Innatearchitecture

By leveraging architecture as a strategy compass, what is needed in strategy management is understandability, consensus, organic, and maturity for improving the success rate of strategy management.

During volatile or dynamic market changes, Architecture is like a GPS to define the means for the strategy and enable the organization to implement a good strategy. 

The architectural views are any aspects of the enterprise concern to a stakeholder, representations of which can be linked to “planning & development, enhancement, and improvement" of strategy planning-implementation continuum.

Planning & development: Strategic planning is based on architecture components and is executed as part of the architecture process of transforming the enterprise from the current to future states. Generally speaking, architecture does not do strategic planning for you, it is about bridging strategy and execution. It describes all crucial components of the enterprise and their relationships to consider in strategy design and execution. It also defines how to implement the business strategies in a structured and systematic approach and develop the roadmap for driving changes.

The architecture of the enterprise, with an integrated blueprint and associated information, offers a solid base for road mapping, planning and strategy specification and execution, includes policies, principles, standards and guidelines for business processes, information, applications and technology to implement a strategy. A solid architecture discipline implies an acceleration mindset, captures the organizational structure development needs, sets the scene for a process to achieve well-defined goals and reach the next level of the growth cycle and business transcendence.

Enhancement: Due to rapid change and business dynamic, the "right" strategy can't be completely defined by the planning space; it is clarified through initial actions and timely adjustment. It is easy to look like you are making progress by focusing on tactical issues, but it’s much harder and requires courage and skills to really tackle what is wrong at the strategic level. Architecture is an effective tool to enhance governance disciplines including business rules, legal requirements, operational requirements rules, financial compliance, etc. It also helps to enhance strategic alignment and synchronization to catalyze change and accelerate strategy implementation in the long run.

In practice though, too much architecture focus is on dotting all the information using various framework approaches which encourage one to focus on completeness and rigor. Strategy execution is an iterative continuum propelled by both visible and invisible enablers such as process, resource, culture, etc. Strategy execution will keep the speed at sync, strategic planning and execution should keep both long term views with short-term urgency. Effective governance as a critical component of architecture can be used to raise visibility and awareness for many business issues that are captured at the different levels of the organization, focusing on optimization, agility, and overall business maturity.

Improvement: Nowadays, strategy management is not linear, but an iterative planning-implementation continuum. A successful strategy execution needs to have well thought-out plans, prepare “what if” scenarios, analyze impacts on customers and competitions, and plan for multiple forks on the road for the speed to react promptly. The purpose of architecture is to enable strategy implementation and business improvement. Without architecture, there is no context, framework, blueprint, roadmap, etc.

Strategy execution will almost always change the way the organization operates, such change will always provoke some measure of resistance, particularly if the organization is large, traditional, in order to align it with the defined strategic direction, strategic planning. The architecture should be about business process and contextualization, not a morass of details. Architecture and organizational change need to be used, together, for what they are, facilitate continuous dialogues, make improvement on the way.

Enterprise Strategy should be driven by customer’s needs, marketplace demands, and more importantly a practical way to sustain competitive advantage in your product or service offerings. By leveraging architecture as a strategy compass, what is needed in strategy management is understandability, consensus, organic, and maturity for improving the success rate of strategy management.

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Innovativeleadership

Leadership comes in all ages, forms, styles, and becomes more inclusive, innovative and interdisciplinary.

Contemporary businesses have to make many tough choices in its growth-maturity business journey, either making decisions in strategic planning, talent management or innovation exploration. 

Innovative leaders will add a new dimension of vision in making the right choice for balancing the business’s short-term gain and long-term value proposition. Highly effective leadership personality/skills testing covers vision, critical thinking, communications, creativity, for problem-solving and innovation.

Creating vision & strategy: A great leader provides the vision to achieve the results that all would want to go if you could define the challenges; craft a good strategy that sets the right priorities to achieve expected business results. A good leader asks the questions anyone would want to ask, if only you had his/her vision or perspective. A truly great leader would ask “What if we do things in a new way” or ``How can I make things better for the whole”; not only ask a deep “WHY” to diagnose the root cause of problems, but also ask the constructive “Why NOT?" -The refusal to be bound by constraints and limitations and pursuit of possibilities. It is imperative that leadership effectiveness, trust-building and cognizance can be improved by breaking down conventional wisdom to reach leadership profundity.

A leader needs to have a passion for keeping learning and for what he/she is doing. The one with insight sees what everyone would want to see, if only you had his/her eyes. Leadership is about focus. A business leader should be allowed and encouraged to excel by deepening their understanding of people or organizations and solving problems thoroughly. Good leaders need to be able to prioritize their work and manage their time more effectively, laser focus on the critical things which really matter to achieve strategic goals. The result can be brilliant corporate achievements.

Streamlining business alignment: Businesses today become much nonlinear, interconnected and interdependent than ever, leadership is about providing direction, both for oneself and others. It is also about alignment and integration, and having high abilities to understand and handle issues from different angles, encourage collaboration and healthy competition. However, much of what passes for leadership today is either 'survival managing' or "status quo." Status quo often refers to the practice “command and control” style of management. Survival management is when an organization's leaders say they want leadership at all levels, but what they really want and expect is performance management and production on their terms.

Strategic alignment and synchronization can catalyze the flow of the right information to the right people at the right time to coordinate and execute strategy, tactics, and risks. Collaboration based learning needs patience and strategic support from management. So if you have a competitive team that is doing exceptional work, it would behoove the company to maintain the balance of that group for as long as possible, revitalize the workforce to make seamless alignment and co-solve problems smoothly.

Enhancing management activities: Leadership and management are activities performed by people. It is rare that any of us are pure leaders or managers, A leader creates value & quality; a manager maintains, facilitates, and monitors. Leaders invite debate and challenges from employees for innovative ideas. At the very core, great managers, and great leaders are both critical to every organization and we should respect both leaders and managers. Good leaders also need good managerial skills such as organizing their leadership team, measurement, follow-up results.

Although the line between the hard and the soft skills is blurring. The practical reality of today's business world is that business leaders need to have interpersonal skills, business acumen, and the ability to motivate and communicate effectively; technical manageability skills such as business domain knowledge, project management experiences, and organizational restructuring skills to fine tune business management discipline and achieve operational excellence. Gaining new skills should be inspired and driven by individuals recognizing that it adds value to them, their organization to accelerate performance and unlock business potential.

