Re-imagine Airlines

I'm flying high and couldn't be more confident about the future.— Freddy Laker

For global airline industry, last decade maybe the “lost decade”, suffered from both nature and human disasters, flying fuel and great recession, however, airline as the most challenging and charming industry in the world, stand on its feet with discipline, stabilized and start growing again via consolidation, innovation and hard-working, it’s at infection point to brainstorm more enchanting ideas, to re-imagine airlines and rejuvenate this legacy industry.

Imagine the airline like:

1. Full-Mobile House in the Sky

Today’s digital technologies add the new pair of wings for airline to grow, to delight customer through self-service, flight entertainment, and personalized solutions.

               

• Always Connect-On Customers

Smart clients today expect to continuing working or entertaining on board, the business travelers need speed internet connections, track-your-flight features, proactive notification services, and first-rate loyalty programs; leisure travelers will delight with social media connection, tailored entertainment services, all the activities the family enjoy at home, they also expect to have the similar experience at plane.

• Real-Time Travel Experience

Even beyond, the always connect-on customers expect their mobile with faster response time and real-time travel information & experience, such as: location based services: online baggage tracking, movement tracking, push notification, voice recognition

• Everyday Hero

We have to make you think it's an important seat - because you're in it.

Think every journey is special, just like big full house family, most of airlines are a bit crowd,  to lift up the travel spirit, airline staff need present the friendly & humorous attitude , optimized service; the diversified passengers have the chance to stay at the same journey, need support each other to make either the short trip or long journey more fun and impressive, window seat taker has the view, the isle customer has the convenience to exit, so the middle-seat customer makes some sacrifice, become our everyday hero.

2. World Window through the Cloud

The globe will be linked by flight and the nations so knit together that they will grow to be next-door neighbors. . . . What railways have done for nations, airlines will do for the world.

— Claude Grahame-White, 1914

 If  airport is  the window of the city, then airline is just like the window of the world,  Smart cities, better world, the widow-seat passenger will tell you why and how to modernize our cities and change our world via the overview and foresight of the man-made scenes.

Airlines are also economy engine and barometers, the aviation ecosystems influence worldwide activities significantly, from global trading to business activities, from job creation to travel attraction and from sustainability to new energy development. Aviation industry is one of infrastructural pillars in modern society. 

3. The Retailer with the Wings

There always has been a mystique and a romance about aviation, but in terms of the principles involved of satisfying your customer there's no difference between selling airlines seats and chocolate bars.

Airline is also one of the industries with least return on investment due to the large capital expenditure and high cost, many famous quotes by great investors and strategists well articulated how difficult for airline to make money, however, airline, as one of our strong economy pillars, the critical retailers with the wings, deserve to make some profit.

Airlines make some new innovations in recent years, they build up the ancillary revenue stream to keep industry flow and reimburse the high fuel cost, in order to keep the sustainable growth for the long term, airline need:

• Keep building up the innovation capability to drive more  new revenue and enhance customer loyalty via the latest digital technology such as mobile and social;
• Optimize the distribution channel and supply chain, with focal point at core business and customer services
• Consolidate, rationalize, integrate, modernize and optimize IT infrastructure and applications.
• To engage the employees, with passion, trust, and next generation of working environment and  talent management.

Yes, to revitalize the airline businesses is strategic imperative and long term journey, but it worth the effort: to transform it from national embrassment into national pride, to recover its image as
 the Proud Bird with the Golden Tail


I was engaged in what I believe to be the most thrilling industry in the world—aviation. My heart still leaps when I see a tiny two-seater plane soaring gracefully through the sky. Our great airlines awe me. Yet I know they were not produced in a day or a decade.

 William A. "Pat" Patterson, CEO United Airlines

Read More

Modern EA’s Value Propositions

 EA  should play the bridge role between business and technology, the goal is to share the knowledge and recognize the optimization point.

In the blog:
 http://futureofcio.blogspot.com/2011/07/re-imagine-enterprise-architecture-re.html, we pointed out some 20^th century EA’s crucial problems such as lack of clear definition, lack of prioritization and lower level of maturity; ivory tower approach, fragmentation, and over-complexity. After being through a variety of valuable forums and case study, we conclude EA needs to be revitalized to reflect the new identity and become the competitive asset at the digital era in 21^st century, to deliver the true values, embrace the latest digital technology trends such as social/mobile/cloud, and lead the business into more radical digital transformation. The modern EA could deliver the following value propositions and beyond:

1. Strategy Communication Tool

Strategy Architecture blueprint the vision, mission, the goal, identify the enterprise capabilities and unique value chain, EA needs to be more dynamic to define both the long term vision and short term change facing in the organization. More importantly, EA needs to cultivate loyal internal users such as CXO, to use EA as a true communication tool, either for an elevator speech or the board level presentation.

2. Orchestrate the Change Management

The social enterprise is the new theme in the digital era: Modern enterprises take a hybrid approach, to integrate traditional centralized pyramid shape structure and decentralized lattice style through enterprise social platform, focus on communication, open leadership, and innovation. An effective EA effort will help:

 -Identify the talent needed in order to achieve its strategic objectives, also the talent needs to be developed and maintained on an ongoing basis.

-Become part of the organization’s operating model, assess organizational awareness and competencies periodically, to facilitate knowledge sharing, to drive change management and cultural influence.

3. Compass to Transformation

The subset of EA, such as IT Architecture should become the framework for CIO to build up the IT roadmap, focus on business transformation, to digitize and simplify the end-to-end process, not IT details, keep simple and standardized, but also recognize the technology trend and well-describe how IT and the latest technology could drive business value: not only think about today, but also selectively forget yesterday, and forward-looking tomorrow.

·  Rapid, effective and positive response to business change

·  Orchestrate process and knowledge management for better future-state planning

·  Democratize and unify business and technology decision-maker scenario

4. Connect Optimization Point from Project to Organization

EA still should play the bridge role between business and technology, the goal is to share the knowledge and recognize the optimization point, and expand the process optimization from project to organization base:

- Improve business agility via consolidation, rationalization, modernization, reusability, simplification, and optimization

-Drive value and cost-efficiency via the current platform and optimized process

-Increase economies of scale through standards.

5. Business Governance

As we indefatigably debated, for those industry leaders or laggards, is EA the cause or effect, part of problems or solutions?EA is planning, governance, and innovation function that enables the organization to progress toward its vision of future states, governance should play a critical role in  EA, however,  for the majority of the organization, EA governance is just too theoretic and intangible to make it a reality, in more detail, EA governance will:

·        Define and Manage Architecture Risks & Risk Control

·        Decision Making Governance

·        Works with a program and project Governance context to  ensure the realization of EA Vision and Enterprise Solution

·        Review and Audit Solutions

6. EA Benchmarking

From an ROI perspective, EA benchmarking could have an immediate impact by setting up the performance report card and track EA best practice:

·  Set up an EA performance measurement program to link to overall performance management

·   Track EA Program Maturity and Perceptions

·    EA Best Practice ROI: such as EA team can provide the business with cost comparisons of different project approaches

·    Forecast the impact of cost avoidance

Read More

CIO’s Analytics Roadmap

The maturity of the organization’s Analytics methods, tools and competencies is based on exploring the quality data, asking the effective question, exploring the end-to-end business process, building the practical analytics model, measure the KPIs.

The exponential grown of data (both structured and unstructured data) in digital era brings both significant opportunities and risks for contemporary enterprise.  Analytics, as one of the most critical components of business capability becomes strategic imperative for business to gain competitive edge and distinctive capability in 21^st century.

 What is analytics? Metaphorically, data is like tea leaf, and analytics is like reading those tea leaf to locate the pattern, capture the insight and foresight, methodologically, by analytics, we mean the extensive use of data, statistics and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions, to help the organization well-prepare for the future.  

However, one of the prestigious consulting company made a survey of 600 executives, 8 out of 10 companies have not achieved their goals in analytics. And only 1 out of 12 respondents expressed satisfaction with the return on their investments.

How does modern CIO recognize, prioritize the analytics projects, create the solid analytics roadmap and cultivate the analytics culture to achieve the best result?

 1.    Ten Essential Business Analytics

(1)   Web Analytics: in digital era, every business has web presence, the goals of web analytics include optimized ROI, customer satisfaction, brand enhancement, optimized operational cost, improved business process flow, increasing sales & marketing lead, all stakeholders such as business, IT application development, performance team need work closely to do systemic analytics such as user life cycle analytics or application infrastructure & performance analytics. A strategic analytics plan and measurement is created to evaluate the achievement of the organizations goals.

(2)   HR Analytics: today's analytics tools help define the link between “people practices” and performance more effectively,  talent analytics culture will fertilize the talent seed, let people grow with organization’s long term strategy, and IT need become HR’s strategic partner, help develop the talent management platform and performance tools which are base on the data merit and measurable performance, tangible influence, rather than political behavior, to retain high performance talent.

(3)   Supply Chain Analytics: Effective and efficient supply chains involve constant change and a fluid transfer of information and materials from one stage to the next. To optimize process and to generate maximum efficiencies, the companies need analytics that can provide insight across the entire chain, that can respond to changes, rationalize suppliers, leverage the spending, recognize the bottlenecks, optimize the logistics and execute cost analysis.

(4)   Predictive Analytics: it’s the key to become customer-centric, forecast might tell you total quantity of items you may sell, predictive analytics will tell you who are your most profitable customers, which customers might no longer order from you in the future., etc.  Predictive analytics help develop customer-tailored solution base on their needs, preferred channel, current situation, and the point of journey. It helps organization to gain the competitive edge and beat competition through customer behavior prediction.

(5)   Decision Making Analytics: In today’s digitized global era, decision making has never been more complex and consequential, no matter it’s strategic decision made by executive, operational decision made by mid level manager or tactical decision made by front-liner staffs, intuition and gut-feeling is no sufficient, the biggest challenge and opportunity is how to better-utilize the information on decision-making to carry out the strategy faster and better than competition, the modern decision management may include: business rule, BPM, data management, predictive analytics,  event process., etc.

(6)   Risk Analytics: Technology and process strategies need focus on building sustainable growth, IT need deliver more value while staying at or under budget, at the same time, IT must mitigate the risks associated with information security, increased regulations and performance & risk management coordination. IT also need take leadership to breakup the data silo, to build up the holistic risk analytics and governance framework .

(7)   Big Data Analytics: Companies are increasingly analyzing unstructured data, including voice, text and video, big data also become the metaphor of the large volume of data and information, the characteristic of big data are: volume, velocity, variety, and complexity. Big data bring up both big opportunities and great risk for organizations, via analyzing the big data, company can predict the future trend, listen to customers’ voice and optimize the products and service, on the flip side, security, privacy, data loss protection, data storage, data life cycle management., etc, all data related issues become unprecedented challenges facing in modern organization today. 

(8)   Contact Center Analytics: the next generation of contact center analytics will streamline the call flow, provides customer insight within and beyond call center forecast, also facilitate the trend analytics, and orchestrate the social enterprise through more integrated platform with all necessary blocks such as social CRM, analytics tools, unified communication, call center., etc, and deliver the customer-centric solution,

(9)   Energy Analytics: Green journey for many organization not only means sustainability, but also lead to better profitability, the energy analytics scenario includes to track all parameters relevant to energy, cost and carbon footprints in real-time and analyze these at multiple resolutions to provide the valuable insight.. It’s pre-requisite to ensure data quality and accuracy, deliver insight and enable energy related decision-making to choose the right information., and capture a real-time, fine-grained view of energy, cost and carbon footprints.

(10) Process Analytics: Strategic planning, budgeting, planning and forecasting., etc are process intensive, workflow driven, with top-down, bottom-up and middle-out model,  IT engages in the strategic planning process and work with business to deliver the effective analytics solutions. IT will also orchestrate more corporate centric, holistic B&PF to breakdown the divisional based silo planning, to make it part of BI , analytics and performance management strategy

                             

2. Analytics Roadmap

Analytical driven business is the organization that uses analytics extensively and systematically to outthink and out execute the competition. Statistically, high-performance business has five times opportunities to use analytics as distinctive capability.

