Three “F” Factors in Digital Innovation

Innovation has many success factors. Innovation has to result in something which leads us to a better state than where we are today.

Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. There is no doubt innovation is becoming more important whereas technology becomes more advanced in the digital era. In fact, the speed of change is expedited, so does the speed of innovation. There are many key factors to lead the success of digital innovations. Here are three “F” factors in digital innovation.

Fluidity: Digital is the age of innovation because creativity is about connecting the dots in the wider scope. How cleverly you connect your dots by leveraging your experiences, sharing interdisciplinary knowledge, and finding a solution to the problems is creativity which is also an important aspect of digital fluency. Digital fluency is interconnected with digital fluidity. Digital means flow, data flow, information flow, knowledge flow, mind flow, and business flow.  Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to communicate fluently and operate smoothly.  an organization can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear, accountable tasks. From an organizational structural design perspective, delayering becomes a lens through which it is possible to examine and then fix many other issues. Digital fluidity enables free thinking and intuition. On the navigation dimension, a connecting mind, or collective minds in a business setting with digital fluency have more antennae focused on the trends and what’s going on in the world, or what it will impact the next generation, and what group will have better cognitive diversity with different opinions, and creativity sparkling.

Flexibility: Flexibility is about thinking alternative ways to do things. At the individual level, a flexible mind is creative to thinking outside of the box, open upon the feedback and ideas. But is risk tolerant? People with a flexible mind can work as a team more seamlessly. At the team level, a flexible work environment encourages collaborative thinking, build adaptability to create mutual interest communities, to encourage brainstorming and enable ideas to flow. It is important to set the principles and build a practical framework for managing innovations from keeping ideas flow to implementing ideas systematically. Flexibility is crucial to managing innovation because overly rigid rules or processes will stifle creativity and decrease innovation effectiveness. etc. From innovation management perspective, the imperative is to build a culture of innovation which has flexibility, agility, and resilience as key characteristics. In practice, it’s easy to say you are flexible or playful and have a lot of innovative desire, but culturally within the walls of an organization, the overly rigid processes still stifle innovation. An innovation leader allows an innovator to bend the rules as long as it is not harmful to the organization. As long as this flexibility is provided with necessary oversight by the management, It is also crucial to building flexible processes focusing on outcomes without micromanagement and creates a sense of urgency as well. You have to remember that innovation can be a breakthrough and notice that it requires a “break.” They include being a risk taker, challenging the status quo, being fearless, looking at failure as a learning opportunity, and always looking for a better way.

Failure: Failure is part of innovation; without failures, without the blossom of innovation. It depends on how you read failure. And it depends on what you learn from it. The point is to avoid the repetitive mistakes and focus on lessons learned from failures. At the age of innovation, failure is seen as a fruit full of experience, failure is very much an intrinsic part of innovating. To improve innovation success rate, it is a balancing act to have enough failure and an environment that encourages learning from failure quickly and cost-effectively, without having failures that are too frequent or too expensive. Learning from failures is a way to improve until you find the wonderful solution which will suit market or simply a waste of time. As you learn more from failure than from your success.

Innovation has many success factors. Innovation has to result in something which leads us to a better state than where we are today. There’s no such one size fit all success formula for innovation management success. It is important to define the most compelling and unique innovation approach or a mix of different approaches. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking, and solutions to allow developing into its potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative and advantageous ways.

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CIOs as "Chief Insight Officer": Three Aspects to Shape the World-Class CIOs

The digital CIO will create a blue ocean for his/her organization which will provide a competitive advantage.

With overwhelming growth of information and continuous digital disruptions led by technologies, there is now a greater need for a CIO to understand business drivers and equip with digital mindsets, leverage information to make effective decisions and apply digital technologies to speed up IT and build business competitive capabilities, make digital influences which touch every aspect of the business and across the geographical and business territories. Here are three aspects to shape the world-class CIOs.