Optimizing shared culture & values: Culture is the foundation to build differentiated business competencies. The highest-rated business competencies could be fragile if the organization lacks the culture to rate and retain the value system beyond the business results. Whereas the cultural aspect is an intrinsic factor that drives the organization's business longevity. An organization with an excellent culture is arguably capable of giving great results in their competencies. In high-integrity cultures, every person has the opportunity to exhibit cultural taste by upholding the company core values and missions and making a positive influence on the surroundings.

Culture is certainly part of the environment in which an organization operates, it represents the box in which decisions are framed and the footprint the organization actions occur. Culture change is top down. It’s usually a slow evolution with gentle touch as sometimes you need to change the brief or conventional wisdom- removal of something old and familiar, and replaced with some advanced thinking, value, and perspective. “Command & control” is obviously not the right way to influence culture. Culture can only be changed if the leadership team advocates advanced thinking, sets good policies to encourage desired attitude and behaviors; coworkers, management, and leadership allow those mindsets, behaviors and actions to define the company.

Organizations are the hyper-connected and interdependent business entities that are connected to the ever expandable ecosystem as switches. Leadership comes in all ages, forms, styles, and becomes more inclusive, innovative and interdisciplinary. Leadership is about the respect and understanding of people - transforming a crowd into a workable collective. To put simply, leadership is to bridge, not to divide; leadership is to adapt, not too rigid; leadership is to move forward, not backward. Leadership is the right combination of elegant, interesting and challenging art, and objective, analytical, structural science.

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itprofitability

Striving is to try to achieve the optimized result, and make the strenuous effort on IT management effectiveness and maturity.

In face of fierce competition and tough business dynamics, achieving profitability is a strategic aspect of business’s survival and thriving, especially for many struggling vertical sectors today. Information technology is in a unique position to observe broadly and explore deeply about their business and the related digital ecosystem. 

IT management should understand deeply the value chain of business, value chain of the industry segment, and value chain of the business ecosystem where it competes. To improve IT visibility as a strategic partner of the company, the balancing act of looking to increase profit while keeping a long-term strategy of the business is perhaps tricky sometimes, as it takes thought-through planning and integrated approach to leveraging multiple factors to achieve expected outcome.

Fundamentally redesign IT role and culture as a co-creator of top-line value, growth, and profitability: Profitability is key to running a successful business. Senior executives are focused on business performance and their number one metric for performance is revenue growth. More critical than ever, businesses require IT to help drive revenue and business innovation by providing innovative products and services that the business can offer to clients to grow revenue, or improve enterprise revenue through better customer loyalty.

Increasing the organization's profitability would be an important value proposition. When top business leaders recognize that IT is roughly coupled with the business strategy, and let the revenue generation/increase become the focus vs. cost savings/optimization, it is a very good sign about how the companies will deliver the business results and increase profitability. Looking at which products or services and customers are most profitable to your business can give you great insights into running a company. Information technology permeates everywhere in the organization, basically, start showing small wins in helping revenue increase and IT will get opportunities to transform from mere enabler to accelerator of the business.

Try to make organizations people-centric, also keep at the profitable trail for the long run: IT savvy organizations have a clear understanding of how people-centric approaches enhance the business model and extend profitability. High-intelligent businesses can sense and create new markets before competition; thus, making it much more sustainable than the competition. Information analysis can impact everything from how pricing is affecting close times and support calls to referral business activity triggered by high customer satisfaction, etc. Exert lots of intelligence, through data-based insight, the businesses know what they are giving the customer is both what they really want and what they are willing to pay for. For example, the dominant focus on high-value clients may principally be around the retention and penetration lever, whilst efficiency may be the focus for lower value deciles.

Nowadays, information-based intelligence touches almost every critical aspect of business from financial analysis to competitive analysis; from workforce analysis to customer sentiment analysis, etc. IT savvy organizations are able to align the business activities that have a three-way impact - Revenue, Cost and Investments at the same time by choosing an environment to compete; they inherently generate more revenue per unit cost compared to competition across every demand pattern. In certain circumstances, information based business analytics should provide a platform for predicting business consequences. Different business units would have different opinions on a business issue; the platform is the place for testing all the suggested options with predicted business consequences. The insights identified through the tests could lead to an “optimal” business decision for solving critical problems and achieving high outcomes.

The key strategic goal of an organization with high agility is the key strategic goal to improve profitability: Everything a business does is ultimately done to improve profit. Profitability as different from “profit” is an ability to run a good business. The realization of that profit may be in the short, medium or long term. It's not enough to simply say you should distribute or decentralize authority to be more "profitable." You must also answer in such a context why the path you're advocating is the better path to achieving "profitability." It requires the management to clarify strategic goals, the roadmap to implement strategy, and information technology enabler to build business capabilities, and key performance indicators to assess business results.

Cost of research and resource increase, value chain and brand value or market share are frequently observed. From top down across the organizational hierarchy, people need confidence that their actions will make a positive difference - whichever timeline they are looking at. It helps senior and mid management to build overall information management strategy, improve process effectiveness and efficiency. It also requires subject matter expertise or proficient process knowledge to get practical solutions. When that happens, if implemented correctly, the cost of operating the business reduces, more customers are attracted to your offers and profit margins increase

IT is a prudent and effective steward of the organization’s resources and strives to be a revenue contributor to the business. IT needs to learn how to build a strong brand by selling the right things to the right people for bringing high business value; striving is to try to achieve the optimized result, and make the strenuous effort on IT management effectiveness and maturity.

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Innerleverageadvantage

Leaders and managers should find the leverage points, guide, direct, own the strategy they hold themselves accountable for, listen, communicate, and rally the team for the cause to accelerate change.

The rapid change and fierce competition is the new normal. Organizations today have to develop a dynamic strategic planning and accelerate the development cycle of loose-coupling capabilities.

 To master the art and science of uncertainty management, business management needs to know which factors contribute to uncertainty and how to handle it effectively to adapt to the business dynamic; what makes each situation unique is the lens that the management brings into the planning process, and how they use that to facilitate the process itself and the outputs, and develop strategic planning to increase the probability for accelerating business performance.

