Welcome to our blog, the digital brainyard to fine tune "Digital Master," innovate leadership, and reimagine the future of IT.

The magic “I” of CIO sparks many imaginations: Chief information officer, chief infrastructure officer , Chief Integration Officer, chief International officer, Chief Inspiration Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Influence Office etc. The future of CIO is entrepreneur driven, situation oriented, value-added,she or he will take many paradoxical roles: both as business strategist and technology visionary,talent master and effective communicator,savvy business enabler and relentless cost cutter, and transform the business into "Digital Master"!

The future of CIO is digital strategist, global thought leader, and talent master: leading IT to enlighten the customers; enable business success via influence.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

The Monthly Insight of Digital Organizational Maturity May 2016

A high mature digital organization is truly proactive and outside-in, information savvy, culture intelligent, and people-centric.

Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. How to understand the mentalities behind the change as the first step, in order to fine tune the process of Change Management, and overcome the obstacles to managing a digital transformation smoothly?


   

 Digital Organizational Maturity

  • Build an Organization of Future: The future is already here, the digital is the age of customer-centricity; the age of empathy, the age of collaboration; the age of co-creating and the age of people, but either strategically or tactically, how to build such an organization of future?


  • A Flexible Organization: Digital is the age of choices; just like consumers have more options to shop via multi-channel platforms; organizations also have more opportunities (and risks as well) in scaling or innovating their businesses. Today, the "flexible organizations" are on the digital way, those companies, are able to "navigate" the change and the complexity of the present business world via creative problem-solving and next innovation practices. The organizational flexibility is essential for business success.


  • A ‘Happy’ Organization? Many forward-looking organizations are shifting from the industrial silo mode to interconnected digital mode. Digital organizations are more organic than mechanical; more sociological than hierarchical; more hybrid (multi-generational; multi-geographical and multi-devicing) and antifragile. So which mood is the digital organization more often in, and how to build a “Happy Organization” with both happy employees and happy customers?


  • How to Build a High-Mature Organization: An organization or company may be in business for many years, but has not matured its management practices or lack of well-defined sets of business principles. Most of the organizations stick to the lower level of maturity mode (reactive, inside-out, and operational driven), how can they move up the maturity level to become truly proactive and outside-in, more culture intelligent and people-centric?


  • Three IT Movements to Improve Organizational Maturity? Due to the “VUCA” characteristics of digitalization, organizations today need to build a unique set of business capabilities and enforce organizational democracy to adapt to changes, accelerate business growth, catalyze innovation and achieve operational excellence. Information and Technology play a pivotal role in such a transformation, here are three digital IT movements to harness business competency and improve organizational maturity.

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.

Three Questions to Assess Talent Management Effectiveness

People are always the most important business assets, but also the weakest link in strategy management.

To compete in today’s hyper-competitive digital environment, businesses rely so much on their people assets or human capital, to reach their goals and succeed. However, digital leadership gap, innovation gap, IT skills gap, or overall  business talent gaps are not fictions, they are the reality, and the barriers to digital transformation. What are root causes of the scarcity of digital leadership and poor talent management, and which questions should you ask to assess talent management effectiveness?


What leadership, functional, and industrial competencies are needed to achieve corporate strategy? There is no one generic set of leadership skills or talent competencies. Effective leadership or desired talent capability differs by level, the type of organization, the stage of organizational evolution, the mindset of stakeholders (particularly boards of directors), the complexity of the product, the national and political culture, and many other variables. There is no magic talent management formula as well, too often, leaders are allowed to complain generically about what they mean by skill and competency gaps and often they pick the symptom, not digging through the root causes. Every organization must address their common and unique skills requirements and map that out through skills/competency matrix within their organization. For example, broadly speaking, across the industrial or functional border, creativity has become the #1 desired quality either for leaders or digital professionals. Creativity to some extent is the nature of seeing the patterns that already exist, and then being able to predict how they change, and sometimes manipulate them in a direction that fits the organizational needs or that of business objective, to come out an alternative way to solve the problems. To spur creativity, organizations have to innovate their talent management, encourage “out of box” thinking and leverage digital platforms to build their creativity competency.