Visionary CIOs are needed: Vision is about zooming into the future as if it were closer. Vision is, in fact, important for today’s digital leaders because they need to observe, perceive, and pay attention to the myriad of internal, external, national or global forces that define and influence the way we do business these days. Visionary CIOs are more confident to lead their organizations in into the blurred territories and uncharted water. The technical visionary CIOs are able to not only articulate the vision but communicate it in various forms and forums, including BoDs, executive peers, investor relations, business partners, IT personnel, or customers. CIOs have to be able to infect and encourage with their vision and generate conviction and enthusiasm for the missions of the company. Therefore, a world-class CIO needs to be a good communicator, a good facilitator, a good listener, and a good collaborator. If vision is the destination, the strategy is the way to get there. The role of the CIO should be able to envision not only where a company believes it is going, but how it will get there, and how it might be missing out on opportunities because of limitations on understanding of disruptive technological trend and streamlined information flow. A visionary CIO is also a business strategist. A strategic CIO is changing the dynamics of the business enterprise by leveraging technology for strategic advantage. A strategic CIO creates IT and leverage information to create the long-term sustainable competitive advantage for organizations. In this way, the CIO will create a blue ocean for his/her organization which will provide a competitive advantage. The essence of being a world-class CIO should have capabilities to deliver the vision for their business, industry, and even bigger ecosystem, for building up the solid global leadership position and take the organization to the next level of digital maturity.

Innovative CIOs are in demand to reinvent IT as the business growth engine: To amplify their influence as the world-class CIOs, they must think as the global leader, to challenge conventional wisdom or groupthink. A confident CIO needs to keep asking, "why? why? why?"CIOs are expected to constantly propose new ideas and challenging the status quo. The transactional CIOs who are only putting stress on "have the knowledge" not on "build the knowledge" might be in danger just to preserve the organization and thus create huge constraints for the possible innovation. The CIO needs to provide the "innovation execution" service to their fellow business peers. The concentration should be on what these technologies can do for the businesses, not on the technology itself. IT also needs to shift from a change laggard to a change agent, via riding the learning curve faster than the rest of the company, fostering business innovation via lightweight and powerful digital technologies. Being able to become innovative or close is being able to think, and create new things based on its own needs, and develop the optimal solution. A world-class CIO with their finger on the pulse of technological advancement or information insight can provide many ideas on how new technology and abundance of information can create fresh new opportunities, renovate business model for upcoming business expansion and build a reputable global brand.

Global outlook: Majority of traditional CIOs are tactical IT managers who often speak IT jargons. To reinvent the CIO role as the world-class business executive, CIOs should be able to communicate effectively with all levels of the organization. With the advent of the Internet and social platform, nearly any company can be global, which brings fierce competitions, different cultures and customs, multiple technologies and significant business opportunities. Thus, the CIO needs to be an enterprise “polyglot,” to master both business dialogue and IT terminology, regional viewpoints and global perspectives.  There are many IT managers, but very few world-class digital leaders, the gap can only be bridged by ensuring that the CIO is an excellent communicator, who is business aware, digital savvy, global cognitive, and only finally, technically aware. A digital CIO can communicate effectively with all levels of the organization, has a solid grasp of the business goals and objectives, can think globally and holistically and take systematic approaches to solve business problems. In short, the CIO needs to talk like and actually delivers as a business executive who is also great communicators not only understand multiple ‘languages’ but also know the business context and always bring the unique insight to the table.

The true world-class CIOs have the strong leadership trait to be as “Chief Influence Officer”; they can think out-of-box as “Chief Innovation Officer”; they can leverage invaluable information in decision making and build a data-based business culture as  “Chief Insight Officer”; they can interpret with context intelligence as “Chief Interpretation Officer,”; and they can communicate with empathy as “Chief Interaction Officer.”

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The Popular Quotes Collection of “Digital Master” Book Series XXIV

The boardroom composition will directly impact on how they lead and which tone they will set for the entire organization to follow.

“Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (18+ books) is to perceive the multifaceted impact digital is making to the business and our society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the digital journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” Here is the set of popular quotes for conveying the digital vision and sharing the unique insight about the digital transformation.

Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&as by Pearl  Zhu

“The board composition should be synchronized with the digital perspective of the business.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&as

“The board is responsible for ensuring an appropriate mix of skills, knowledge, and experiences are present or available for it to fulfill its function.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&as

“The board directors see the development of strategy as a collective effort between themselves and management, rather than a question of “us versus them.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&as

“The digital board’s success plan needs to be well aligned with the board composition, as well as the business's strategy evolution and digital transformation.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&as

“The boardroom composition will directly impact on how they lead and which tone they will set for the entire organization to follow.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&as

Performance Master: Take a Holistic Approach to Unlock Digital Performance by Pearl Zhu

“Most organizations fail to manage performance effectively because they fail to look into the system holistically.”

― Pearl Zhu, Performance Master: Take a Holistic Approach to Unlock Digital Performance

“The real purpose of performance indicator is to provide business insight and monitor the progress and performance.”

― Pearl Zhu, Performance Master: Take a Holistic Approach to Unlock Digital Performance

“Keep strategy management and performance management synchronized to accelerate digital transformation.”