Leverage the system understanding from different perspectives for fine-tuning a fast-growing coherent business: The strategic planning is nothing but the answer to the question where the capital and resources should be allocated to get the max leverage for the business advancement. In the digital working environment, context intelligence is about understanding the whole meaning without getting lost in translation, leverage system understanding from different perspectives, and perceive business insight in a cohesive way. Systemics is about experiencing the resultant whole of parts relating together by embracing cognitive differences and diversified worldview. Without system understanding as a leverage, sometimes you intend to fix one issue; it perhaps causes more issues or side effects later on.

A high mature digital organization is a self-adaptive system which is able to reconfigure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environmental changes. If anything is wrong or the business gets stagnated, businesses should take the time to analyze the process to find the point of failure to avoid it in the future. Very few people actually know how to identify problems by conducting an inclusive holistic system logic which suggests the need for an ontological stance based on constructivism, and confirms the assumption that systems are purposeful with mental constructs rather than things that are out there. Silo thinking, bureaucracy, inflexibility, inefficiency, rigidity, etc, are the causes of missing synergy and business stagnation. By leveraging system understanding and analysis, a focus on process tuning and development reduces attrition to create synergy and has a great quantitative ROI.

Leverage advanced analytics as "techniques" to predict future outcomes with confidence: Advanced analytics can be used to help drive changes and improvements in business practices. In a business scope, there are some of the important bits and bytes of information needed to forecast emerging trends or the business growth opportunities. To predict and respond to the business dynamic, make data more “visible” for shareholders, linking data management to multiple business domains within the enterprise and their business partners. Leverage advanced analysis tools to do a comparative assessment of many decision criteria - both quantitative and subjective, concurrent across many options, initiatives or programs etc.

Advanced analytics solutions will give all kinds of businesses the capability to anticipate the future by making better decisions. This is where they can really differentiate themselves from their competitors. All company’s performance is directly related to the decisions people make every day. There are many variables in complex decision making, there are tradeoffs you have to leverage, and there is no magic formula to follow. They need to pay particular attention to the quality of information from which they will extract these nuggets of insight. Organizations need to define the set of parameters that help them make informed decisions across the organizational scope consistently, and also develop a culture of analysis to improve decision effectiveness and maturity.

Leverage their “sense and sensitivity” to visualize the large scale of changes: Digital has the “VUCA” characteristics - velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It implies both business opportunities and risks on the way. For many business leaders, there is no surprise that they will see the mixed picture of “old and new,” from the mindset, business model, process or practice perspectives. The challenge for business management is to reinvent business continually by looking forward, looking ahead and being proactively looking for opportunities to improve.

Either for the individuals or the businesses, if you stick and restrict, you cannot be dynamic. Deep common sense” leads toward effective judgment," which has been defined as leveraged sense and sensitivity, measured reasoning, knowledge, and experience to come to an effective strategy oversight. Digital dynamism consists in being able to break away from static or stale, and being fluid and proactive. The real impact of making the invisible visible, and then measurable, comes when companies find ways to leverage business sentiment to initiate meaningful dialogues, open communication across the enterprise to orchestrate change, empower people and enforce business relationships to unleash the collective potential.

Complexity, uncertainty, disruptive changes, and interdependence are the new normal facing business today. Leaders and managers should find the leverage points, guide, direct, own the strategy they hold themselves accountable for, listen, communicate, and rally the team for the cause to accelerate change; connect the dots across the various management disciplines and glue up all crucial ingredients to manage performance as an iterative continuum.

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Initiatechange

Change is inevitable, the organization can reach the “inflection point” of change when the business is able to generate new opportunity for growth; hit the point for transformation, as well as reach the moment to be “paranoid” – either disrupting or being disrupted.

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, crises, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. A digital transformation is achieved via dynamic Strategy-Execution-Change lifecycle management, although it is not all linear steps, but an iterative, ongoing and upgoing change continuum.

The purpose of the book “Change Insight” is to dig deeper to analyze the psychology behind changes and handle problems and changes at the level of the mindset, and explore people-centric change management philosophy and practices.

                   Initiate Change Cycle

Initiatingchange Organizations and human societies become overly-complex and interdependent, change or problem-solving are important perspectives for driving business forward. Change management today has a very wide scope, intricate factors and needs to take an interdisciplinary approach. Change should never happen for its own sake, without figuring out the “why” part of change. For change to be embraced by various stakeholders, they ultimately need to understand what’s exactly the problems, what’s the philosophy for leading change; when it’s the right timing for change, who are change agents, how to change effectively and sustain its impact.

Innerchangedimensions Organizations across the vertical industries are on the journey of digital transformation. There are various approaches to change such as planned change, unplanned change, imposed change, negotiated change, and participative change. Transformative changes are nonlinear and multidimensional, often taking a holistic approach with an iterative continuum. The more complex the change is, the more complex the solution could be. The success factor to the “transformative change,” and its further “championing” has been the endless self-exploration in emotional, intellectual, technological dimensions that need to co-evolve together, for amplifying and sustaining its impact.

Innerchangecycle The speed of change is increasing; uncertainty of outcomes or occurrences is inherent in numerous business endeavors or societal movements. All of that makes us humble and become cautious for adaptation. Organizational change management today shouldn’t only be a few spontaneous business initiatives for reacting to business dynamics, but logically structured and well-planned efforts to make continuous improvement. People are the center of change, from incremental change to the large scale of business transformation, Human factors spectrum model includes more detail about referential interdependent factors, organizational governance, human interfaces, transitional factors, organization of work processes/procedures etc. Here is a people-centric change management circle including the following interdependent components

Innovativechangecycle Change Management is about balancing all main elements impacting change such as people strategies, structure, procedures and information technology into coherent capabilities which enable businesses to adapt to the dynamic ecosystem and gain their competitive advantages.

Innatechangeacceleration Running a business is a thorny journey full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, with many curves and bumps on the way. How successful organizations can handle “VUCA'' reality depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment, as well as how proactively and creatively they can drive change. Change is inevitable, the organization can reach the “inflection point” of change when the business is able to generate new opportunity for growth; hit the point for transformation, as well as reach the moment to be “paranoid” – either disrupting or being disrupted.

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 for human progression.

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Innovativepotentiality

There is no limit to human potential; however, it’s the individual, culture, leadership, circumstances, and society that sets a limit on that unlimited potential.

