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.

Thursday, May 31, 2018

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 5/31/2018

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking, brainstorming, innovating and sharing.

"The Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with 4600+ 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. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

CIOs as the “Change Agent”: Three “Never” Practices to Manage Change Seamlessly Change is a volatile subject, just like change itself. Compared to the business world decades ago, information is growing exponentially, the digital ecosystem has also become more complex and dynamic. Everything changes continuously by following the laws of evolution, and the rate of change is accelerated. to put simply, change itself changes. Therefore, senior leaders like CIOs need to gain an in-depth understanding of changes, especially at the strategic level, also help to make change principles and develop a set of best & next practices to lead changes seamlessly.

Five Senses of Digital Board The corporate board oversees strategy, monitors performance, sets policies, advises management and plays an instrumental role in leading business transformation seamlessly. The digital-savvy board has to gain digital awareness, shape digital mindset, leverage five senses, and exercise creativity muscles in order to improve digital fluency and leadership effectiveness.

Digital is the Era of ...We are at the dawn of the digital era. The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses. A digital paradigm is an emerging ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set limits or boundaries; but also offer the guidance for problem-solving or creating something new from old. The emerging digital era has many dimensions, how can you gain the deep understanding and embark a meaningful digital journey?

IT Innovation and Intrapreneurship The digital organization is technology driven and information intensive, IT needs to become the linchpin to integrate people, process, and technology into differentiated business competency such as innovation. The art of innovation is to connect wider dots for creating new ideas; the science of innovation is to take a structural approach to innovation management. Thus, IT is the hub to bridge the art and science of innovation. Nowadays, IT is the business in the business and the digital engine of the entire organization. The role of CIO continues to evolve rapidly in the midst of the information in digital transformation. Forward-looking IT organizations should practice intrapreneurship for running IT as a software startup, promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and corporate competitiveness.

The Monthly Insight: Digital Profundity May 2018? Now we live in a hyper-connected and over-complex digital ecosystem, digital flow changes the landscape of communication, collaboration, and connection, With "VUCA" characteristics of digitalization, digital profundity is in demand; a profound mind is deep, but not depressing; sophisticated, but not complicated; knowledgeable, but not arrogant; creative, but not naive; critical, but not negative; and mature, but not aged.

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.

Avoid Pitfalls to Run Digital IT

Organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to lead and manage, yet most important to execute.

The nimble digital technologies and abundance of information change how we think, live, and run always-on and always connected digital businesses today. The world is becoming smaller every day and as the consequence, every successful business has to sooner or later step into the uncharted water and blurred business territories. It brings both significant opportunities and unprecedented risks, how to understand and overcome pitfalls on the way to running a high-performance digital IT organization?


Lack of strategic IT leadership: To keep IT relevant in the era of fast-paced change and service on-demand model, there's a fundamental shift happening with the emergence of converging digital technologies that impact the business through cross-departmental collaboration. Lack of strategic IT leadership is the pitfall to reinvent IT as the trustful business partner. If the CIO comes only to speak about IT as the service provider, he or she only acts as a functional manager. IT ranked CIOs need to learn the business and gain an in-depth understanding of end customers. In fact, CIO is one of the most senior IT executives in the organization, and therefore, must have a seat at the big table to share the technological vision and co-create business strategy, to evolve IT as an integral element and digital linchpin. They should participate in conversations and get engaged in the investment process prior to the decisions already being made. The CIO has to run IT flawlessly at the prevailing level of sophistication, help IT become more differentiated, integrated, proactive, and aware of the organization as a whole. Without a clear vision or gut to break down silos, CIOs will meddle in the middle, IT will continue getting stuck at the lower level of organizational maturity. Forward-thinking organizations are empowering their CIOs to lead changes and practice innovation juggernaut. This is a golden opportunity for CIOs to lead the way by enabling, governing and optimizing the consumer-driven technology and information management, which are going viral in the enterprise. Becoming a strategic IT leader simply means being a proper "C-level" leader to build strong and value-creating relationships with C-suites, between IT and vendors or suppliers; and build a high-performance team with a strong bench.


Not investing enough time to identify pitfalls and discover the root cause of business problems: Many IT organizations are overloaded and understaffed, spend most of the time and resource on “keeping the lights on” or fixing symptoms only. Not investing enough time in identifying pitfalls and discovering the root cause of issues would make IT suffer from busyness and lower customer satisfaction. Even worse, the wrong cause of the problem will perhaps grow new or larger problems and create the disconnect between IT and the business. The better solution that crosses all industries is to keep peeling back the layers to find the root cause through asking big “WHYs”, or taking systematic approaches - to discover the root cause, and address it. In practice, CIOs should spend some time on making an objective assessment of IT beforehand: Is IT too operation-driven without spending sufficient time on strategic changes? Can IT management and staff communicate well with customers in the common business language without “lost in translation”? Which is the percentage of resource or budget spent on innovation? It’s important to integrate risk management into change/operational management as well as the everyday business model, to help move the organization a couple of steps forward in achieving business excellence.


People as the weakest link: People is still one of the most important factors to run a digital organization. Misfit mindset, change inertia, or talent gaps are all people-related pitfalls. Without overcoming those pitfalls, the success rate of digital transformation will decrease significantly. Businesses need to strengthen their weakest link - people by cultivating the culture of learning and innovation and ensure the right people with the right capability being put in the right position to solve the right problems at the right time. Effectiveness goes before efficiency. People often have the tendency to feel efficient - doing things right when working on the problem reactively. However, effectiveness - doing the right things requires a little bit of thinking before doing with digital fit mentality and attitude. By identifying and overcoming talent pitfalls, the management is capable of instilling energy into their organization; able to set good policies and processes to build a delightful working environment; and able to bring the new perspective, and come out the alternative way to do things.

Organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to lead and manage, yet most important to execute. Digital is all about change and exploring! IT needs to avoid the pitfalls on the way, move up the maturity level, in pursuit of effectiveness and performance by having governance in place, with a long-term focus to get digital ready.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

The Monthly Digital Debate Collection: Five “HOW”s to Fine-Tune Digital Organizational Structure May 2018

Highly mature digital organizations have the high-level digital capability not only to build a digital business with people-centricity, but also to catalyzing enterprise-wide transformation via self-aware leadership, self-adaptive systems, and self-disciplined and self-motivated people.
 Five “HOW”s to Fine-Tune Digital Organizational Structure

How to Run a Digital Organization with Autonomy The business world is moving from a static, siloed, and mechanic industrial mood to the dynamic, fluid, and innovative digital mentality. Because the speed of change is accelerating, so the attempts to solve the existing challenges through the lens of the old paradigm continue failing. The new paradigm that is emerging is a digital organization that is more responsive, holistic, vibrant, self-driving, and above all enhances and supports the living organization and the dignity of the creative human spirit. More specifically, what is the digital way of running an energetic and autonomous digital IT organization? 

How to Leverage Systems Thinking in Designing a Digital Organizational Structure? Digital shift is inevitable, the digital revolution is reshaping the way we live our lives and the way we work. It’s forcing a fundamental digital transformation of business and our society. How to design organizations to maintain viability and deliver tactical actions for strategic effect, given weak, noisy, or evolving feedback signals due to systemic adaptive complexity in its environment? What would be the balanced design principles to enable successful emergent behavior and function of the organization in order that its structure is emergent as a self-organizing, self-redesigning team of teams? Or to put simply, how to design a digital organizational structure with the well-aligned resources, processes, and rules?

How to Design Organizations to Maintain Viability? Digital organizations are a complex ecosystem with the blurring line between functions, organizations and geographic locations. How to design organizations to maintain viability and deliver tactical actions for strategic effect, given weak, noisy and evolving feedback signals due to systemic adaptive complexity in its environment? What would be an inclusive set of theories to accommodate a complex system? How would such a set be integrated? How would be an organization experiencing that type of feedback know it's viable? How would it or its parts know it needs to change itself? How would it or its parts know what to change?

How to Keep Organization Grow and Flow? Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to operate smoothly. An organization achieves this state of equilibrium through its management layers. In other words, an organization can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear, accountable tasks. To put simply, how to keep organizations flow and grow into digital masters?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with 4600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. 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 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.

Five Senses of Digital Board

The board's ‘deep common sense” leads toward ”Effective Judgment," which has been defined as leveraged sense and sensitivity to make sound decisions. 

The corporate board oversees strategy, monitors performance, sets policies, advises management, and plays an instrumental role in leading business transformation seamlessly. The digital-savvy board has to gain digital awareness, shape the digital mindset, leverage five senses, and exercise creativity muscles in order to improve digital fluency and leadership effectiveness.

LISTENING:  Listening & debating become the new normal in the digital board. Traditional boards discuss various topics and practice compliance-driven governance discipline, but digital boards can listen empathetically and encourage debates to stimulate creativity. The debate is a discussion involving opposing viewpoints; deliberation; consideration – or to dispute or disagree about. The digital BoDs are good listeners, they act like a sponge and absorb information, ask lots of questions. In practice, the high performing digital board shows the ability and openness to "question itself and its decisions/ discussions." When the board builds the listening and learning culture, it could be also on the right track to build a listening-and-telling organization.

SMELLING: The rate of change has accelerated, indicating that foresightful business leaders such as board directors should be able to “smell” the business opportunities and learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the uncertain issues of tomorrow. With strong digital acumen, BoDs can sense emergent opportunities, predict potential risks, and also encourage those they guide to seek ongoing experience and knowledge. For leading effectively, the board needs to be engaged at the most senior levels to help influence positive changes, have a sense of the business direction, and shape the business of the future. It's critical to find the time and a viable board process for discussing long-term strategy and profitably growing the company.

FEELING: Emotions such as feeling is in some form morally acceptable in the boardroom, although most of the times, dispassionate analysis is the foundation for effective governance. Some good leaders are the ones that have a broad instinct to business and that act emotionally. But concern arises where emotional decisions are allowed to override other more appropriate considerations which are supported by hard facts and updated information. Emotion shouldn’t put the business at too high risk. Emotions shouldn’t pop up the ego or drive the autocratic style to diminish leadership effectiveness and take the organization in the wrong direction with potentially serious consequences. Imagine how the companies could change if each Board Director felt his/her mission is to expand the value to the existing or new customers, with new ideas, new products/services; or the new structures.

Tasting: The high taste of digital means openness, responsiveness, innovativeness, and fluidity. Homogeneity, primitiveness, and stagnation are tedious and tasteless. Building a high-taste digital board needs to identify and mind the multitude of leadership gaps, continue to add the new blood for enforcing IT savvy and digital acumen in the boardroom, fill cognitive gaps in decision-making, become performance-driven, embrace changes, and make the significant influence on change and innovation.


Touching: The human touch will become more central to build competitive advantages. An enterprise has to be linked to the many and varying touchpoints between itself and its marketplace environment. Prepare, listen, question, and participate at the board level is imperative to unfold the digital paradigm shift. It is so important in developing an atmosphere with effective and candid communication. From the boardroom to the contact center, the touchy-feely conversations need to truly connect the minds and untie the knots in people’s hearts. It is also important to foster an environment where feedback and communication are based on reality and not simply what BoDs or senior management wants to hear. Digital is the age of people. People-centricity is the hot topic and evident reinforcement of building a high-touching digital board.

The board's ‘deep common sense” leads toward ”Effective Judgment," which has been defined as leveraged sense and sensitivity to make sound decisions by listening, feeling, smelling, tasting, touching, and lead the organization in the right direction.

