship and spirit among your customer experience design team members? How shall you...

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Is Agile the friend or foe of creativity?

 Agile stifles innovation when stakeholders dictate "how" and not get "why" and "what."  As an emergent management philosophy and methodology, Agile spurs many fiery debates, such as Does Agile improve software quality or is it the very reason for defects increase? Are Agile making manager’s happy, employees unhappy? Can Agile thrive in a large enterprise environment? Here is another one: Is Agile the friend or the foe of creativity? Agile...

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Is Data Asset

Data is like the crude oil, the primitive forest, the deep sea, the soft asset and the raw intelligence of business in the 21st century.  Statistically, the amount of data stored is doubling every 18 months, and many organizations concern "we have too much data but not enough information" or "we are rich in data but poor in information, knowledge, insight and analysis.". The underlying question is whether data can be an economic or productive...

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Apply System Thinking to Frame the Problems

System Thinking provides a structured process and takes consideration of the range of options.  As businesses become over-complex and extremely uncertain, more often, framing the right questions to ask or defining the real problems to solve is more challenging than finding the answers or discovering the solutions. Does Systems Thinking change the way you 'define' problems? System thinking (ST) provides a more holistic way to view the...

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What are the CIO’s Top Priorities for Improving Business Maturity

The priority has to be set for lifting IT and overall business maturity from efficiency to effectiveness to agility. Nowadays, information is the lifeblood of business, and technology is the big brain of the organization, there are so many things on the CIO’s agenda, IT is always in overload mode, and CIOs seem to be always at the hot seat. Therefore, in order to run IT more effectively and efficiently, how shall CIOs prioritize the projects,...

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Is Strategic Management a Process or a System

Strategic thinking is the system thinking in the new boxes whereas strategic planning, is a process of thinking within the business model and the system to embrace digital ecological value.  Digital means change, the speed of change is accelerated, however, it doesn’t mean businesses do not need strategic planning anymore; on the opposite, strategy may become the very core of management discipline than ever in order to adapt to the digital dynamic;...

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To Celebrate the 1100th Blog: The Practice of Mindfulness

A mind is like a parachute, it works best when it’s open in the right way!  Business and the world become over-complex and interdependent. From leadership and talent management perspective, are mindful leaders or workers nature or nurtured? How do human beings think? Where do you draw the line about which aspect of human activity is thought and which is mere reflex? How do you differentiate between well thought-out reflex and simple physiological...

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Is Differentiation a Strategy

The real strategic differentiation is to create true value, look forward, not backward, and present the advanced uniqueness to shine through. Today’s digital business environment is unprecedentedly dynamic, complex and uncertain. There are always players starting with different resources and competitive position. And there are always different complexities at a different time. Thus, the organizations have to build the two sets of business...

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Analysis vs. Synthesis

From a cognitive perspective, system thinking integrates analysis and synthesis.  The terms analysis and synthesis come from classical Greek and mean literally "to loosen up" and "to put together" respectively. These terms are used within most modern scientific disciplines - from mathematics and logic to economy and psychology - to denote similar investigative procedures. In the emergent digital world with the nature of hyper-connectivity...

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CapEx vs. OpEx

CapEx to OpEx shift benefits businesses to maximize the investment potential. More and more IT organizations are pushing up their Cloud envelope, though Cloud Computing still takes time to get matured and it doesn't necessarily equate to faster software development or better quality of software, still, there are some significant advantages such as the ability to scale up or down as demand waxes and wanes, global availability and transforming from...

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