With the digital evolution and innovation taking place in organizations globally, the management must be mindful that the driving force behind the success and prosperity of organizations are employees. 

How well does the individual continue to perform and grow in their current roles, how likely are they to take on new challenges at work, rapidly learn and grow into next-level roles, or roles that are expanded and redefined as the business develops? Does "human potential" begin and end with one individual? Or does it encompass collective potential?

Potentiality is correlation with innovation: Human potential is limitless, and can be unleashed by exploring it: The condition of being human is the endless search for the conditions that allow them to find our true identity through self-reflection and self-realization, and maximize the potential. Individuals need to step outside the box and challenge perception, push themselves to the limit. Learning is the key to move forward, by gaining the knowledge, address any future potential challenges and issues with more confidence to avoid failures.

To identify potential and create an authentic organizational culture to encourage employees’ growth, successful organizations should encourage people to learn and grow, potential is about future performance worthy investment. The management should continue making talent assessments, define the updated competency model, assess the talent's overall capability to solve problems, strike the right balance of learning capability, character, skills, communication, and energy within the teams. A potentiality portfolio is an integral component of innovation management. The potential portfolio investment needs to enhance the strategic objective alignment and accelerate future growth of the business. It’s a part of strategy management and organizational transformation effort in a structural way.

Human potential is a bottom-up, upwardly and outwardly-expanding process: Strength needs to be built via continuous practices, and competencies are interrelated with the traits and expertise. In order to tap your potential, investigate your passion, discover your strength, define competency and build capabilities, establish yourselves as a very strong reputation in a particular topic area. The best way to discover potentiality and go on discovering what we are capable of doing is by following our insights, intuitions, and imagination while at the same time keeping our feet firmly on the ground.

As individuals, the challenge is to transcend the perceived limitations and make the most of the gifts we are given. People with high potential continue to learn to expand the horizons with a growth mindset, they either demonstrate the positive attitude or constructive criticism to build a healthy or even creative workplace. As an organization or a society, we should be striving to create an environment that is egalitarian enough so every individual has, at least, the opportunity to actualize their potential,

There are both cognition and emotion involved, hard and soft elements in creating potentiality development formulas: Potentiality is about future performance; it takes the immense amount of time and hard work that "naturally talented" people have committed to developing their talents and building their professional competencies such as creativity, problem-solving competency etc. If there is such a magic formula of potentiality development, could it be: Potentiality development = raw talent + hard work + resource + training, etc. From an evolutionary perspective, this is what we humans have always done and will continue doing – exploring our minds and bodies for the latent powers inherent in our genes. Based on the talents and skills each one of us has been given, the person is able to live an authentic life, actively explore who they are and make the biggest contribution to society according to their specific gifts and passions.

Collectively, it’s important to nurture the right environment to grow a natural affinity into "talent, “tapping human potential, believe in building talent, otherwise it would be underutilized or dormant. It takes the immense amount of time and hard work that most "naturally talented" people have committed to developing their talents, building a set of capabilities to deliver consistent high performance results. When the employees fail, the leaders are not so effective and the employee didn't try as hard as they might have, you fail to unleash talent potential or diminish the overall business potential for the long run. When you identify and develop human potential, make sure people get placed into the most conducive environment in which they can flourish and make the maximum contribution to themselves and their organization.

There is no limit to human potential; however, it’s the individual, culture, leadership, circumstances, and society that sets a limit on that unlimited potential. We need to nurture an inclusive environment in which people are comfortable to be themselves, continue to learn and grow. It is only then we will see 'Human potential' really show itself, and then come together as a group, will we see real human potential achieved and human society are making leapfrog progress continually.

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Innovativeinsight

Isn’t it a tough journey to celebrate 8600 blog postings - to pursue the digital way of brainstorming, innovating and sharing.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with 8600+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. 

The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of innovation leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management to celebrate 8600 blog postings.

Innovation The digital era upon us is about people, innovation, option, empathy, or simply put, "personalization." Providing personalized services or solutions to its customers will become the new normal to run a people-centric organization. In the digital era, what the business needs is not only faster speed, but also a hyper-connected ecosystem with information/process synchronization and collaboration-driven relationship harmony. That great personalization leads to better understanding by designing tailored applications or solutions to meet people’s needs and improve customer satisfaction.

Innovativeleadership Digital leaders today should lead by influence, not via brute force. Great leadership is a good combination of advanced mindsets, humble attitudes, unique insight, proficient expertise, and exemplary behaviors, etc. Leadership is both natural and nurtured; it’s about trying to determine which competencies or capabilities should be used in which combination, and with what level of weight for each, for different situations, in order to improve leadership maturity. Leadership is intangible, but there are many tangible ingredients to make it shine.

Innovativeadvancement It’s the beginning of the lunar new year, it’s time to awaken our consciousness to growth, sowing the seed, making differences, synchronizing with the speed of nature. Perhaps it's called growing up - when things or people are mature, they are not aged, they are in the advanced stage - ripened and delightful.

Innatearchitecture Organizations become overly-complex and ever-evolving due to rapid change and uncertainty. The business architecture is a useful adaptive tool for a dynamic and iterative long term strategic planning process that fine tunes the internal and external business influence factors, high-level accountability for compliance and provides important input into the feasibility and appropriateness of policies that have a direct impact on improving business effectiveness and maturity.

Innovationinvestment The business ecosystem is full of complexity and uncertainty, it’s important to understand that there are both opportunities and risks in every investment. The logical investment scenario helps to clarify: Which benefits will be achieved through addressing the key business drivers? Can these business benefits be measured and quantified? What outcomes can the sponsor expect to achieve through investment in the proposed initiative.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking about 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.

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Innovativeness

By stepping outside of the comfort zone, you can break down the old box of knowledge, explore the unknown, connect the wide dots to create new ideas continuously.

We are living in a complex world where inventions, developments, and conflicts are continuously changing and that makes it impossible to have complete knowledge and understanding of many issues that need to be solved. 

To overcome challenges and solve problems innovatively, do not let knowledge deter your imagination, stifle creativity. Keep your minds flowing to release the positive energy, out of this comes a beautiful thing – abundant ideas and fresh insight.