― Pearl Zhu, Performance Master: Take a Holistic Approach to Unlock Digital Performance

“You should always leverage performance and potential, look at the overall success of the company for the long run.”

― Pearl Zhu, Performance Master: Take a Holistic Approach to Unlock Digital Performance

One of the biggest pitfalls for performance measurement is to measure the “part” with ignorance of the “whole.”

― Pearl Zhu, Performance Master: Take a Holistic Approach to Unlock Digital Performance

Digital It: 100 Q&As by Pearl Zhu

“IT needs to be running in a proactive digital mode, rather than in a reactive industrial mode.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital It: 100 Q&as

“Back to fundamental, IT is not the weakest link in the organization, it’s people.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital It: 100 Q&as

“Often old IT thinking cannot move fast enough in the age of the digitalization.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital It: 100 Q&as

“Innovation happens at the intersection of people, process, technology, customers, and business ecosystem.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital It: 100 Q&as

“IT is part of business, and business is becoming IT.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital It: 100 Q&as

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CIOs as “Chief Information Officer”: The Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Epistemic Aspects of Information and Knowledge Management

A well-designed and relatively simplified information/knowledge solutions bound to unlock the enterprise knowledge, to turn a downward spiral into an upward spiral.

Information nowadays is the invaluable resource and asset of organizations, and information assets need to be managed successfully. Back to fundamentals, CIOs are Chief Information Officers, and one of the most important responsibilities for IT is to ensure the right people getting the right information, extract to sufficient knowledge and unique insight to help them make the right decision at the right time and location. But more specifically, what is Information Management theoretically, philosophically, strategically and tactically, and what are the intrinsic, extrinsic and epistemic aspects of information management?

The intrinsic value of information management: Information Management makes information available and useful for growing business or delighting customers. Information Management is the overall process of aligning the use of information through the management practices: What data you have, in what format and the location and method it is held? And how to refine information into knowledge and business insight. Information is the lifeblood of the enterprise, but if not properly managed, it becomes at worst case a liability and at best case an underutilized asset. Information in itself isn't power, it’s the ability to seamlessly access, analyze and utilized data, information strategy as the key ingredient of business strategy which enables executives to make a data-based decision and build up an analytics-driven culture cross organization. Both information and knowledge are not equal to insight, but they are the foundation to capture insight and allow people to make the right decisions. Thus, the goal of information management is to ensure information ASSURANCE -information held is safe, secure and processes are legislatively compliant, and EXPLOITATION- collaboratively enabled and fully support the business objectives. The intrinsic value of information management is to turn the most valuable information and knowledge assets into corporately owned assets and improve business decision effectiveness and business competency.

The extrinsic value of information management: Information is the most invaluable asset in business today, besides people. Managing information and knowledge is a human problem and not just a technological problem. Information Management has an expansive impact on the economy, politics, culture, and human behavior. The tricky bit with information is that, depending on the level of granularity and aggregation, you can use it for multiple purposes. Not only is the information interesting economic goods, but the value is also difficult to determine. Knowledge Transfer allows people to understand new topics and get access to knowledge. It is about refining data into useful facts and unique insight. The extrinsic value of information management is multifold. As we all know knowledge is power, information and knowledge management is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unusual dots and build unexpected connections between our starting points and its rich environment, the digital ecosystem, to spark innovation, broaden varying perspectives, advocate the scientific methodology, and advance the knowledge-based economy.

The epistemic value of information management: Knowledge by itself is nothing if you do not understand how to apply it and make it useful. Information can either enforce cognitive understanding or sometimes misleading or cause distraction due to incomplete information or false knowledge.  Information and knowledge are path-dependent. That means, to discover an opportunity, you should have previous knowledge in the field to be able to get recognized. Information is often available in data; knowledge is often inside the minds of employees/experts. Knowledge basically involves the human factor and capturing the benefit of someone's experience, then applying it and making it available to broader and broader audiences who can benefit from that combined intellectual asset of information and experience. Information is contextual, and knowledge can also be outdated soon. Thus, it is important to know how to survive and even thrive in today’s digital era with information overloading. The epistemic value of information/ knowledge management is to develop the knowledge workforce and build the culture of learning agility. Individually, you need to build your own trustful and diverse resources for absorbing knowledge, learning to activate and use your own mental band-stop filters. It is amazing how you can work through arguments and filter through information when you relax your mind and share with someone. You need to not only assimilate the existing knowledge, more importantly, but you also have to keep updating knowledge, and create the new knowledge and become the knowledge value creator to benefit your organization and our society.