What competencies do you have? What’re the capability gaps that are identified? What kind of framework would ensure high-quality assessments of current talent competencies? It is important to make an objective assessment of your talent competencies, identify your collective business capability gaps. It is not a simple task because most teams operate with an incomplete and relatively small view of the world. So their views of talent gaps are often based on the immediate talent need at the operational level, but lack a clear link between talent competency and long-term business strategy. In order to build high-effective teams, the foresightful organizations should always look for the complementary mindsets, capabilities, and skills that they don't have so that they can build a winning team and complement each other. Statistically, the heterogeneous team with the cognitive difference is more innovative than the homogeneous group setting, because good ideas are multi-dimensional, they take root in unsuspected places and they evolve with time and by unexpected connections.


How to innovate talent management and performance management?  The performance management in the majority of organizations are still the static annual event, take an industrial style approach to collect certain quantitative data point, it is not sufficient to adapt to the digital management philosophy - with a holistic and innovative approach to integrating people management, culture management, and performance management, and setting the very clear goals to build a creative working environment, encourage innovation, and ensure, the purpose of reviews is improvement about the future. The past is over. Move the purpose of performance reviews away from "evaluating" the past, and to improving success in the future. The best reason to do the performance management is to work with employees to improve their performance regardless of current level, so they can better contribute to organizational goals. It is also critical to leverage the latest technology and tuning performance management systems and processes which are gradually moving away from a static, unidirectional, and time-bound avatar to a more dynamic, continuous, and interactive state. Improved transparency, real-time feedback, goal tracking, and enterprise-wide acknowledgment, recognition of achievements are some of the key drivers, which result in the adoption of digital and social performance management systems.


People are always the most important business assets, but also the weakest link in strategy management. Talent management effectiveness directly makes an impact on strategy management success. Thus, make the great investment on the people, to not only motivate their better performance but also unleash their full potential and build collective human capability of the organization to achieve the high performance of the business for the long run.



Monday, May 30, 2016

The “CIO Master” Monthly Tunings: IT DIgital Transformation May. 2016

IT is the business.

Modern CIOs have many personas and face great 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, the 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? Here is the monthly tuning of IT Digital Transformation


        IT Digital Transformation Brief May 2016
  • Three IT Management Dilemmas Managing a highly effective IT is not an easy job, and improving IT maturity is even harder. IT leaders have to avoid a lot of pitfalls, overcome many change management roadblocks, and deal with quite a few of IT management dilemmas in transforming IT from a cost center to value creator, from a support function to a strategic business partner and innovation engine. Here are three IT management dilemmas. 

  • Running IT as a Digital Differentiator  IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the driver of business change. However, many IT organizations still get stuck at the lower level of maturity to only “keep the lights on,” and IT is perceived as a support function and cost center in those organizations. With the increasing pace of changes and fierce competition, the forward-looking organizations empower their IT leaders to lead changes? How can IT build its reputation as a business value creator and how to run IT as a digital differentiator?


  • Running IT as Digital Capability Builder of the Organization: Forward-looking organizations are making a continuous journey shifting from an inside-out operation driven organization to an outside-in customer-centric business; to improve competency, they also shift from process-oriented practices to capability-based strategy management. IT plays a more important role in such a digital paradigm shift. The capability is the ability to achieve the desired effect under specified performance, standards and conditions through combinations of ways and means (activities and resources) to perform a set of activities. What are differentiated business capabilities can IT help to build for business to gain long term advantage?


  • How can Digital CIOs Run a Delightful IT with Zeal: At a contemporary business, technology is an enabler for business transformation, process optimization and talent empowerment. However, the majority of IT organizations are perceived as support centers with heavyweight hardware boxes and back office functions less delightful today. And IT leaders are often the transactional managers who can only speak technology jargons to keep the lights on, with less passion, but more heavy duty. With emergent lightweight digital technology trends, how can IT reinvent itself as a cool innovation center less wired, but more connected, less legacy infrastructure, but more powerful? How can digital IT leaders run a truly delightful IT with zeal and improve its agility and maturity?