Ideas shine through the darkness; innovation is the light brightens the surroundings: Creativity is a phenomenon, creativity is all around us, we just need to get connected with it. Creativity is imaginative, expressive, productive, inventive, innovative, or emergent. A creative person needs to absorb the new knowledge across the disciplinary boundary in order to connect the wide dots and work out with more ideas consciously or subconsciously. The higher the level at which we are engaged and stimulated to imagine, enriching the thinking and contributing to a fabulously rich output, the more likely we can generate novel ideas.

A creative team should have a cognitive difference and diversified worldview, collaborate, clarify, and build on each other's ideas, as collective creativity is only achieved through the diversity of thoughts. Silos have been broken down by reducing business tensions, frictions, and conflicts that arise, to streamline information, idea flows. The harmonized digital workplace is in which collaboration and sharing are the norms, learning and creativity are encouraged, ideas are abundant and well-managed to achieve their business value.

Loose ideas spread on the ground; logic is the thread to weave them into precious gems: Creativity is a synthesis of imagination with which you create new ideas and the concreteness with which you can transform ideas into valuable work. Creativity, or broadly, intelligence generates lots of ideas, but it takes logic to recognize, filter, or deal with them, and implement them successfully. Having many ideas is not dangerous if they are submitted with the best of intentions, having too much information may cause a problem if it is not processed effectively. The basic goal of idea evaluation should be to quickly and thoughtfully weed out potential initiatives that are not a good fit for your particular business, so you can focus on the good ideas and commercialize its potential business values.

From idea generation to innovation implementation - plan, do, check, act is not the scenario made of linear steps, but an iterative continuum in the digital era. If idea creation is more art than science, and then idea implementation is more science than art. By leveraging digital platforms and technologies, businesses can be more effective in managing innovative ideas, relying less on silo functions, and more on cross-functional collaboration and innovation. When complex ideas can be visualized effectively, individual contributors can for the first time see where they fit in the universe of work and it can bring a great sense of purpose to their work.

Innovation leaders can break down barriers; set fair principles for idea generation and implementation: Forward-looking organizations work proactively to dismantle business bureaucracy, harnessing different experiences, perspectives and ideas of people to bridge differences, They evolve customers, partners and variety of stakeholders in the conversations to generate great ideas for innovative problem-solving Creative leaders are able to deal with opposing views, cultures, constraints and competition; shape fresh insight, integrate good ideas into alternative solutions to complex problems, to unleash enormous potential of their organization.

Vision sparks the imagination and opens the mind to new concepts and ideas. It is a clear choice among different scenarios that advocates future trends and great ideas. Innovation leaders have their special eyes to recognize innovators for generating and implementing novel ideas. Select for empowerment, select for curiosity, love the clash of ideas, love listening, love learning, etc. They present a collaborative spirit to initiate digital dialogues, brainstorm ideas, turn around tough situations, and skillfully assign their talent, resource and time carefully to solve problems that really matter innovatively.

Creativity is a complex, multifaceted thought process such as association, perspective-shifting, opposites, etc. There is both magic and logic in the idea brainstorming process. By stepping outside of the comfort zone, you can break down the old box of knowledge, explore the unknown, connect the wide dots to create new ideas continuously. Collectively, great ideas are shared, communicated, and selected to achieve their value for advancing humanity.

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Innovativebodleadership

Corporate boards as one of the critical top leadership pillars should set the right tone and develop high-quality profiles for exemplifying digital leadership and steering the organization in the right direction.

With “VUCA” digital new normal, organizations across vertical sectors have to continue reinventing themselves, setting the path for smooth business transformation which represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. 

The corporate board needs to be able to listen, brainstorm, question, show the ability and openness to "question itself and its decisions/ discussions," provide clarified opinions or excellent feedback to the top management for contemplating or improving.

Is corporate change as continuum or conundrum: The corporate board as the advising role is responsible to steer the organization in the right direction and provides an “outside-in” view of the business via multidimensional lenses to oversee strategy, Strategy management and change management go hand in hand. Sometimes, even though you have a perfectly crafted strategy, if people are not ready to make change, the business would get stuck due to change inertia. In other cases, people suffer from change fatigue, without spending time on clarifying the logical scenario to change and prevent change pitfalls. Change is the journey, not just a destination. The spirit of change comes from the top. Senior leadership teams such as the corporate board play a critical role in assessing business changeability, ensuring corporate change is an iterative, progressive continuum, rather than waste time, confused conundrum – like keep spinning the wheel, without moving forward.

At a strategic level, change management shouldn’t be just about taking a few random business initiatives; but an ongoing, differentiated business capability with multi-stepped processes that include both change resolution and change management disciplines and practices. In today's work environment, change indeed is difficult to measure unless all parties involved in the change take ownership of the change and see why and what the change is about. To manage a smooth change continuum, the corporate board’s change management oversight helps to clarify some critical issues which include some soft business elements, need to be dealt with smoothly. Technically, change impact analysis and business readiness are two key processes that need to be conducted to give the management a glimpse of what to evaluate. The operation-centrism should be shifted to people-centricity; organizations have to be holistic and forethoughtful to deal with change with nimbleness and flexibility.

Can you identify crucial building blocks or roadblocks for the business move forward? Statistically, either strategy management or change management has a very low success rate. There are varying ingredients (process, people, culture) to build differentiated business capabilities for strategy management and long-term growth. Board leaders should have the desire to understand better in order to bridge gaps and capture business insight for managing a holistic and seamless digital transformation. In today’s business dynamic, business capabilities are a fundamental building block in strategy management with which companies can transform business models, operational processes, customer experiences, to reach high-level business agility and maturity. To dig deeper, information and technology as the building blocks of business capabilities can enable and shape business capabilities and capacities by linking all crucial strategic aspects (goals, objectives, actions, etc.) together to enforce business competencies.

Besides building blocks, what are roadblocks that stop the company from moving forward strategically? Change is usually a collaborative effort, negative perception of experience is the roadblock to changes, that further causes ineffective communication, miscommunication enlarges gaps and slows down the pace of changes. On one side, the resource is an important building block of dynamic capability; on the other side, ineffective resource or talent management is the roadblock to business moving forward. The matter of fact is that organizations have limited resources, many businesses that get stuck at the low level of organizational maturity take a big bite of resources to keep the lights on, only leaving very little for building differentiated capabilities. Effective governance ensures that the management stays focused on top prioritized business activities, assigns resources scientifically, put the right people in the right position to solve right problems, and manages a balanced portfolio/program to build a unique set of business capabilities for unlocking performance.