Developing an analytics roadmap with systematic process for prioritizing and framing the high analytics capabilities to create measurable value and outcome, without roadmap, the organization either underestimate the effort, ignore the pitfalls or simply solve the short-term issues only.

(1)   Analytics Structure & Change Management

·        Centralized Analytics Structure: Modern IT is transforming from the infrastructure cost center into business enabler and strategic partner, IT can take leadership to framework the centralized analytics team, since data and data management is essential to analytics.

·        Decentralized Analytics Structure: Data architects, analysts distribute cross the business functions, the more dynamic CoE-center of excellence is facilitated to share the progress and best practices.

  

(2)   Analytic Business Cases

·        Quick Win: Communicate and initiate the business case base on business priorities buy-in & support from shareholders to deliver near-term result

·        Strategic Project: Capture the hinder-sight, insight and foresight, enable the business to solve problems timely and approach new market promptly.

·        Expansion: Cross-functional, multiple analytic disciplines are required to solve the wide variety of problems an organization faces, while enabling the greatest analytic bandwidth.

·        Transformation: Organizational change and analytics capability

expand effort cross-functional track, evaluate and measure the result, the analytics culture has been nurtured, the key processes have been optimized, the organization has been transformed into agile, high-performance business.

  

      (3) Analytics Tips

·        Out-of-the-box analytics with a heavy focus on results

·        Increased demand by users and continued data model development analytics

·        Make it stick: Integrate the analytics practitioners into everyday business rhythms, also commit the measurement

·        Agile Analytics: A series of user-driven deliverables, with frequent outputs and check-in

    (4) Analytics KPIs & Maturity

The path to analytic maturity has three key areas — leadership, breaking down silos, and developing and keeping talent — are fundamental to fostering an analytics culture.

The maturity of the organization’s Analytics methods, tools and competencies is based on exploring the quality data, asking the effective question, exploring the end-to-end business process, building the practical analytics model, measure the KPIs.

Read More

Moon Festival Thought: Humanity and Humility

The sunset clouds are gathered far away, it's clear and cold,
The Milky Way is silent, I turn to the jade plate.
The goodness of this life and of this night will not last for long,
Next year where will I watch the bright moon
-Ancient Orient Poem

Time is flying, another Moon Festival, compared to many other happy-theme holiday occasions, such as the Spring festival, moon Festival brings us some deep thought, and paradoxical feelings, and numerous moon-related poems also reflect the theme of humanity & humility.

What can we reflect from this year’s Full Moon day:

• 9.11 Ten-Year Memorial 

The only real nation is humanity - Paul Farmer

The tragic event that happened a decade ago still caused many pains and sorrows, for many families lost loved ones, tonight’s full moon may never truly wax, always wane through their emotions, but hope the clean, bright moon can comfort their hearts, soothe the heavy memories.

Many touching articles published at the internet also remind us of the humanity and leadership we could learn from 9.11. May sunshine and moonlight guide us out of the dark and the lost decade, may the new balance of Yin &Yang leadership energize us all into a brighter future.

• Human’s Moon Journey 

 If we can not end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. 

J.F. Kennedy.

President J.F. Kennedy’s inaugural address and “Go To Moon” speech lifted the American dream to explore space and beyond.

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” These famous words were uttered by Neil Armstrong as he made history as the first man to walk on the moon in 1969.

A Couple of Great Quotes about Moon, Humanity & Humility 

• See how nature – trees, flowers, grass – grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, how they move in silence…we need silence to be able to touch souls. 

• Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon. 

• To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.  Martha Nussbaum 

• My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.  Bishop Desmond Tutu 

Read More

CIO as Chief Influence Officer: Seven Points of Key Influences

 The strategic role of CIOs is more based on the influence made across the organizational boundary, from innovation to sustainability, from talent management to cultural transformation.