  • Running IT as Digital Catalyzer: IT is on the big shift to transform from a cost center to a business value creator, from a help desk to a growth engine; IT should devote more attention to what organizations really care about - managing information to capture insight and foresight, putting technology to business advantage. However, there is the gap between the aspirations of what IT could do to the business versus what the current IT “mentality” and capability within the respective IT department is capable of providing and enabling. How can IT close communication and capability gaps, and what is the focal point to run IT as the digital catalyzer and improve its effectiveness, agility, and innovativeness?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about #2800th 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. 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.

How to Fine Tune a Digital Learning Organization

There is no panacea, no magic bullet with regards to change management.

Digital means the increasing speed of change and hyper-connected, always-on businesses. Change Management in high mature organizations are no longer just a one-time business initiative, but an ongoing business capability. Change Management and Strategy Management need to go hand-in-hand. But more specifically, how to manage change effectively to improve its success rate, and how to fine-tune a digital learning organization?




One of the items that affect changes in organizational structure is how it is done. Planned vs. radical way. Studies have shown that leaders that have offered democratic participation have reached a far better outcome than those who have been autocratic in their approach. Planned change and participative management are central to success. To change an organizational system, you must first understand the concept of the true meaning of the organizational system & learn the art & practice of the learning organization. Leadership that understands the organization as a system is part of the answer. Sometimes, radical change is needed when you want to change some things, not just the organizational system only but the holistic ecosystems which are centered on the cultural system, moral system, social system, material system, and functional system. The other times, an organizational system may not need a total remodel. A few areas need improvement while others need new processes. Once the "why" is known that "what" can be the focus and the "how" will follow as it will be easier to answer the question with all the variables and goals identified and defined.


To change an organization's culture, there MUST be buy-in from the top executives: We can't change anything without changing the culture, sometimes in big ways and others we make small system changes. There are many who discount the necessity to plan and cultivate organizational culture. The point is that we can do all the right things during the change process but still fail when the organization eventually moves back to well known long-time practices. In an era of poor decision making by management from top-down, you need to allow a 'bottom-up' approach, too. Then a change agent must be brought in to work with every tier, establishing a common language for the organization and dealing with the most challenging issue - what is NOT spoken. There are change agents making cultures conscious. Start by building trust with yourself, because if you don't trust anyone, including yourself, then bringing about change in an organizational system will be daunting.


There is “no one size fits all” formula for change management: To manage change effectively, you should take into consideration that no two organizations are the same and the same applies to the leadership. Today we see that many companies are moving toward open structure and more freedom to those who are linked with the front line jobs. Perhaps one key to the question is to allow for leadership at many different levels throughout the organization. If people don’t feel that they are valued, it is often difficult to bring around changes. This means that employees are a part of the decision-making process and how the company is operating. Leadership and decisions making at many different levels are often likely to drive out the best in the people, organizational innovation, and culture. Trust is fundamental but in an organizational system if you want to change something, you also need to follow the step-wise scenario:
- the first point is the pressure coming from the management and with clear business goals (implication from top management)
- the second point is an explanation to justify why and legitimacy in time. Knowing the "why" is important to determine the "how."
- the third point is to indicate the strategic goals coming from the top management are achieved bottom-up, and how operating people have their own trajectory with respect to the real contribution and the individual know-how.
- qualify the departure state and the state "dreamed" at the end (middle management)
- work after on the HOW especially who contribute and when (operating people)
- don't forget one eye on the final objective and the second eye on risk management for emergent events.
-Enjoy and stay in a positive attitude


Changing an organizational system is an ambitious project that would imply consideration of several factors. A holistic approach would be recommendable for radical changes. Since it is the system, the key elements in Change Management include vision, value, culture, goals, process, and measurement., etc. Incremental changes should also have plans and take logical steps. There is no panacea, no magic bullet with regards to change management, but the well thought out planning, the changeable people with learning agility, and robust, but not rigid processes are all success factors for building change as an important dynamic digital capability.



Digital Leadership as Harmonizer

Harmonization is the digital leadership theme to celebrate this holiday weekend.

Though the substance of leadership never changes, it is all about the future. Leadership is situational, in every era, there is a different theme for leadership effectiveness. If the agricultural leadership is about surviving from the scarcity of resources; the industrial leadership is based on command and control to build a certain order from chaos, and then digital leadership is about harmonizing and orchestrating toward the next level of prosperity of human society. Because we slowly, but steadily move to the era with an abundance of knowledge and flow of information and ideas, and digital leadership should also leap to the next level of maturity with the following traits.
 
Vision: The purpose of leadership is to grow your business and advance our society. Therefore, vision is critical to focus on the big picture, to steer the organization towards the uncharted water without getting lost in the right direction, or inundated with trivial details. A great vision is one that relates itself to a purpose greater than itself which contributes to the common good. Digital leadership is not just about winning, but about harmonizing to unleash collective human potential and orchestrate a scalable innovation symphony. A good vision statement either for personal development, business growth, or societal progress, should motivate us continually to "reach beyond our grasp" -- in the pursuit of longer-term goals to be realized through the achievement of nearer-term objectives.


Empathy: Empathy conveys the respect which is crucial in the binding of peer-to-peer relationships, connecting the minds and touching the hearts, to harmonize the business and the world. It becomes more significant because we live in such a hyperconnected and interdependent digital ecosystem.  Without empathy, there cannot be a rapport and thus no sustainable business relationships. It is the ability to think as if you were in the other party’s position, to gain an in-depth understanding of the thought processes behind each action. The lack of empathy is caused by the homogeneity of leadership setting. Today, many leaders have sympathy, but lack empathy, they intend to help and manage well, however, sometimes, it goes in the opposite direction. Empathy is a very important soft skill that is frequently undervalued. It's not born to a leader, but it can be learned if you have an open mind and a humble attitude.


Balance: What is leadership? It reminds us of the famous fable of “Six blind men and an Elephant.” Each one of them is fumbling around and making the conclusion: Is leadership the sports competition? Is leadership the beauty pageant? Is leadership about richness or spirituality? Is leadership all about winning? Or is leadership about "Just do it," -taking action? What are the emergent themes of digital leadership? Compared to the previous eras, to improve leadership effectiveness, it’s about harmony. To achieve harmony, it’s all about balance. To balance, it’s all about overcoming extreme thinking and silo mentality. Often, superficiality will cause such anti-digital "extreme thinking" pattern: More often, the binary thinking just focuses on the symptoms and stick to the polar situations or two opposite views, they perceive things either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, there are no shades in between; such extreme thinking can limit your view to observe the world more objectively; distort the picture of reality, restrict the scope of your thought process, and cloud your mind to make a good judgment either in decision-making or problem-solving. The digital leaders with a balanced mind can bring agility and flexibility across the spectrum of digital dynamic and digital paradox. It can also bring in-depth understanding across the spectrum of a "local"/"specific" to "global"/ "holistic"/ "systemic" (boundaryless /transdisciplinary)/ "whole-systems" elaboration.


Leadership is complex because there’re so many variables in it, leadership is simple as well because the substance of leadership never changes: It is about future and progression. Digital leadership should go beyond the status quo, it is about harmonizing a more peaceful world, it’s about orchestrating an innovative society. It's about bringing wisdom to the workplace. Harmonization is the digital leadership theme to celebrate this holiday weekend.


Sunday, May 29, 2016

Change Leadership Sum Up II

Leadership is about CHANGE!

Change is inevitable, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. The perspective is often rational, an automatic cultural response; defending already existing structures, all that we take for granted, without questioning the underlying premises. But in order to make change both proactive and sustainable, which is more important, Change Leadership or Change Management? How does Change Leadership differentiate from other types of leadership?