Does corporate strategy focus more on blue ocean exploration or red ocean exploitation: Fierce competitions or frequent disruptions make organizations fragile. Nowadays, competition is occurring not simply at the level of independent firms, but often at the level of the platform, and business ecosystem. The different departments in the companies often run at a different speed. Blue ocean provides a way to improve both the value and cost drivers by “rearranging” business attributes within the value proposition in under-analyzed market segments. Red ocean has more competitions; companies continue serving existing customers or marketing sectors by improving operational excellence or products/services qualities. Often, large firms capture the trends and think they have the resources to create their own blue oceans. Most of the time, their legacy systems working in exploitation mode do not allow them to do it. Thus, the corporate board’s level strategy assessment is crucial to build long term advantage of the company.

The strategy needs to be made not only based on the historical pattern, more importantly, but it also has to leverage the emergent thinking and make continuous adjustment. To explore the blue ocean smoothly, corporate boards should set good policies to encourage innovation, nurture a creative culture and build multi-faceted business value propositions. So the profitability logic becomes ingrained in its management processes and organizational culture. Value innovation is not immune to competition. Once a value innovation is successfully established, the innovator commits to scaling it up to create economic value for the company.

Corporate boards as one of the critical top leadership pillars should set the right tone and develop high-quality profiles for exemplifying digital leadership and steering the organization in the right direction. The interdisciplinary expertise with humble attitude is critical to be the guardian of the business, continue to inspire, innovate, improve, interact, interpret, influence, exemplify, and orchestrate change and digital transformation.

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Innovation

  Innovation is not an overnight phenomenon, but an adventurous journey to overcome challenges, transform great ideas to achieve commercial value.

Like the blossoming garden, the digital organization is organic, sophisticated, living, and charming, innovation is the light every organization is pursuing; innovation competency is indispensable. If you really innovate, you will differentiate your company from competitions and build unique competency.

Innovation starts with a vision, implemented via collaboration: Despite the fact that there is a clear line between influencing and predicting what is to come, having the ability to predict is important for, and helpful in, influencing the future and take initiatives to innovate proactively. Forethoughtful companies are able to leverage emerging technologies, efficient apps, and tools to lubricate business processes, rejuvenate organizational culture, enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration, and catalyze innovation. Innovation can happen anywhere across the organization and its ecosystem, the most powerful innovation navigation system involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for collective perspectives and knitting all critical business elements such as people, process, and technology into differentiated innovation competency.

Innovation is creative power to build unique capabilities, explore emerging opportunities, design new business models, and investigate hidden paths for accelerating growth. We all know we don't live in an ideal world where we can pick the perfect innovation team. Many good ideas get wasted simply because the innovator fails in engaging in talented people as well as in adapting to their input. If innovation starts with a vision, it's primarily a journey through which the innovator has to interact with others on how to innovate; what’s the best and next practice to innovate.

Bridging innovation execution gap requires a systematic execution scenario with clear-defined stages, decision-making parameters, performance thresholds, metrics selections: Learn your business, and its strategic imperatives. Build a good innovation strategy to drive value-added innovation. The innovation classification is based on the position of the concept in the evolution tree. Innovation execution is a significant part of overall strategy execution; Innovation management portfolio comprises the right mix of incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation. Return On Investment value proposition of innovation initiatives should be an overall measurement based on the combination of cost, schedule, quality, performance, and satisfaction of the customer, users, and stakeholders

Compared to other types of business initiatives, innovation has usually high return and high risks. Innovation practitioners are the people who identify, develop, select and implement the initiative to reach high return on investment. To catalyze innovation in the traditional well-established companies, create a disciplined, managed space for developing and testing new models, products, and business approaches, shielding innovation teams from the organization’s dominant logic or established standardized operating procedures, protecting existing operations and brands, and establishing clear proof-of-concept before making investments to launch and scale. The “on-value” evaluation of an innovation management portfolio should be an overall performance measurement based on the combination of cost, schedule, quality, performance, and satisfaction of the customers or shareholders.

Highly innovative organization is to create organizations in which creativity is a significant part of business climate: Taking a few innovation efforts is the management discipline; being innovative is a state of mind; building an innovative culture is a collective mindset and attitude to advocate innovation by assessing: What about the right innovation climate? How about your personal climate, your team climate or your organizational climate? All those are soft touches of nurturing an innovative workforce. If you have or develop the right culture, then everything else can be connected.

Corporate innovation stagnation is caused by overly rigid organizational structure, culture inertia, etc. Organization's innovative culture needs to be more “coorpetitive” – encouraging corporation and healthy competition, and risk tolerant – taking calculated risks for achieving more. It doesn't mean you should reward "failure" as such; but to inspire the culture of innovation, you should rather reward taking risks. Technically, the real power of emerging digital platforms and collaboration tools comes from the innate appeal of social interaction and intellectual stimulation that people derive from sharing what they know, expressing opinions, brainstorming new ideas, and co-solving problems creatively.

Innovation is not an overnight phenomenon, but an adventurous journey to overcome challenges, transform great ideas to achieve commercial value. Instead of being overly rigidly grouped around a specific function or business, an enriched innovation ecosystem is dynamic, expansive, interdependent, and hyper-connected, enabling cross-boundary communication, engaging in multi-industrial collaborations, and improving innovation management maturity.

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Initiatingchange

Change is in small adaptations that tilt scales, but also in big paradigm shifts that rebuild the scales.

Organizations and human societies become over-complex and interdependent, change or problem-solving are important perspectives for driving business forward. Change management today has a very wide scope, intricate factors and needs to take an interdisciplinary approach. 

Change should never happen for its own sake, without figuring out the “why” part of change. For change to be embraced by various stakeholders, they ultimately need to understand what’s exactly the problems, what’s the philosophy for leading change; when it’s the right timing for change, who are change agents, how to change effectively and sustain its impact.