The CIO role by nature is fraught with paradox, the modern CIO need be both business strategist and IT manager, innovator and cost-cutter, visionary and situation-driven. Chief influence officer is one of the most pertinent personas for CIO in the 21^st century since technology is ubiquitous in the information age. However, the traditional big box hardware style of IT infrastructure is disappearing, and more invisible digitized IT backbone based on Cloud computing is emerging, modern CIO is no longer just the chief infrastructure officer to manage back office of functional IT, this strategic role is more based on the influence made across the organizational boundary, from innovation to sustainability, from talent management to cultural transformation. Here we discuss the seven points of CIO influences:

1. Strategy Influence

The strategy is a set of decisions that drive or shape most of a company's subsequent actions. In a rapidly changing digital era and increasingly competitive global environment, IT is now considered a driver of a company’s growth strategy rather than just the keep-the-light-on function. As a result, CIOs now have more accountability and visibility than ever before. The CIO’s ability to create fundamental business value is now greater than ever. IT strategy and the “art of the possible” in technology influence the development of business strategy, closing the loop in strategy development. Co-development of strategy by business and IT would reduce risks of surprise disruptions and better involve IT in bolstering competitive advantage. Today’s CIO not only make a significant influence on organization’s key decisions, real-time digital IT tools such as mobile/social also provide insight and even foresight: the decision capability based on data & analytics, beyond executives' golden guts.

2.   Innovation Influence

Innovation is the execution of new ideas that create business value. Technology is the engine behind innovation at digital age, Chief Innovation Officer is another crucial persona fitting in today’s CIO role, CIO manages incremental or planned innovation via project portfolio or sponsoring business process optimization, and catch disruptive innovation by envisioning the industrial trends and data-driven foresight. It’s no secret that diverse groups come up with more innovative ideas. To tap into this multifaceted source of power, CIO will also help craft the innovation platform by taking advantage of modern technology such as mobile/cloud/social/analytics., etc. The traditional IT mindset aims to capture the value of technology through top-down planning, formal structures, and clearly defined processes. In the new normal, the mindset for success will emphasize a bottom-up search for value through innovative experimentation with customers and partners.

3.  Technology Influence

For high-performance companies, technology is the revenue driver and enabler of new business models.

On the one hand,  CIO is the authorized owner of corporate information technology, on the other hand, statistically 50%+ of the CIOs report to CFO or other executives, that’s why CIOs are more about the influence on IT budget and priority via  communicating and collaborating with other decision makers.In addition, IT consumerization & application sprawling is another phenomena in the current red-hot cloud era, business divisions sometimes bypass IT to procure their own cloud-based technological solutions without consulting CIO, and very often, with ignorance about governance, security, risk control and holistic vendor relationship. In the face of this new normal, the only thing the wise CIOs have to influence—persuade the business about the potential costs of the current situation and the benefits of your solution.  

4.  Culture Influence

Modern enterprise has recognized corporate culture as  the strategic imperative for any large scale change management effort, many companies also walk the talk, take the tough cultural journey: from culture ignorance, culture cognizance into culture transformation. If we say CEO may take the ownership about culture, then CIO could be one of the biggest influencers on it via the modern knowledge sharing platform, analytics tools  to inspire thought leadership, encourage the dissent opinions and demonstrate diversity. Through CIO’s radical influence, the invisible corporate culture becomes more tangible through measurable KPIs, the dynamic analytical culture and social learning environment will be cultivated to embrace the change, and the collective wisdom becomes the crucial factor at any strategic decision-making scenario.   

5.   Talent Influence

Though HR is the main function to hire or fire the people,  IT should become the  strategic partner to revitalize modern talent management based on data-driven advanced analytics.The high-performance businesses may have hybrid organizational structure: the traditional function-driven pyramid and dynamic networked model (to team up like-minded talents or group with cognizant difference),  IT could help set up such a structure and digital platform for intrapreneurship, encourage people to contribute to the innovation dialogue, unleash a diverse workforce, track natural leaders and key influencers,  CIO can also make influence on analyzing the data about the future trends, and long-term global talent strategy. The purpose of such a platform is:

• To connect people across functions
• To enable collaboration on ideas and projects
• To build communities of practice and interest
• To enhance knowledge about one another
• To empower people with a personal branding page
• To personalize the talent experience and make  large organization feel smaller
• To track thought leadership and natural leaders at dynamic talent pipeline

6.   Sustainability Influence

Technology has become increasingly important and ubiquitously efficient in our society, however, all the use of pervasive technology comes at the cost, accelerating depletion of earth resource, increase the carbon footprint and accumulating the environmental waste. Modern CIOs has the new persona: Chief Sustainability Officer, to make an influence on the environment, also dig the new gold via it and improve business’s bottom line.CIO has to balance sustainability efforts with business demands via asking

-How could we measure current CO2 footprint accurately? 