Which Path do you take for Change Management? Organizational Change is always difficult, and many organizations' ineffective change programs have the symptoms such as "change inertia," or “change fatigue,” etc. Change is inevitable and needed in every business. The successful businesses are the ones that have learned HOW to implement change time after time after time, and build it as a solid business capability. Change Management requires a plan and strategy as well, can you take a shortcut, is there any ideal route for the change, and how to improve the success rate of Change Management?


The Future-Driven Leadership: The substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about making the positive influence, and providing direction, both for oneself and others. Leadership is about CHANGE. It is a basic human ability to inspire self and others to look beyond limitations and make continuous improvement. This ability becomes a capability if we constantly nurture our basic human instincts of HUMILITY, CURIOSITY, and CREATIVITY. Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today.


The Empathetic Leadership Many think Digital is the age of empathy, and empathy is one of the crucial ingredients of digital leadership. Empathy is the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person's feelings; or the intellectual identification with or vicarious experience of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. From leadership perception, if you can understand how people think, response and behave, what they desire and what their fears are, you are better armed to manage them in order to gain their support. Therefore, the empathetic leadership with the cognitive difference is needed in today’s dynamic working environment and diversified workforce.


The Inclusive Leadership: How to Manage  Multi-Generational Workforce Effectively: There is poor communication between generations within many organizations, which is a growing problem.The mindsets and priorities of each generation are different. Career development means something different to each group segment, and this becomes problematic when you have a company or organization with culture and values that do not reflect the most contemporary views. Companies that learn how to bridge this gap effectively will have many advantages. You must not stereotype based on a generation. But what are the principles and practices to manage today’s multi-generational workplace effectively?


Leading Change by Questioning: Change is a vital element for the contemporary organization to stay competitive. But most of Change Initiatives fail to achieve expectation. What are the principles and practices, techniques and mechanism shall you use to manage change. Change by questioning, can you frame the right questions and answer them right as well.


How to Lead Through Constant Change? Change becomes new normal because the "VUCA" characteristics of digital dynamic. Traditional step-by-step Change Management as one-time initiative or isolated approach might not work any longer for constant and multitude of change. Companies need to embed a changeable mindset in their culture and build change capabilities among all staff, not only managers in a continuous way. From a management perspective, what are the roadblocks to change, and how to lead through constant change more effectively?


The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about 2800+ 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. 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.

Five Questions to Improve IT Maturity

To improve IT maturity, IT needs to change the emphasis to an “outside-in” approach with that vital focus on users.

Although IT has touched almost every corner of the business right now, the majority of IT organizations still get stuck at the lower level of maturity, struggle at the stage of the business and IT alignment. IT is business, with the increasing speed of change, many think that the gap between business and IT has actually widened. The reason is that business and IT have evolved at a different pace over the past few decades. While IT has evolved significantly in all aspects such as people, process, technology - business has, and continues to evolve faster due to the “VUCA” business new normal. Moving from IT-business alignment to IT-business integration and optimization is strategically important for IT leaders to run a digital IT and improve overall IT and organizational maturity. It is increasingly more challenging for IT to deliver to business WHAT it wants and WHEN it wants. Here are five questions to assess your IT maturity.


Q1: How do you determine the strategic value proposition of IT to the business?
The main problem is that the business executive still limits their vision of IT as “IT supports a strategy.” As a matter of fact, digital technology is often the disruptive force for business transformation. IT is not just to support strategy, IT strategy is an integral part of business strategy. The IT strategy is the responsibility of the CIO and works as a foundation for driving business success. Organizations need to empower their IT leaders to lead digital transformation as a forerunner. CIOs role as C-level is to contribute to the formulation of the business strategy where new trends of technology will provide strategic business capabilities to the business that will enhance the competitive advantages of the organization. The CIO is not simply the leader of the enterprise's IT departments, The CIO role is an enterprise leadership & executive role who is responsible for leadership of the information agenda, which includes driving customer engagement and experience as a cross-functional enterprise responsibility. The strategic value proposition of IT is how to leverage the resources and assets of the IT departments to create the optimal business value - which in the next step, will generate revenue growth, brand or increased market shares.