Knowledge is more intangible, complex and dynamic compared to the physical asset. Information Management and Knowledge Management should be managed more holistically as a corporate asset if done properly. Digital knowledge management will not only enable information flow and knowledge flow, but more importantly, it will empower the mind flow, and transform the modern business from static to dynamic, from short-term driven to long-term focus; from inside out operation oriented to outside-in people-centric. A well-designed and relatively simplified information/knowledge solutions bound to unlock the enterprise knowledge, to turn a downward (cost efficiency) spiral into an upward (business growth) spiral, the challenge is to get beyond the tipping point where the power is unlocked, and unleash the full digital potential of the business.

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The Monthly “Digital Gaps” Book Tuning: Bridging the Gaps to Reach High-Level Digital Maturity Aug. 2017

Digital is the new paradigm shift to deeply connect the business with the natural ecosystem.

“Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business” is a guide book to help digital leaders and professionals today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps with multidisciplinary insight and holistic understanding. Today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still. Bridging the 'gap of opportunity' between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge and a stepwise approach to make a leap of digital transformation.

The New Book “Digital Gap” Conclusion: Bridging Gaps to Catalyze Digital Maturity? Digital is the new paradigm shift to deeply connect the business with the natural ecosystem. Digital makes the business flatter and the world smaller because of its nature of hyper connectivity and interdependence. On one side, the idea of digital lenses is to help people reach a shared understanding of “see the whole” for solving problems holistically and systematically; on the other side, digital indeed enlarges the thinking and capability gaps because different organizations, functions, and individuals evolve with varying speed. Hence, bridging the multitude of digital gaps is challenging, especially today, many organizations are still operated with the silo mentality and practice the traditional management discipline. Hence, this book “Digital Gaps” intend to throw some light for guiding both digital leaders and professionals today to identify, analyze, and close the multiple digital gaps in a systematic way, and gain an in-depth understanding of the deep, deep digital reality.?

Bridging Digital Gaps to Catalyze Business Maturity Digital is the new paradigm shift to deeply connect the business with the natural ecosystem. At the high maturity level, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation, in order to adapt to the new world of business - fast, always “on,” highly connected and ultra-competitive. On one side, the idea of digital lenses is to "seeing the whole," or helping people reach a shared understanding of the whole. On the other side, digital enlarges the thinking and capability gaps because different organizations, functions, and individuals evolve with varying speed. In reality, many organizations are still operated with the traditional management discipline with the silo mentality. So, how to bridge multiple digital gaps to catalyze overall business maturity?

The Quality Gaps in Running a High-Mature Digital Organization Quality is defined by a number of factors, such as performance, manageability, operability, reusability, reliability, availability, etc. Many say quality attracts quality, and to effectively lead an organization into good practices to focus on quality attributes takes work and a level of credibility within the organization. In reality, many organizations still operate and get stuck at the lower level of maturity due to the quality management gaps. Quality is not just the specific task of one single business department or function, it is one of the management disciplines which need to be taken in a systematic way. The quality gaps are varying, how to identify and close them and improve the overall business effectiveness and maturity?

Bridge the Disconnect between IT and Business? IT connection with the LOB has been a discussion and need for a long time now. It's no secret that this need is still unfulfilled and requires serious attention. Most IT organizations can barely keep up with their existing workloads to even think about ways to transform themselves. CIOs and IT leaders of today are realizing these needs, but they too are under the age old time, resource, and budget crunch to make integration a priority. Outside of taking advantage of technology to ease the daily IT pressures, what other recommendations would you suggest for CIOs to do to remove the non-core needs so that they and their team can focus on the core--and advance IT beyond the walls of "just IT"???

Innovation Maturity Gaps: How to Fill Them? There are many forms of innovation - technology, application, product, design, business model, process, communication, or customer experience, etc; there are also many ‘flavors’ of innovations, systematic innovation, customer-centric innovation, open innovation, design-driven innovation, or management innovation., etc, but fundamentally,  what are the innovation gaps, the gap differentiation helps to delineate the problems and opportunities for innovation, and through identifying such gaps, business can manage innovation portfolio more effectively.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with about #3900th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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"Digital Gaps" Introduction, Slideshare

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 1 Cognitive Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 2  Leadership Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 3 Management Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 4 Capability Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 5 Professional Gaps

Conclusion: Bridging Gaps to Catalyze Digital Maturity

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Five “P” Factors in Digital Innovation Management

The success rate of innovation can be improved through assessing innovation maturity and continue to optimize these key success factors for innovation management more effectively.