-Once we establish a roadmap, how do we measure the effects of changes we make to technology and business processes?

-How can we use the data we collect to motivate and impact sustainable change, both inside IT and across the enterprise?

-How can we create a roadmap to reduce IT’s energy footprint and support corporate goals, but at the same time balance our sustainability efforts with business demands?

7. Influence on Influencer

     Modern corporations are massive, complex, dynamic ecosystems. In many of them, organizational inertia is considerable. The effective CIOs should have excellent working relationships with other business leaders, savvy CIOs can also identify the formal and informal power brokers cross the boundary and establish a personal dialogue with them prior to presenting the problem for consideration to the group as a whole. CIOs who have developed influential competence seek to understand the mindset of all related parties, it takes humble attitude and a fact-driven presentation, mixing candor with openness, leveraging humility and courage.

As the result of these seven points of influences, the effective CIOs can harmonize business nature and human nature, and lead transformation effortlessly and achieve the goals as if by magic.

Read More

Five Fingers of Tao: Pointing Out 21st Century Leadership

1.     Tao Means How

"To see things in the seed, that is genius." -Lao Tzu 

Tao is synergy of principle & creation, and it’s a process, about how and what. All process reveals the underlying principles, the Tao leadership convey a sense of harmony, create the synergy between business nature and human nature, and link strategy & execution via observation, communication and principles. .

2.     Tao Means Polarities

"The words of truth are always paradoxical." -Lao Tzu 

All behavior consists of opposites or polarities, which means any over-determined behavior produces its opposite: Over-complexity make inefficiency; on the positive side: simplicity is ultimate sophistication 

Knowing Tao, the wise leader does not push to make things happen, but instead pull the people, process and technology together seamlessly, to build up the high performance self-functioning team and deliver the innovative products and services.

3.     Tao means Being Oneself

"He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened." -Lao Tzu 

Being authentic, the wise leader pay respectful attention to all behavior, dig into substance beyond the style, inspire the team to be open for the opinions and take innovative initiative. By being self , the nature is on your side, you can lead effortlessly and achieve the ultimate goals.  

4.     Tao Means Equal Treatment

Silence is a source of great strength." -Lao Tzu

Tao is unity, neither is one person or one people better than the rest of humanity, the same principle is as the golden rule: treat others as we want to be treated. Tao also means unbiased leadership with a little humility in order: silence is a great source of strength, the leadership harmony comes from influencing, not command & control..

5.     Tao Means Yin: the Open Collaboration

"Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it." -Lao Tzu

Being open and receptive is called Ying, the pond in valley or water. The wise leader is like water: cleanses and refreshes all creatures without distinction and judgment, it penetrate deep beneath the surface, it’s fluid, responsive and flexible; From observing the movements of water, the leader can learn that in action, timing is everything.

In conclusion: the form of “dong without doing” is the ultimate expression of Tao leadership

Read More

CIO’s Crown Jewel: Data

According to the IT analyst firm IDC, 15 petabytes of new information is generated every day (one petabyte equals one million gigabytes). That’s eight times the amount of information that resides in all U.S. libraries, and industry analysts place the growth rate closer to 100 percent annually. Data growth becomes one of the biggest challenges in modern organization, beyond the chaos, it’s the 80% of organizational core asset, and it’s DNA of digital enterprise.

Data is both the unprecedented opportunity and risk facing in today’s CIO, the attitude to data decides CIO’s multi-faceted persona and influence, CIO role is transforming from infrastructural manager to handle transactional data into the visionary business strategist to gain data insight and foresight via big data, and make strategic prediction & priority.

1.     Top Five Challenges of Data Growth

 

• Cost Challenge

Data related cost include storage cost, power & cooler cost, administration cost, database license cost etc, it takes about 7% to 10% of IT annual budget,  though modern storage technology such as virtualization/de-duplication/thin provisioning/ tiering/cloud provide the advanced, cost-effective solution for the enterprise data demand, CIO need forward thinking the scalability and well-calculating ROI for the long term.

