Innerstrategicinfluence

Strategic thinking is about starting the end in mind. 

Compared to the other executive positions, the CIO role continues to be shaken up, refined, reinvented and reenergized. The magic “I” of the CIO title sparks many imaginations and modern CIOs need to wear different hats and play multiple roles.

The purpose of "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT " is to provide guidelines for building a framework to run a highly effective, highly innovative and highly mature digital IT organization. Also, it provides the principles to reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. Here is a set of blogs for brainstorming the role of CIOs and reinventing IT to get digital ready.

      

          Strategic Influence

InnovativeCIO with “Strategic and Paradoxical Intelligence” IT is increasingly supportive of the competitive position of the business. IT matters not only because it’s pervasive, but also because it continues to advance, its nature of the "constructive disruption" and its “paradox in management.” IT leaders have to deal with issues that combine contradictory features or qualities. At the highest level of organizational maturity, IT needs to become the game changer for their company.

IT Strategic Planning With continuous disruptions and fierce competitions, many IT organizations suffer from overloaded tasks and overwhelming growth of information. They encounter so many daily distractions that stop them from laser focusing on achieving strategic business goals. High performance CIOs should have knowledge and leadership influence to demonstrate IT as strategic business competency. They need to build a good strategy which is an integral component of the business strategy, based on the circumstances that will allow the highest probability of IT management success. But more specifically: How to make IT strategic planning right?

Strategic Thinker Strategic thinking is about starting the end in mind. Statistically, only 5% of the population is a nature strategic thinker. Being able to think strategically is an invaluable digital thinking skill that perhaps not everyone has, but it is critical to be future-oriented and make a progressive movement. Given that, the importance of diversity and formulating a team that has complementing skills cannot be understated. So, how to spot strategic thinkers and discover their talent and potential to build a solid leadership talent pool. Strategic thinkers are interdisciplinary influencers because thinking and logical reasoning are not for their own sake, but to make positive & intellectual influence and drive progressive & transformative changes. Here are three characteristics of strategic thinking.

Strategic CIO Modern CIOs have to wear multiple hats nowadays, from business strategist to tactical manager; from customer champion to talent master. A qualified CIO has to be a strategist, but what image comes to mind when you think of strategic CIOs?

Strategic IT Many organizations still consider IT as a maintenance department and Cost Center, which lenses do you take to look into IT depends on the senior executives’ perspectives, background, and the organization’s culture as well. Forward-thinking IT organizations are at turning point of change from transactional IT to transformational IT and from operational IT to strategic IT.Digital CIOs today need to have both business acumen and technological understanding to become the trustful business advisor and empathetic IT manager in order to lead effectively and digitize IT effortlessly.

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 #8700 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.


CIO Master Order Link on Amazon

CIO Master Ordre Link on Barner & Noble

CIO Master Order LinkOn IBooks

“CIO Master” Book Preview Running IT as Digital Transformer

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 9 IT Agility

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 8 Three "P"s in Running Digital IT

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 7 IT Innovation Management

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 6 Digital Strategy-Execution Continuum

"CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 5 Thirteen Digital Flavored IT

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 4 CIO as Talent Master Introduction

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 3 “CIOs as Change Agent” Introduction

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 2 “CIOs as Digital Visionary” Introduction

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 1 “Twelve Digital CIO Personas” Introduction

"CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Introduction

"CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Book Preview

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Initiatestrategiccontinuum

Strategy and execution are two completely different things and skill sets, but they are interlinked.

Complexity, uncertainty, disruptive changes, and interdependence are the new normal facing business today. Statistically, more than two-thirds of strategy implementations fail to achieve the expected result. 

 The success of strategy management undoubtedly lies in “timely superior execution,” and it can only be achieved through clarified information, dynamic adjustment, continuous improvement and following up with key performance indicators clearly linked to the strategy persistently.

Information-based strategy management: Without reliable information, strategy is misleading. Without a good strategy, information is trivial. With today’s business velocity and frequent digital disruptions, constant changes and unprecedented uncertainty, execution is more difficult due to its complexity and culture of resistance. The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. Real time quality information becomes invaluable to make proper adjustments to adapt to an ever-changing environment. Technically, the strategy-related information is varying, it could be utilitarian, extrinsic, intrinsic, social, practical epistemic etc.

The digital business is very complex, the leaders need to diagnose the core issues they have in their organizations, observe, perceive, and pay attention to the myriad of internal, external, national, or global forces that define and influence the way they do business these days. Unclear or static strategy perhaps misleads the business in the wrong direction. If you plan in detail as far ahead as the end state, much planning time and effort will be wasted. With quality information, how to set the right priority depends on which of the business areas are most in need of improvement in the organization in question. Strategy management is a cross-functional effort and multidisciplinary and multidimensional planning.

Execute strategy in an agile way: It’s important to apply agile principles to make the linkage between strategy and execution and enhance resource engagement. Whether you have Agile teams or not, you still need to have agile management expertise and strong leadership discipline. Because it should be clearer to people how their work impacts the organization, to improve engagement, and increase productivity. The execution starts with a kick-off and workshops, top-down, different wildly important goals. Traditional management sometimes causes the ineffectiveness of strategy execution because of the weakness of inter-organizational control or weakness of adaptation of organizational task management.

In today's digital dynamic or unstable business circumstances, instead of out-of-date disjointed top-down management paradigms, digital management is more agile and flexible to encourage autonomy. