Monday, November 27, 2017

CIOs as “Digital Master”: Setting Stages to Keep Digital Flow

Digital means flow -mind flow, data flow, information flow, knowledge flow, idea flow, and business flow.

Digital means change, choice, fluidity, speed, and innovation. In a dynamic digital workplace, the organizational structure should be solid enough to keep people or things in order; but fluid enough to keep information and idea flow. Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to operate smoothly and adapt to change effortlessly. An organization can approach such a flow zone when people are ready for moving to a fluid structure, and digital leaders are eager to set stages to drive a frictionless, immersive, and relentless digital transformation.


Digital mind flow: Digital fluidity enables free thinking and intuition. On the business navigation dimension, we live in the digital era, it requires that we move from mindset to mind flow, from fixed mind to growth mind, to embrace changes, and ride learning curve for gaining insight from the sea of information and the abundance of knowledge, and ultimately improve digital fluency. The connecting mind or collective thinking in a digital business setting will have more antennae focused on the emergent business trends and foresee what’s going to happen and well prepare for the tide of changes. On the opposite, the fixed and rigid mind usually won’t allow a person to think beyond a point and get stuck at “We always do things like that” mentality. These mindsets can be described as defensive, resist or reject anything that affects the cozy comfort zone. From a change management perspective, keeping digital fluidity requires mind change at every level of the organization and gain an in-depth understanding that things cannot stay the same. Often, the imperative thing needs to change is the mindset of the management. Because radical change and digital transformation have to deprogram old mindsets, let go of “the voices from the past,” reprogram people's minds with new thinking to reflect digital norms, and attitude, and establish a new blueprint for how you want to create the digital future reality at the mind level.


Digital knowledge flow: We are moving from a considerably static industrial age with knowledge scarcity to the digital age with knowledge abundance. To adapt to the increasing pace of changes, it is important to create a dynamic business environment that encourages the utilization and knowledge flow. Why, because knowledge does not stand still, and knowledge today even has a shortened life cycle due to the overwhelming growth of information and the ocean of changes. Knowledge flows into the company and flows out of it, it erodes, it emerges, it flows to the customers of the company in terms of product and service delivery too. The knowledge stock should be perceived as something that changes the volume and shapes all the time. So, the information and knowledge management is about understanding and driving the change of knowledge stock at minimal cost in a way that fits the strategy of the business the best and ensures people can update their knowledge timely in order to make effective decisions and get the work well done. Knowledge Management, taken as a whole, addresses both stock and flow; connect and collect; share and create. Digital knowledge flow helps to unlock latent expertise, collaborate through communities with geographically-distributed teams, and arise the opportunity to analyze and reuse the information they create as they go about their activities, and from that to generate valuable knowledge that can be shared to help people and business growth as well.


Digital ideas flow: Digital is the age of innovation. For cracking serendipity code to achieve digital innovation premium, organizations should build a healthy working environment to encourage brainstorming and idea flow. It is important to develop the scalable innovation management framework and practices for sharing and managing ideas throughout the enterprise, even across silos and geographies. Because the main barriers to innovation are silos, rigidity, inflexibility, static mindset, or bureaucracy, etc. Ideas are seeds of creativity that can change a certain situation and future. Streamlining idea flow is not an easy task, getting crazy ideas isn't a problem; having too much information may cause a problem if it is not processed effectively. One of the real challenges to innovation management is how to accelerate idea validation and streamline innovation process to keep ideas flow, and set prioritization - select the ideas which can have a better opportunity to implement and maximize business value, build the competitive advantage, and stimulate the growth of business revenue and profit.


Organizations today have to become highly responsive, dynamic, and hyperconnected. Digital means flow -mind flow, data flow, information flow, knowledge flow, idea flow, and business flow. Winning the digital dynamic means engaging dynamic thinking, updating knowledge, streamlining idea flow, enforcing cross-functional communication and collaboration, in order to build the unique business competency.

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