Q2: How do you evaluate the evolving IT capabilities of that could outperform competitors?
In today’s business dynamic, digital capabilities are a fundamental building block in digital transformations with which companies can transform customer experiences, operational processes, and business models, to reach high-level business agility and maturity. A business capability is the set of abilities needed by an organization in order to deliver value. It’s the ability of an organization to do things effectively to achieve desired outcomes and measurable benefits and fulfill business demand. IT is the key enabler for building business capabilities which can be categorized into the necessary operational capabilities to keep the lights on, and the unique business capabilities (such as change, innovation) to make a difference. CIOs as IT leaders must be able to develop and optimize IT operational functions and harness value added IT capabilities within itself as well. It is also something to have IT resources (people and operational IT processes) refined to the point that they are nimble, can adapt to changing business demands in a timely fashion. It is critical as well to define performance indicators and evaluate & measure IT and business capabilities to achieve the expected result if you can only manage what you measure.


Q3 How do you allocate dollars across the portfolio of IT investments to ensure a healthy return?
The de facto best practices of managing IT project portfolio need to include such as, only manage a business project, not for technology's sake, IT should not just run the business today, but help to “grows the business” for tomorrow. The goals of portfolio management are not only the strategy alignment and value leverage; it's also a mix of short, mid and long-term projects that need to make up a project pipeline. IT leaders must also have a good understanding of the projects and programs they are facilitating, particularly the objectives and benefits to be delivered. Overall value, therefore, has to be judged at the enterprise level considering the overall satisfaction over each combination of cost, schedule, performance, and satisfaction of the customer, user, and each stakeholder, prioritize the portfolio, and manage full application life cycle. Here is a set of questions to evaluate the business value of every project: What are the key drivers behind this project? What problem or event is driving the need for the project? What immediacy does this problem or event have and why does it need to be addressed now? What is wrong with maintaining the status quo? What impact are these problems currently having (either to the organization or the community)? Can the impact of these problems be measured and quantified and if so what is the quantum of the problems., etc. A healthy IT program portfolio makes a good balance of “run, grow, and transform” projects.


Q4: What ideal IT spending ratio, what tradeoff are you making in managing IT performance and cost effectively? All IT spending must be rationalized against the business benefits. This discussion and these arguments are not new. IT needs to stay in the mix; they need to find ways to move up the stack and provide business value, such as innovation and not spend their cycles "keeping the lights on" as just a cost center. For example, just keep the lights on to contribute 25 percent of the profit sounds better than just keep the lights on as an act of pure overhead cost. IT is always striving to improve its value to the business. Some of the "long poles in the tent" tend to be labor; depreciation and new capital spend. It isn't just the IT spending ratio as a percentage of budget numbers (70/30, 85/15), but the question of what is real: tangible or measurable business value? And who is measuring or driving the perceived value? When all departments truly collaborate with IT to improve the vision,  realized of using IT as a competitive leverage.


Q5 How do you measure that a breadth of best practice is in place to leap the business growth both now and in the future? The success of IT is not for its own sake, but to ensure the entire business success. IT organizations should be able to define and align operational KPIs to strategic KPIs of business for successful tracking of the effectiveness of strategic KPIs. By the time IT is ready to deliver functionality to the business, the business needs not just "requirements" have already changed. Therefore, CIOs must become true business leaders by looking to get much closer to their company’s customers in understanding their needs, and use the big 'WHY' to help crystallize their own companies 'what.' The effective way to track the achievement of strategic goals is to cascade those down throughout the organization with the use of operational KPIs. It DOES mean that at the operation level, there should be some metrics that can be tied directly to achieving strategic goals. If one focuses on short-term value too much, this might not support long-term strategy and vision in the end. If one puts too much focus on long-term value, there may be a loss of momentum and engagement.

To improve IT maturity, IT needs to change the emphasis to an “outside-in” approach with that vital focus on users. IT has both internal customers and end customers as well. Cutting out waste such as shrinking the gap between business and IT could make a significant contribution and the sooner it starts the better it will be for all involved. At the higher level of maturity, IT is the business driver and innovation center.