The Duel Forces to Run “Balanced” IT

 To stay competitive, businesses today have to gain a deep understanding of duel forces, manage digital balance cycles and reach the next level of organizational maturity.

The journey of digital transformation is all about weighing the key business elements impacting change such as people, process, and technology, blend coherent business ingredients, and balance the multiple duel forces, to create the business harmony and make a solid digital transformation.

Innovation & Standardization: Innovation is a management process to transform novel ideas for achieving its business value. IT led innovation is more science than art, to manage a healthy innovation lifecycle in a systematic matte and provide the sustained competitive advantage. Innovation comes with a risk of failure, usually not well tolerated in a market governed by risk-allergic mindset or unstructured management discipline. Standards are a form of embodied technical knowledge accessible to all types of business that enable more effective innovative product and process development. To improve innovation success rate, the business needs a level of guidance, set the standard, and build an effective framework for managing innovation portfolio effectively. However, overly rigid rules or processes will stifle innovation; being “unruly” incurs risk as well. People in tactic or operational management usually face a hard time to understand that the duel forces - innovation and standardization, actually can go hand-in-hand together in an appropriate way. In fact, the business must strike the right balance and consider the digital continuum between innovation and standardization.

Push & Pull: Digital transformation is driven by both visible (hard) and invisible (soft) forces, from multiple directions. Often the emergent digital technologies are imposing hard forces of digital disruption and change drivers, continually push the organization to reach the tipping point of digitalization. The soft business factors such as communication or culture can either catalyze changes or drag down the business speed. If you only take the visible business factors such as business process or technology alone as an element of the strategy execution, you may miss the point and head to the troubles, or things will be slow down again after adoption. IT is adaptively rational, “Push” and “Pull” are the duel forces businesses management must master in order to “run, grow, and transform” their organization at the steadfast speed. From the business management perspective, for every thorny business problem, push to explore multiple resolutions; take time to look at every situation from different angles (Management PoVs, Customer PoVs, Supplier PoVs, etc); also pull all necessary business resources to develop innovative business solutions. Continually accelerating changes in IT consumption and production require faster responses and better performance measurement, it is important to push staffs (including management themselves) to get out of the comfort zone, but also pull all critical business elements to build differentiated competency.


Simplicity & Complexity: Organizations are indeed becoming more complex. IT is by nature, even more complex, behind every intuitive user interface, there is complexity in it. Complex problems rarely have simple solutions. On the other side though, the goal of running digital IT is not to complicate things but to simplify and optimize for getting elegant solutions. From an information management perspective, it’s about how an enterprise will leverage information to power its business by optimizing the value of information while minimizing risks. Many tough problems get solved elegantly, but it may have been very complex for someone to implement it. When framing and solving problems, initial solutions are often more complex than required, and then adoption and progress come with simplification. In the corporate scope, there are hierarchical complexity, environmental complexity, information complexity, collaboration complexity, governance complexity, etc. From a business management perspective, simplicity should become the rule of communication and innovation." There are always constraints, so simplicity implies to build as little as possible. From the organizational structure perspective, some organizations are too complex and need to be more flexible and re-organized in a simple way by using a clear measure of complexity. Simplicity and complexity are duel forces of running an elegant digital organization. "Simplexity" is the portmanteaus word to reflect the digital new normal.

Digital IT is the key element of leading changes nowadays, leveraging duel forces to strike the right balance and delivering tangible and recognizable business value is the long-term management approach. To stay competitive, forward-looking organizations have to gain a deep understanding of these duel forces, manage digital balance cycles and reach the next level of organizational maturity.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

The Full-Color Spectrum of Creativity

Creativity is full of colors and has many dimensions, with multifaceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and incredible imagination.

Creativity has many faces, the creative thinker is unique. Creative personality seems to be more colorful and paradoxical. Analogically, creativity is like a color spectrum, there are commonalities that are relevant to all colors which reflect the spectrum of light. Such a metaphor connects the dot back to the nature of creativity.

Blue - competency: Creativity is an innate ability to generate novel ideas, it is the differentiated competency. Everyone has the ability to create, but creativity is an inherent ability that cannot be taught, only developed. Creativity can be either an individual activity or a team sport, Individually, creativity is the most needed professional competency; collectively, many minds can create many creative and different ideas, to often amplify creativity. Creativity in the workplace is fundamentally about the mental production of new ideas - not just any new ideas, but the creation of ideas that are both original and valuable. The workplace needs to be designed to help employees at all levels within an organization develop their creative competency and exploit opportunities in new and innovative ways.

Orange - confidence: 
Being innovative is a state of mind. Confidence allows creativity expansion to full potentials. Generally speaking, innovators have great confidence. Because innovation is a tough journey with numerous roadblocks and pitfalls on the way. If you are not confident, you won't be able to convince others to follow your leadership and vision. Only confident souls dare to break down outdated rules and conventional wisdom. Creativity is nurtured by curiosity. A truly confident person ask more than answer; take more risks than avoid making mistakes. Failure is part of innovation, confident people are better at pushing themselves to the limit, exploring new possibilities and tasting different flavors of the life. Their enriched experiences may make them more confident to do more with innovation.

Yellow - Passion: Passion fuels imagination and triggers creativity. Creativity generally comes from people who are passionate about their openness and sensitivity; who are passionate about exploring new ways to do things or gaining new possibilities. Passion enables determination. Following passion requires a good sense of judgment that you are on a right path to becoming more innovative. The passion fueled by a good positive chain of thoughts followed by positive actions often catalyzes creativity; brings good results and makes a leap of collective progress.