People understand accountability with the sense of urgency: Change is inevitable with increasing pace, there’s a variety of changes from incremental behavior change to mind-shift; from a few software updates to process optimization; from operation improvement to strategic movement; from transaction to transformation, etc. In practice, Change Management is all about balancing the main success factors impacting change such as people, strategy, process and information technology. Change could occur at the level of the individual and it is only when the management has a sense of urgency, the majority of people are on the journey that the real results start to emerge. The management can ask people to change their behavior manually; however, to keep change sustainable, people need to change their attitude, enhance accountability for what they decide, and do, becoming part of solution rather than generate more issues.

Top management should be able to motivate change at the right timing. The good moment to change is when the top senses the urgency and the bottom feels the pain. Change inertia can be minimized via common understanding about the necessity and imperatives of changes. Professionals should be conscious of what they think of change and they are responsible for their actions. They should be accountable to his/her company, to themselves or their conscience. Collectively, accountability needs to be well embedded in the organizational culture, to encourage responsible communication, decision-making, and action; true accountability focuses on learning; it goes hand in hand with the delegation of authority or power, and it’s harnessed by autonomy.

People provide the best quality even if nobody is looking: The degree of quality is in everything people do and experience. Quality conveys what we think, what we do, and what we deliver. Quality leaders and employees demonstrate both intellectual understanding and emotional maturity; the good attitude and great aptitude, working together as a team to excel in quality products or services delivery. People's quality often decides the quality of the other part of the business. High quality people are consistent with what they think and do; provide the best quality even if the management is not around.

Quality assessment is to evaluate both individual and team performance on how effectively they can improve the quality of products/service, their skill/capability/potential, as well as their learning agility to bring business to the next level of maturity." Quality Management is not one department’s work, it’s like "change management," needs to be embedded into the corporate culture. Organizational excellence is achieved by delivering qualified products or services and continuously improving business performance.

People can agree to disagree and move on: Change is often not the straight line, change is never for its own sake, it’s about improvement or innovation; it involves learning to ride above the change curve, adapting to an ever-evolving environment, and collaborating for amplifying change effectively. Organizations or societies are becoming more diversified, inundated with exponential growth of information, variety of people, enriched cultural ingredients, etc. People do not have to agree with one another in order to learn from and with one another. People shouldn’t blindly follow their management completely for driving changes, but they need to be pulled in the same direction. Critical thinking and complementary skills are important to improve change effectiveness.

Change is the journey, either individually or collectively; with unprecedented uncertainty and high velocity, the reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important. There is much in the world we do not know nor understand and because of that limitation, we need to choose to continue to learn, grow and empower people to learn and grow too. The blurring line of organizational border and the uncharted frontier provides both unprecedented opportunities and emergent risks for change management. So we have to have the ability to ask the hard questions and engage in meaningful dialogue even if we do not agree with one another completely, we can indeed agree to disagree yet, set common ground, stay engaged with one another to make change happen.

Change is in small adaptations that tilt scales, but also in big paradigm shifts that rebuild the scales. Great change leaders have the clear vision to lead forward, a unique set of capabilities to lead effectively and soft skills to communicate and motivate the team to drive change step-wisely and make collective progress.

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Innerperformanceassessment

  Continuous improvement means to continue to discover that "there is always a better way.''

Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy to the shop floor. "If you can't measure, you can't manage," legendary management guru Peter Drucker once asserted. 

Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions to ensure it happens. It takes multifaceted approaches from multidimensional perspectives to unlock digital performance and catalyze change.

  

                Performance Assessment

Innovationperformanceassessment Corporate performance Management is a management control across functional domains and management disciplines. It is a necessary foundation for continuous improvement. There is performance at strategic and tactical level; there’s individual performance and team performance.

Innovationperformance Innovation is the process to generate fresh ideas, transform them to achieve their commercial value. Overall speaking, innovation has a very low success rate. The problem is that many organizations do not set the right conditions for increasing the probability of innovation success. Also, they don’t set the right key performance indicators to measure results from innovation efforts.

Improvementindicators Continuous improvement means to continue to discover that "there is always a better way.''Any individual indicator can be a lead or lag indicator depending upon the context and the explanatory model chosen. Have always looked at a Lag Measure as the method for measuring the outcome and the Lead Measure as the bet you make. Here are three indicators for measuring improvement.

Innovation Indicator As the saying goes, “You can only manage what you measure.” Digital Organizations are like organic systems that keep evolving. The performance of the total “system” is independent of the performance of any one of the functions and depends more on how the functions relate to each other, the “space” between functions. In fact, the very goal of running a high performance business is to ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

Innerperformanceassessment Hyper-connectivity and interdependence are the digital characteristics, it is important to understand that digital business development and transformation is the paradigm shift which takes multi-viewpoints, multi-discipline, and multi-stage approach. Strategy management, Change Management and performance management need to walk hand-in-hand. Most organizations fail to manage performance effectively because they often only focus on single dimensional behavior performance. In practice, performance assessment is a combination of many factors and shouldn't be quantified so easily. Performance Management is a multidimensional management discipline. Mindsets, behavior, and outcome are all important elements of performance evaluation. Here is the three-dimensional performance measurement.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8600 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating 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.



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Innovativeadvancement

The lunar new year celebration encourages us to make an advancement from mindsets to behavior.

It’s the beginning of the lunar new year, it’s time to awaken our consciousness to growth, sowing the seed, making differences, synchronizing with the speed of nature. Perhaps it's called growing up - when things or people are mature, they are not aged, they are in the advanced stage - ripened and delightful. 

To make collective human progress and advance human society requires fundamentally different mindsets and paradigms to lead and work innovatively. True advancement is about brightness, quality, intelligence, simplicity, delight, etc. The lunar new year symbolizes the end of winter and beginning of spring; makes wishes for good luck and prosperity; reaches the inflection point to make a leap of collective human progress.

The lunar new year celebration keeps people awake: We know spring is coming, as we can smell the fresh air, listen to the wind blowing in the trees, or the waves curling on the beach. It’s time to keep people awake, open-minded, forward-thinking, upwards. Digital footprint is more than the feet crunching in the land, it’s how your energy, aura impacts on the surroundings; it’s about how you think and do things differently. The advancement starts with a growth mindset, experimenting, exploring, and encouraging new ways to solve problems or take the adventure of the life journey.

We need to enter a new people-centric era in which we consider for the betterment and harmonization of the shared planet. The lunar new year keeps people awake, making interpersonal transformation via self-reflection, then intrapersonal transformation via learning, participating and improving. Only through continuous improvement, with a few transcendental movements, human advancement can be sustained and the world can move forward with accelerated speed.