Innovation can happen everywhere, it is our gift as humans, a great deal of what defines us as humans actually, whether there are new products, services, solutions, new sounds and music, the new way of reading and publishing, new ways of educating future of generations, etc. One of the good definitions of innovation is: "to transform the novel ideas into commercial success.” In essence, innovation is, "intentional novelty bringing sustainable benefit." Different organizations have their own “innovation strength.” The innovation-generating organization depends more heavily on its technological knowledge and market capabilities to develop and commercialize innovations. Here are five “P” traits in digital innovating management:

Perspective: Innovation is about exploring the new perspective and discovering the better way to do things. Perspective is looking at either heads or tails. A coin is an interesting metaphor as while your focus is on heads you cannot see tails and while looking at tails you cannot see heads. The secret lies in "imagining" a perspective of the whole coin as you aspire towards truth. Thus, to fuel creativity and inspire innovation, we should be open to new information or different viewpoints. Perspective is a personal " truth." What if our stance is wrong? It is ok to be wrong, as long as we learn, but holding on too tight to our perceived truth is the difference between power vs. force. Also, you don’t need to agree completely with the other side of viewpoint, but you can always gain empathy, insight, and new perspective to see things from the other angle and be creative to figure out alternative solutions. That is the beauty of being innovative.

Passion: Innovation evolves the full spectrum of emotions. Passion is an emotion, which is something that comes from within. Passion enables determination, creativity, strategy, and talent. Because passion fuels our imagination and triggers our creativity. A passion with a good positive chain of thoughts followed by positive actions often brings good results and leapfrogs progress. To develop creativity, it is important to be passionate about learning and growing, because the knowledge you absorbed can be abstracted into unique insight and developed into the skill for triggering innovativeness and problem-solving capability. Following the passion also requires a good sense of judgment that you are on a right path to becoming more innovative. Having a passion and building a career around that passion would certainly fuel creativity, align your focus and therefore potentially aiding you in greater success.

Probability and prioritization: Innovation is the mechanism through which you grow and evolve something to something better (higher value-add) or something new (mostly based on a combination or modification of previous attributes/approaches). Developing innovative ideas are one thing, execution is a whole different matter. Before ideation, companies need to discover insights. After ideation, companies need to filter, prototype and validate their ideas. Depth + ^Breadth = ^Probability for Innovation. Innovation, as an individual process or collective process, helps us adapt, improve, grow and integrate. Innovation management is about prioritization, a system that can “smell” the right idea at the right time and place, innovation is about having new knowledge and new processes to transform creative ideas to realize its business value. When looking at business/ organizations, the most powerful of these processes involves tapping the organization's ecosystem (people!) for the collective perspectives/insights of those who make up and know intimately their parts of the system.

Platform: A well-considered tool/platform for innovation, in the given culture, operating environment is important to manage innovation in a structural and scalable way to improve innovation success rate. Innovation Management includes policies, structure, and program that innovation managers can use to drive innovation. Remove any of the three, you're liable to fail. The appropriately configured innovation platform creates a scalable means for sharing and building ideas throughout the enterprise. The innovation platform needs to be the part of innovation management planning and implementation, to strengthen the innovation effort and success rate to the organization. The effectiveness of innovation platform can be evaluated on how it will effectively leverage diversity to create meaningfully unique ideas, how it will effectively use the power of stimulus to create meaningfully unique ideas, and how it helps to reduce fear and encourage creativity and idea sharing in the organization.

Process: Innovation processes are used to create, deliver and manage innovation. Innovation process has usually been defined with a wide-scope view. It’s critical to strike the right balance between ideation and execution part of the innovation process. Far too many innovation management experts excel in helping their organizations create ideas but come short in the other phase of innovation. The results of those ideas depend on the ability of the company to select the best ones, develop them and implement them. If you don't have Innovation Management process in place, it is substantially harder and less likely to be an innovative company for the long run. This means that your processes will be less safe and economic, products more expensive or with lower quality. A systematic innovation is a structured process and set of practical tools used to create or improve products/services/processes that deliver new value to customers or satisfy employees.

The success rate of innovation can be improved through assessing innovation maturity and continue to optimize these key success factors for innovation management more effectively. Hence, innovation leaders in different organizations and industries should embrace different perspective, be passionate, match their own needs to build their innovation strength, and fill their innovation toolbox with the tailored process, platforms, frameworks, and metrics to create a healthy innovation portfolio and manage innovation in a systematic way.

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