Green - Freshness: Creativity is fresh and new every time. Creativity loves the challenge, with the courage to see the new. Creative thinking is the way to look at the “old” problems or situations from a fresh perspective that suggests unorthodox solutions. Many people live in their old thinking box for so long, their minds get stale. Creatives have the courage and emotional strength to step out and expand their thinking to trust the process of creativity. Engaging in creativity inevitably creates tension, conflict, and emotionally charged debates and disagreements because we need both control and predictability, creativity and change.

Red -Energy: Creative people are intellectually curious, and energetic. Creativity seems to be the free flow of life force energy and it is a wellspring we can learn to tap. Creative people are inspired to think and work nearly every day on creating and show abundant energy. Our mind evolves different dimensions of thinking, the multitude of thought processes and creates a kind of vibration around us. That enthusiasm, energy, and optimism stimulate creativity. When we keep minds flow, release the positive energy, out of this comes a beautiful thing, the freedom of choice and the plenty seeds of creativity.

Purple - Devotion: Creativity is often born in solitude. If you consider being creative as a way of thinking, of expression, of seeing things differently., etc, and then it happens every day, multiple times a day. Being focused can harmonize your brainpower with nature energy in stimulating creativity. If someone has the desire to be curious and involved in a situation, they are dedicated to discover new patterns or connect usual dots, their innate creativity will push them along to an extent and continue moving forward by taking a creative path.

Brown -Friendliness: It is important to build a friendly environment in the melting pot to inspire creativity and encourage free thinking and experimenting. Collaboration is a fundamental part of what ultimately fueled the inspiration and imagination to innovate! Collaboration does create a sense of belonging and build trust through listening, asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, as well as dealing with conflict or even constructively advocating a point of view. The friendly workplace uses the diversity of ideas as a rich source of connectivity and relationship, to harness all the spontaneity of interaction the group is capable of and provoke breakthrough thinking to arrive at creative outcomes that would be otherwise very unlikely.

White - Brightness: Being bright means more about the altitude to see further and beyond, the attitude to learn and grow, and the aptitude to solve problems creatively and make a difference. The bright people are often more optimistic and confident with a positive mentality, more inclusive and magnetic to attract even “polar opposite” viewpoint to stimulate creativity. Being bright is simply not just about “Looking bright,” but about thinking the bright side and coming up with more bright ideas. Being innovative is about figuring out better ways to do things or solving old or emergent problems creatively, to brightening your environment.

Black - Magic: For many, creativity is the magical thinking and innovation is serendipity. Serendipity will always play some part in the innovation effort, and there are plenty of stories over the years about great ideas evolving out of chance meetings, sudden flashes of insight, and sheer luck. Still, creativity is the muscle can be strengthened and innovation is the process can be managed, but it has to be done slowly, patiently, and individually. There is no template which you can apply and suddenly have a creative workforce. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking, and solutions to allow this to develop into its potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative and advantageous ways.


Pink -Playfulness: Creativity demands the possibility of the wrong in order to be exploring in a free and playful way. You need to have the level of curiosity, desire to learn, observe, with the natural ability to maintain an open and inquisitive mind and have a playful attitude to discover and experiment. Child-like playful thinking can produce novelty, because they have the beginner’s mind, and they enjoy experimenting and discovering, asking questions and exploring.


Creativity is a flow, an abstract, an imagination, and an association, or simply the unusual dots connection. Creativity is full of colors and has many dimensions, with multifaceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and incredible imagination.


Strengthening Digital By Synergizing, Personalization, and Serialization

A digital transformation is an overarching approach that has to dig underneath of the surface of businesses and takes a holistic approach by synergizing, personalization, and serialization.

The digital paradigm shift has many dimension, it is not a single dimensional technological upgrade, companies need to embed digital into the very fabric of the business and explore digital management practices in a structural way. There is no magic formula, businesses that find themselves setting new and radically different trajectories are facing daunting tasks of navigating largely uncharted territories or diving into the underlying business processes and functions. It takes both strategy and practices to strengthing digital by synergizing, personalization, and serialization.

Synergizing: 
When jumping into the digital future of “VUCA” new normal –Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, you can’t predict every turns or curve the business will face, you have to enable the desirable emergent business property, either being called synergy or dynamic capability. Digitalization stipulates companies working together in a hyper-connected and continuously converging environment that provides structural analysis, and strikes the right balance of collaboration and competition to create synergy for making the paradigm shift. Business synergy creation implies the emergent organizational capability being built through certain business activities or process, structure or talent tuning. Cost saving is not equal to gaining in synergy. Synergy creation is something to do with identifying and developing core competency to get future ready. To create synergy, unlock performance and unleash digital potential, businesses need to fine-tune their organizational structure and business system concentrated on the cultural system, moral system, social system, IT system, other functional system and the holistic digital ecosystem. You need to envision the future trends and manage the two fundamental business cycles - balance cycle and growth cycle effectively to create business synergy and ride to the next level of organizational maturity.

Personalization: Digital is the era of people, option, empathy, or simply put, "personalization." Either for running the business or living the personal life, we expect that great personalization leads to the better understanding by designing tailored applications or solutions in real life. If traditional organizations like the mechanical system which were operated through linear logic and reductionistic management practices, perhaps work fine in the considerable static and silo industrial age. It has limitation to solving emerging problems in an increasingly volatile, uncertain and complex digital dynamic. The digital organization is more like the living thing with its unique identity, in part because ways of doing business and customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age. Providing the personalized services or solutions to its customers become the new normal to run a customer-centric organization. The intention is to delight customers by presenting the differentiated solutions to make sure that the end user is getting maximum benefit from the content and application, with the ultimate goal to build a people-centric organization.