• Data Full Life Cycle Management

Data/Information Lifecycle Management is the discipline around the planning, collection, creation, distribution, archiving of information, up to retirement and deletion/destruction, based on business and regulatory requirements. Data quality, data cleanse, MDM, data integration, data warehouse, data synchronization., etc are the fundamentals to decide the success of your business intelligence/analytics projects.

CIO should craft the right strategy, methodology and technology to manage the data and create effective link between data and business strategy.

• Data Security/Disaster Recovery

From varies of industry surveys, CIO’s top concerns are disaster recovery (72%) and reducing the risk of data loss, theft and corruption (65%)—understandably so, since disaster recovery is a necessary part of preventing or mitigating data loss, especially the emerging cloud computing enables more agile business via fast delivery and OPEX model, however, data security is still the top concerns to adopt the cloud. CIO need invent the trend and avoid the pitfalls.

• Data Governance

As the data (weather structured or unstructured), is aggregated and consolidated, to successfully leverage the data across the organization, it must be treated as an enterprise asset.  Data governance provides a common language that makes it possible to understand and act on information across functions and lines of business. CIO’s success pill –take with governance: converge data/IT governance with enterprise governance. 

• Data Analytics/BI

Perhaps Data analytics/BI is one of the most powerful secret weapons in digital era to out-weight and outthink your competitors, the market-leading companies see their ability to exploit analytics as the distinctive capability—the agile business processes and the integrated capabilities that together serve customers in ways that are differentiated from competitors and that create an organization’s formula for business success.

It’s value-added CIO’s new battleground to use BI/Advanced analytics such as predictive analytics, context/location base analytics, to craft dynamic Links between data & business strategy, and cultivate the analytic learning culture surrounding in the organization.

2.     Five Senses to Dig through Data, Make Strategic Analysis

Where is data coming from? Operation data such as financial data, logistic data and HR data come from organizational supply chain, customer data from CRM/marketing, and big data from social/mobile/cloud/RFID,  they are the raw gemstones, and strategic asset for modern corporation.

 ·        Smell Data: smell the revenue growth opportunities/threatens via data based SWOT analytics, through embedded data analytics process, the organization could also uncover its strength and weakness, adapt to progressive improvement.

·          Listen to Data: hear customers’ feedback, and employee’s opinions, one voice maybe a noise, but collective data is chorus, and statistic analytics such as gap analysis (helps companies compare actual performance with potential performance) will directly drive such as pricing strategy, customer insight, supply chain optimization and strategic workforce planning

·        Touch Data: Feel the pain point and customers’ touch point, modern enterprises are mostly over-complex, integral data cross the organization will touch the ground, help optimize the process via root cause & simplicity analysis, improve business capability via simple process, not simpler (Einstein’s philosophy).

·        See Through Data: like tea leaf, data can envision the mega-trends, data insight and foresight provide the scientific scenario analytics via asking what are the trends, what is going to happen, and what are the best could be happened., etc.

·        Taste Data: crunch the data or taste the sweet spot: to further explore Porter’s five forces strategic analysis, and also discover his recent theory about transforming from CSR (corporate social responsibility) to CSV (corporate social value) via impact analysis: how will your organization make social/economic/regulate impact,  become the strategic shaper and rule maker for the long term.   

3. Five Strategic Crowns Weaved via Data Gemstones

Enterprise information strategy

Companies are pushing hard to get the benefit from their huge investments in IT. The effective enterprise information system focus on building the missing bridge between strategy and operation, apply their data in a focused, repeatable and structured way to support decision-making/analytical capability, the business agility and the art of possible

• Customer Strategy :

Understanding the customer is the key to effective marketing, and IT can be at the center of a continuous feedback culture that encourages sales and service staff to provide information on existing and potential clients, retain their loyalty. IT should be championing the systematic collection, analysis and presentation of customer market data to identify where the higher-margin opportunities lie

• Talent Development Strategy :

Unleash the employee full potential via above talent gap analysis, strategic workforce planning, IT should take the leadership to establish the communication platform such as social/enterprise 2.0, to encourage employee sharing knowledge & idea, inspire learning culture, and manage the modern metric system to evaluate talent via multi-dimensional lens, to make sure the right people do the right job at the right time, and manage the talent pipeline via analytical perception.   