The lunar new year delight is reflected in the overflows with abundant gratitude to nature: Nature is delightful! Springtime makes nature colorful, vibrant and balanced, inspiring us to rejuvenate creative energy and make courageous advancement. The advanced journey reaches the turning point when we are in the right spot to enjoy natural diversification; create our own landscape for growth and progression; and capture multidimensional views of things via the right angle.

Every advancement is an art of imagination and science of logical clarification, process optimization; and balance of hard and soft elements to spiral up the change cycle. When you have the courage to brighten the surroundings; when you have options to take alternative paths, tap creativity, and take adventures, to enjoy different scenes, you are reaching the advancing stage. Inspired by the natural world, the diversity in the human world will be transcendent to the next level of human advancement when having a common purpose, creating the right mix of automation and human creativity is crucial for long-term prosperity.

The lunar new year disrupts the “old,”renewing the fresh perspective: Without seasonal change, the natural world looks pale and gets stale. Without an advanced mindset, the growth of mankind will be stagnant, all inventions and creative processes that take us forward in evolutionary scale will come to a standstill. Essentially, innovation is a type of creative disruption. Innovation can be defined as the collision between different perspectives, internal programming, mind-states of possibility and necessity and thought patterns that result in creative ideas and solutions.

The most advanced mind with great vision is the one which relates itself to a purpose greater than itself, contributes to the common good and the collective human progress. When life is shifting from surviving to striving and thriving; when being innovative becomes a state of mind to discover authenticity and take adventures; and people are becoming more progressive, life is in the most advanced stage, and the society as a whole is advancing to the next stage.

The lunar new year celebration encourages us to make an advancement from mindsets to behavior. The progress of the world is pushed forward by courageous leaders and energetic professionals who can keep disrupting conventional wisdom, inspire innovation, have the ability to learn from the past, perceive what is now and foresee the future in pursuit of advancement. Courage, innovation, and advancement is the theme of this spring festival celebration.

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Investmentplatform

The effective investment frameworks add value as they help the management make objective investment portfolio assessment.

Running a business is fundamentally about solving societal problems with continuum. The investment management needs to ensure that they are investing in the right business initiatives and create headroom for innovation, growth, and progression. It’s also important to understand that there are both opportunities and risks in every investment. 

An investment value platform provides a structure to justify critical business investments, broadens perspectives with important components, avoids pitfalls, helps the practices deliver consistent results and achieve repeatability of the outcome, improves the management effectiveness on the basis of business benefit delivery, return on investment and contribution to innovation.

Investment strategy: Innovation is the path for building competitive differentiation and driving transformative progress. It’s crucial to evaluate the impacts of investment decisions by presenting a "strategic" look to maximize the business's benefit from the investment. An effective investment platform can provide visibility into each investment, provide ongoing investment health information as well as enable understanding overall portfolio health.

The wise investors analyze business models that list all of the sources of value, cost, and risk, and contain formulas to interconnect them. In fact, achieving visibility of strategic investment helps investment management become more future-oriented and discover the path to where they need to move for investing innovation with growth potentiality and progressive societal impact. It generates predictions for how much profit the new business model will make, as well as how to strike the right balance of short term gain and long term perspectives.

Investment principles: The investment principle is usually based on value and strategy. In fact, principle, purpose, and progress are inter-related with each other. Purpose and principle clearly understood, articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of investment management. The guiding principle is like the light tower, navigates crucial business activities such as investment toward the right direction and harness innovation in a structural way. If shareholders valued innovation more, more often than not, they would value companies that devote more talent, resources toward future innovation than those that optimize short term profits.

It’s not easy for a set of innovation principles that can be applied holistically as various stakeholders have different viewpoints about innovation investment. Sometimes the principal content contains natural conflict, without a method of prioritizing and implementing consistently, they become a source of contention. By following the digital principles and rules, the investment lifecycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of reorganizing, refocusing, rebalancing resources, and redirecting people to improve innovation effectiveness to ultimately achieve higher than expected results.

Investment resource management: Resources are limited, there are different types of resources such as funds, physical assets, people, information, reputation, resources of the individuals who comprise the firm, such as knowledge, education, training, insights, experience, etc. Often resource management becomes a bottleneck in innovation investment and management.

Successful capacity planning and resource management are critical to ensure that resources are available before they are needed. If a solid business case can be developed, the resources are often made available; An effective resource allocation scenario helps to get all related people involved, set priorities, take advantage of resources effectively, optimize cost, and keep the process transparent in order to improve innovation investment success.

Investment risk management: Managing strategic risks effectively can do more than just help a company avoid potential downsides. The management can ask good questions, do pre-work for risk assessment in the correct manner. Identify risk issues related if the initiatives cannot be easily accepted by staff about cash flow from the corporate capacity or level of trust with suppliers to provide the service. This will require that each organization believes or create its own risk matrix.

The risk assessment and management process helps investment management prioritize the activities they are committed to resourcing in addition to serving as a cross check for anything that they may have missed or are doubling up on. It’s important to integrate risk into resource prioritization and planning processes.

Investment performance checklist: For many investing managers, they need to be able to support essential initiatives with sound ROI reasoning by clarifying: Why should we invest in what you are proposing? What are the best methods for calculating ROI? How to accurately project the economic impact of the proposed innovation initiatives. ROI, Net present value, internal rate of return, and time to payback are all measurement methods. It’s important to define measures appropriate to best assess the performance; showing how well they satisfy or delight customers and generate business value.

A cost-benefit analysis simply compares an initiative cost to its anticipated financial benefit. In specific, make an objective assessment of the size, or the cost - not only the amount but the flow at the time of disbursement. Size of profit - not only the amount but the flow at the time or the cost if you do not do it, such as meeting regulatory actions. The time to complete the Implementation (post-training and post-adjustment period) Time to reach equilibrium (cost = benefit) Each organization has specific measurable goals and objectives they have to hit through investing in innovation initiatives.

The effective investment frameworks add value as they help the management make objective investment portfolio assessment including techniques such as pure health check techniques, customer feedback, business partner relationship analysis, etc, and provides a holistic picture of what is working or not. The comparisons help to review investment progress, deviations, and make more effective decisions for improving the overall investment management maturity.

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