Serialization: The objectives of digital transformation is the management discipline that underlies all planning and strategic activities. It stretches out in multiple dimensions. Digital exploration is about planning, investing, designing, developing, operating, consolidating, integrating, securing, modernizing, optimizing, balancing, and orchestrating. The process, technology, culture, and capability tuning. etc, are all tactics to get the organization from here to there for adapting to the over-complexity and fast-pace of changes. Thus, Digital playbooks are the series, to guide the business managing changes in a structural way. They serve as the basis for creating right policies and evaluating performance and changes effectively, shaping digital leadership, enforcing cross-functional communication and collaboration, developing cross-industry ecosystems and innovation opportunities. The highly effective corporations need to embed the power of information in its fiber to weave business competencies, to ensure it is part of the digital mechanism and process to improve business responsiveness and innovation. Digital transformation takes a holistic approach and a series of actions, to leverage their various environments, or ecosystems, to accelerate performance and improve business maturity.

A digital transformation is an overarching approach that has to dig underneath of the surface of businesses and takes a holistic approach by synergizing, personalization, and serialization. Digital organizations are all about information savvy, adaptation, people-centricity, high-performance, and speed. Going digital takes multifaceted management disciplines and structural procedure to drilling down the critical success factors to reaching business success for the long term.

Monday, May 28, 2018

The Monthly Insight of Information Management May 2018

 Information is the lifeblood and knowledge is the power of modern businesses.


The aim of modern Information Management has often been described as getting the right information to the right person, in the right format and medium, at the right time, in order to make right decisions. The value of information is qualitative, measurable, and defined uniquely by an organization to maximize its full digital potential.


 The Long Journey of Information Management


Take a Journey of a Thousand Steps for Information Management IT is only increasing in importance and relevance with each passing day. IT shifts from “T” technology focused to “I” driven - information, intelligence, innovation, and improvement. Information Management is the overall process of aligning the use of information through the management, assurance, and exploitation, guide the business towards the right direction and deliver services and solutions. It is a thorny journey with a thousand steps. IT leaders should set principles to ensure information is managed effectively and guide the business towards the right direction and deliver value-added services/solutions effortlessly.

The Five Stages of Information-Knowledge Management Information is the lifeblood and knowledge is the power of modern businesses. All leading businesses across the vertical sectors claim they are in the information management businesses. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses, information potential directly impacts the business's potential of the organization. Managing information-knowledge lifecycle effectively becomes a strategic business capability. And there are different levels of information/knowledge system models to meet the business requirement at the different stage.

Information Management vs. Knowledge Management: Information Management is to connect people with the right information at the right time & location, to ensure that accurate information is accessible and shared within relevant business units. This information is open to interpretation in accordance with the level of knowledge one has. Knowledge Management safeguards full understanding business processes, tools that are used and the people using those to optimize business efficiency. From Wikipedia: Information management (IM) is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences. Knowledge management (KM) is the process of capturing, developing, sharing, and effectively using organizational knowledge. It refers to a multi-disciplined approach to achieving organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.

What is Information Management Information nowadays is a big resource and asset for organizations, and assets need to be managed successfully! When dedicating to managing business information for a couple of decades, shall CIOs go back to the fundamental, to ask themselves: What is Information Management theoretically, philosophically, strategically and tactically, anyway?

How to Unleash Information Power for Improving Business Maturity: Business and technology are now forever interwoven, and IT is the linchpin of running a digital business. IT is shifting from “T” oriented monolithic type support center to “I” driven mosaic style of information hub of the business. CIOs need to provide leadership to the organization from board level down to the business unit and IT organization, to ride learning curves, keep the pace of rapid changes, and unleash information power for improving business responsiveness and maturity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with about #4600th 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 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.

The Aura of Digital Hyperconnectivity

 Digitization amplifies the progressive business effect into modern society, unleash the great potential, and demonstrate the beautiful aura of hyperconnectivity.

Digital blurs geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays, it is all about hyperconnectivity. Digital organizations become always-on, interdependent, and they are like the switches in the expanded business ecosystem, to keep information flow, knowledge flow, and therefore business flow, amplify the progressive business effect into modern society, unleash the great potential and demonstrate the beautiful aura of hyperconnectivity.

FreshnessThe beauty of the digital landscape is of fresh insight into the business. Things will go stale if not moving forward, therefore, the changing nature of digital business keeps things fresh. it's important to digitally connect key resources and assets in their vicinity or context to the resource-rich innovation hubs and clusters across the business ecosystem. Digital hyper-connectivity can foster dot-connecting for generating fresh ideas through the broader scope of interaction and collaboration. The beauty of digital is its freshness as the hyperconnected digital organizations always seek fresh ideas and explore the new opportunities beyond their own company, treat customers, channel partners, suppliers, and varying industry ecosystem participants as active digital agents who can brainstorm and share thoughts and ideas regardless of their physical location. Digital organizations also appreciate those visionary or pathfinder leaders or professionals who can come up with the fresh perspectives and envision the trend that others overlook or ignore, and be willing to forge ahead to satisfy the vision. At the heart of running a high-mature digital organization is a life cycle of refining information, generating fresh ideas, interaction, selection, leaning, deciding, implementing, and combining the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new experiences and expand its impact.

Openness: With blurred geographical, functional, and industrial borders, being open is the choice digital organizations must make. Because digital evolution only exists in the open-cultural environment. The hyper-connected business ecosystem can create insight and take advantage of all sources of creativity in a more open way. Instead of being rigidly grouped around a specific function or business, digital ecosystems draw together mutually supportive companies from multiple industries that collectively seek to create differentiated ideas and capture value they could not reach alone, collaboration & communities over competitions. Being open starts at the mindset level, decontaminating conventional thinking and building the dynamic team with open culture means how to look at something with the new lens, seeing an opportunity and acting on it, push teams to “think in the bigger box” and develop a culture of learning and creativity in the workplace. The multidisciplinary knowledge helps the business professionals not only work in the box but also across the multiple boxes, in order to approach problems through the multifaceted lens. The business management needs to be rejuvenated by practicing high organizational justice (trust); developing a participatory management style, enforcing positive organizational communications, breaking down the silo, and developing an open working environment to inspire change. They should broaden and envision the bigger picture of digitalization, be informative to act, be flexible to take alternatives, be elastic to scale up, and be resilient to recover from the failure.