• Innovation Strategy:

“Innovation is the execution of new ideas that create business value."

Gartner's definition

In today’s rapidly changing era, IT is the innovation engine behind any high-performance company cross industry, via integral data and embedded data process, IT will help manage:

a)  Innovation Volume, which is the number of product ideas that are launched in the market;

b) Innovation Efficiency, which is the proportion of those product launches that are successful, as defined by meeting their net present value (NPV) goals for value creation.

• Enterprise Risk Management Strategy

A data-driven,  driver-based risk management approach uses scenario analysis to prioritize drivers in terms of risk. These drivers also focus risk monitoring, remediation and governance so the organization knows where its key risk areas are and how they are organized. The effective IT risk management will deliver four As: Availability, Access, Accuracy, Agility.

Read More

BPM’s Value Trails

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.   -Lao Tzu quote

Last month we’ve got quite positive feedback about discussing BPM’s Rocky Road, to summarize BPM from the definition to confusion, from pitfall to best practice, from today’s reality into future’s perception.

 Last generation’s BPM more focus on document-centric process, application & IT integration, or structured human activities. From BPM perspective, the last decade, it’s more about “learning curve”, with some confusion and progression, passed some pain points and tipping points, walked through the rocky road and bumpy ride, as one of the prestigious BPM expert described: today’s BPM is a bit blind, deaf and dump. 

Statistically fewer than 40% of major improvement projects  typically achieve their stated goals, and the sustainability of these gains is even more questionable.

What is the BPM’s mission journey for the next decade?

No matter social BPM, mobile BPM, cloud BPM., etc, we believe the next generation of BPM should be more agile and wiser, we need transform BPM into a holistic management discipline that takes an integrated approach to the organization and its business as a whole, going beyond the obvious, and making bigger P&L impact. Hopefully it takes some happier trails and climbs up to the harvest hill.

Trail #1: Process to Delight Customers

Why: Can BPM help organization to explore Blue Ocean strategy—to develop innovative product/service with long tail and attractive customer value proposition?

Trail #2: Process to Enchant Employees

Why: Can BPM enhance creativity and employee engagement, framework for culture change & innovation, create dynamic link between people, strategy & operation?

Trail#3: Process to Manage Business Decision

Why:  Can BPM help every layer of organization to make rational judgment and decision via well crafted process, embed customer/operational data, to framework the risk intelligent, more resilient organization with imaginable growth?

HOW: In today’ constantly changing, digital & global era, the advantage of BPM lies in the requirement of the dynamics or flexibility in process orchestration, to build the conversation centric, business capability; and make radical improvement to mission-critical, cross-functional process.
The best practices include:

1. Recognize the process pain point, customer’s touch point and operational P&L point;

2.  Base on above “point” of view, pick a pilot, not too big, but with strategic value and    

      Priority

3. Build up the process mindset, encourage analytic, but also non-linear &out-of-box   

    thinking, with holistic view.

4. The dynamic team and roles include BPM champion, process owner, executive sponsor, analyst, architect, project manager., etc.

5. Roadmap, BPMS, communication, governance and metrics

6. Center of Excellence: to share resource, from pilot to parade;

Besides pitfalls list here, also pay more attention to:

Seven Sins of Organizational Measurement:

1. Vanity. This sin uses measures devised solely to make managers look good.

2. Provincialism. This one lets departmental boundaries dictate perform­ance measures.

3. Narcissism. It’s widespread: measuring from your own point of view instead of the customer’s.

4. Laziness. You assume you know what’s important to measure.

5. Pettiness. You measure only a small portion of what matters because you’re fixated on details.

6. Inanity. Stupid consequences flow from measuring the wrong thing. An irresistible example: To avoid waste, a fast-food chain told employees not to cook chicken until it was ordered, turning the fast-food chain into a slow-food chain.

7. Frivolity. This happens when leaders don’t take metrics seriously.

Read More