Delight: Digital organizations are living systems with delightful characteristics and growth in nature. Delight is reflected in the expression of joy that overflows with aesthetic appreciation and abundant gratitude to NATURE- Nature is delightful! Digital delight has a multifaceted perspective of building the people-centric business. The delightful working environment is one where sharing and collaboration are the new normal, with idea-rich innovation hubs and community-based cluster across enterprise ecosystems. In practice, cross-functional collaboration to delight customers and engage employees is critical for improving the business’s long-term prosperity. Customer delight is the management approach to engage varying conversations and listening to outside-in customers’ viewpoint. It’s also the emotional imprint left on a customer who attributes the right, positive, and memorable feelings produced by experience to a business. Employee delight is about creating a positive and creative mentality to focus on problem-solving, autonomy, self-discovery, and creativity.

Human history is an evolutionary journey to keep advancing economically, technologically, and sociologically. Digital businesses become more dynamic and hyperconnected, the emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. Interdisciplinary science should be applied to digital management which involves applied science and engineering, art and design, principle and philosophy, cognition and psychology, social norms and culture, group behavior and sociology, etc, be ready for moving to a fluid-structure, hyper-connected state and get used to the complex digital ecosystem and enjoy the aura of digital hyperconnectivity.


Sunday, May 27, 2018

The Monthly Insight: Digital Profundity May 2018


Now we live in a hyper-connected and over-complex digital ecosystem, digital flow changes the landscape of communication, collaboration, and connection, With "VUCA" characteristics of digitalization, digital profundity is in demand; a profound mind is deep, but not depressing; sophisticated, but not complicated; knowledgeable, but not arrogant; creative, but not naive; critical, but not negative; and mature, but not aged.           


Digital Profundity

The Insight upon INSIGHT? If knowledge is manpower, wisdom is nature power, then insight is perhaps the bridge between manpower and nature power. There are multi-layer meanings upon insight.

Running a Profound Digital IT Due to the changing nature of technology and overwhelming growth of information, IT organization can no longer just be operated as a support desk or cost center, being treated as “shallow IT,” or “shadow IT.” IT leaders and professionals also shouldn’t be perceived as geeks or nerds only, they need to become cool digital professionals with an ultra-modern mindset, develop the right set of skills, both hard and soft, and thrive to be artistic technologists or scientific artists, etc. They need to become digital agents to drive changes and bold innovators to advance their organization as well as our society. There are very few businesses today can state that IT does not play a significant role in the day to day operations or even long-term strategic positioning. The CIO has to look forward and actively position the business in the right place to take full advantage of opportunities and avoid the numerous pitfalls on the way. IT leaders have to become the visionary strategist to run a profound digital IT, look deeply into the future that can have a profound effect on where you go, and how you get there steadfastly.

A Deep Mind: "IGE" Factors in Digital Leadership Profundity At siloed industrial era, leadership effectiveness is perhaps dependent on the hierarchical level of authority and brute force style of command and control, it's about how loud you can speak or how hard you can push; however, digital flow changes the landscape of communication, collaboration and connection, instead of being loud, digital leadership must go deeper, to touch the heart and mind, to practice the power of pull, to lead via influence, and to harmonize via positivity. Here are IGE factors of leadership profundity.

"Leadership Master" Book Tuning VII: Three-Step to Dive into Leadership Profundity At the siloed industrial era, leadership efficiency is often dependent on the hierarchical level of authority and brute force style of command and control. It’s often about how loud you can speak or how hard you can push. However, digital means information flow, people-centricity, innovation, and transparency. Hence, digital leadership must go deeper, to dive into the depth of leadership profundity and practice the power of pull, to lead more effortlessly.

Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Profundity At today’s “VUCA” digital dynamic, businesses become over-complex and hyper-competitive, the leadership bar has been raised, and employee professionalism is part of your business brand. So it is crucial to encourage deep thinking and it is also strategic imperative to bring wisdom in the workplace. The maturity of both individuals and an organization as a whole depends on how thoughtful they are - to make effective decisions or sound judgment; and how deep they can go - to gain the insight or cure the root cause of complex problems. Indeed, profundity is one of the crucial traits to differentiate average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with about 4600+ 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 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 to human progression.

IT Innovation and Intrapreneurship

Innovation is a mindset and a prerequisite to doing sustainable business these days.

The digital organization is technology driven and information intensive, IT needs to become the linchpin to integrate people, process, and technology into differentiated business competency such as innovation. The art of innovation is to connect wider dots for creating new ideas; the science of innovation is to take a structural approach to innovation management. Thus, IT is the hub to bridge the art and science of innovation. Nowadays, IT is the business in the business and the digital engine of the entire organization. The role of CIO continues to evolve rapidly in the midst of the information in digital transformation. Forward-looking IT organizations should practice intrapreneurship for running IT as a software startup, promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and corporate competitiveness.

Innovation is to reinvent business, but not to reinvent the wheels: Often, innovation happens at the intersection of people and technology. Intrapreneurship is a crucial component in digital IT innovation playbook because the company expects IT to create value on the top-line of the business growth. The great intrapreneur IT leaders can envision how emerging technology trends impact on the business direction and how the exponential growth of information becomes the time-intensive piece of digital innovation. They can articulate the big why behind business initiative clearly, and they can explain the strategic rationale behind the venture. Innovation is more than designing new products or services; it is about how to establish and nurture a way of thinking where innovation is in every aspect of the business. Innovation is to reinvent business, but not to reinvent the wheel. Today’s IT professional should understand that there are only business initiatives, it's important to "keep the end in mind" to either achieve business value. The company is expecting IT to figure out better ways to perform IT lifecycle, whether they are doing hardware, software or a combined integration, with less drain on their organization. IT needs to master the full management cycle of consolidation, modernization, automation, integration, innovation, and optimization to improve its overall maturity. Digital innovation has the broadened scope, IT can enforce the “need” based solution for the new satisfied need of a customer; a “principle” solution with a new method of gaining the same result; or a “scientific” solution with new technology to solving problems optimally.

Innovation is to convert a problem into an opportunity: Practicing intrapreneurship means enterprise IT should go smarter and flexible, with the culture of risk awareness and tolerance to convert a problem into an opportunity. The business is expecting IT to figure out ways to catalyze business growth, they also expect vendors to deliver flexible, innovative, and high-quality customer-tailored solutions. The entrepreneurial activities help companies develop new businesses that create revenue streams. Entrepreneurship improves company performance by increasing the firm’s pro-activeness and willingness to take risks, capture opportunities, roll it out and measure the result accordingly. Intrapreneurship is about discovering the new path for digital transformation and balancing innovation with other organizational priorities, it presents a possibly even greater challenge--and reward by pioneering the development of new products, processes, and services through enriching its competitiveness.

The heart of innovation is change and innovation is the heart for improvement: Intrapreneurship is about creating a new venture from within established organizations to leverage the startup culture for catalyzing changes and inspiring innovation. The heart of entrepreneurship is about changes, and organizations no matter large or small, all face the unprecedented change, uncertainty, velocity, and accelerated business dynamic. Practicing IT intrapreneurship means to harness changes, cultivate innovation culture and learn to generate more novel ideas in diverse teams. To run an innovative IT organization, the more difficult challenge is not just launching successful teams, but maintaining their motivation and focus, cultivate a positive attitude and build a culture of risk tolerance and do more with innovation. Innovation is the heart of improvement, the intrapreneurship activities can improve the organizational growth and profitability, depending on the company’s dynamic environment, their impact will increase over time. Traditional IT is lagging the change, but digital IT organizations need to become the change agent to make continuous improvement. Not every change is innovation, but innovation is always the most wanted change for either driving the business growth of delighting people. Running IT or the business as a whole is fundamentally an iterative business change continuum.

Innovation is a mindset and a prerequisite to doing sustainable business these days. Without encouraging creativity or practice intrapreneurship, organizations would be upstaged by the ones that are creative because disruptive innovation will happen no matter how well you prepare. Innovative IT leaders with mental toughness will help an organization become more resilient, nurture the culture of risk intelligence. They can keep opening their mind, bring an insightful perspective to stimulate further brainstorming, add a new dimension of visions in making the right choice for balancing the business’s short-term gain and long-term win.

Saturday, May 26, 2018

The Monthly “Dot Connections” Connecting Dots for Catalyzing Innovation May 2018

Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, and creativity is all about connecting the dots.

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation via connecting dots and spreading the knowledge.

Connecting Dots for Catalyzing Innovation


Systems Thinking vs. Creativity? The purpose of Systems Thinking is to solve problems and creating desirable futures. The goal of creativity is to connect the dots for generating naval ideas. So many people do not know how to connect the dots within complex systems, nor think inclusively or holistically, nor comprehend dynamics, induction or deduction, nor understand expensive variables, interfaces, and interactions. Here is the dot connection between creativity and Systems Thinking.

Systems Thinking vs. Inclusiveness Systems Thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes and understanding the relationship between the parts and the whole. The relationship is everything. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than isolated things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static “snapshots,” to perceive diversity in unity. In management practice, Systems Thinking advocates inclusiveness; and inclusiveness enforces Systems Thinking.

Self vs. Creativity: True creativity has an inner origin and “self” driven. It keeps surfacing from within and keeps expressing and flowing. It simply a thought process to generate novel ideas. The interaction between what is within us (the Self), and how we project to the exterior world is the bridge to spark creativity and achieve the wholeness. The constant negotiation between our essence and our projection is what leads to growth, innovativeness, and human evolution.

Intuition vs. Creativity The word intuition comes from Latin verb intueri which is usually translated as to look inside or to contemplate. According to the online dictionary, it is "the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning."Creativity is a person’s innate ability to create novel ideas. Creativity is as much defined by the problem as by the capacity of the individual to connect things to resolve that problem in new and sometimes unexpected ways. What are the further correlations between creativity and intuition?

Innovation vs. Rules: Innovation is to transform novel ideas and achieve its business value. Innovation is doing something better than it currently is. Hence, it requires a sound and competent understanding of what is currently being done. Innovation is not serendipity, it's a mindset, a process, and the strategic business capability nowadays. From innovation management perspective, should innovators break rules, or does innovation need rules, and how to improve manage innovation effortlessly and improve its success rate?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with about #4600th 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 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.

CIOs as the “Change Agent”: Three “Never” Practices to Manage Change Seamlessly

It is nevertheless true that the change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary, as compared to treading through carefully. 

Change is a volatile subject, just like change itself. Compared to the business world decades ago, information is growing exponentially, the digital ecosystem has also become more complex and dynamic. Everything changes continuously by following the laws of evolution, and the rate of change is accelerated. to put simply, change itself changes. Therefore, senior leaders like CIOs need to gain an in-depth understanding of changes, especially at the strategic level, also help to make change principles and develop a set of best & next practices to lead changes seamlessly.

NEVER ASSUME you know what the problem is: Most large-scale plans fail because the planners do not envision the problems. Many organizations spend significant time on fixing symptoms which results from the actual cause of the problem, rather than digging into root causes so the real problems will continue coming back. Change is happening all the time, the management just has to acknowledge and appreciate that. What matters most is going to identify the root cause of the problem either by asking big why or reframing the question for gaining in-depth understanding. “Do I really understand the problem?” - it’s the question every change leader should ask himself/herself. There is no need to look at it in a reactive mode as a “problem” but it would be desirable to look at it proactively and have a “policy,” to catalyze changes. Otherwise, fixing the wrong problems will waste time & resources, increase anxiety, and allow problems to grow under the surface, out of sight, out of mind until it’s too late. Change is never for its own sake, solving problems large or small is the very reason to change. It is important to build a culture of learning, change, and “problem-solving.” Constantly learn, educate, share, and the challenge for leaders is to motivate others to be real problem solvers by first understanding what is the real problem and then solve it smoothly.

Never UNDERESTIMATE sponsorship from the top and the buy-in from shareholders: Change is supposed to happen. Change is not always delightful. Resistance is supposed to happen. Change cannot be fully managed or controlled top down, it has to be proactively made bottom up. However, many senior leaders don't understand what their role is, don't want to discuss publicly due to the criticism they will get. Or leaders do support the change but radically under-estimate the importance of their active and visible support for the change. The executive feels compelled to stop asking legitimate questions about the approach and the process ends up with groupthink. Stakeholder involvement and engagement nearly always make these difficult paths easier to tread. It is important that attention is paid to the intrapersonal and interpersonal aspects of dealing with change. Stakeholder involvement has positive implications at each stage of the change journey. The dividends for early involvement and continues engagement during the change journey payback hugely during the organizational impact stage. The more stakeholders can impact a change capable of seriously affecting their lives, the better chance the change will achieve or exceed the target.


NEVER THINK there is a short list of solutions you can pick from: A solution should match a problem and with that in mind, the one thing change would be to have a phrase at the heart of everything the organization does. What needs to worry about is the danger of a company adopting a couple of simple rules to fix some poor behaviors without doing the difficult work to change the mentality. Real change and creativity are deprogramming old mindsets, letting go of "the voices from the past," reprogramming their minds with new norms and attitudes; establishing a new blueprint for how we want to create our future reality. Digital is about options. A change manager needs to assess and evaluate every specific scenario to create the change program success. Co-create alternative visions and dream into the existence of new solutions, these are the capacities of humans who are not trapped in 'the same level of thinking.' Ultimately, the success of the change program is measured by results that are important values to the organization, and the cultural adoption of these goals is part of that measure.

It is nevertheless true that the change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary, as compared to treading through carefully. Change is not just a few random business initiatives, it needs to institutionalize these changes into the company’s cultural DNA. The change principle is still: Fix the right problems and fix them right.

Friday, May 25, 2018

The Monthly CIO Debates Collection & “Digital IT” Tuning: How to Run IT with Differentiated Competency May 2018

Debating is not for stimulating conflicts, but for brainstorming better ways to do things.

Due to the changing nature of technology, IT leadership role also continues to involve & shift the focus, to move up the maturity level. More and more CIOs are requested to take more responsibility and many CIOs present the breadth of leadership competency. The proactive IT debates help IT leaders to brainstorm better ways to do things and improve management capabilities. Here are the monthly CIO debates collections.

IT Personalization: How to Run Digital IT with Differentiated Advantage IT is always at the center of change. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern at exponential speed, as the pervasiveness of an organization’s digitization journey increases. IT can no longer just “keep the lights on,” IT leaders need to think strategically and creatively about alternative solutions and ask themselves tough questions about how to personalize IT to gain differentiated business competency.

Can CIOs Wear the New Thinking Hat to Run IT as the Business? Information is now permeating into every corner in the business, and technology is often the disruptive force of digitalization. The general expectation from IT has changed. Not only are they being seen as an enabler, they are now mandatorily required to give ROI for the investments. Forward-looking organizations also empower their CIOs to lead change and catalyze innovation. The CIO's leadership penetration is about the depth of leadership insight and the breadth of enterprise knowledge upon understanding business as a whole. CIOs need to update both their mindsets as well as leadership responsibilities to run IT as the business.

CIOs as “Chief Initiative Officer”: How to Take Initiatives on Change, Innovation, and Digital Transformation? The magic “I” in the CIO’s titles implies so many things: “Chief Information Officer,” “Chief Innovation Officer,” “Chief Improvement Officer,” “Chief Influence Officer,” "Chief Insight Officer," etc. In practice, the CIO role should transform from a reactive IT manager to a proactive digital leader; from a controller to a change agent Thus, the CIO as “Chief Initiative Officer” has become necessary or even imperative to manage strategic digital alignment and orchestration from concept to post-implementation of all initiatives from the C-level to the front lines, focus on changes and innovation. CIOs are also quite eager and enthusiastic to drive challenging transformation initiatives, to reinvent IT as the information hub and the business growth engine.

Are you Running IT Organization as a “Magic” or a Trendsetter? IT plays a critical role in modern businesses today, however, most business leaders and professionals lack the in-depth understanding of IT organizations, often time, the “magic” thinking of IT is one of the root causes to divide business and IT and create gaps for the digital transformation. In practice, digital IT organization needs to become an integral part of the high mature digital company, to gain competitive advantage or differentiated capability for the business’s growth. To improve IT maturity, CIOs should ask themselves: Are you running IT organization as a “Magic,” or a “trendsetter”?

How can CIOs Shift their Focus to Avoid Becoming “Chief Irrelevant Officer More often than not, technology is the catalyst for driving business change and digital transformation, information is the lifeblood of the business. The expectations for CIO have grown multi-fold, and they are expected to be visionary and path-finder for organizational strategy and growth. How should CIO shift their focus to improve leadership effectiveness and how can CIOs prioritize the limited time and resources to ascend IT maturity?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with 4600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. 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 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.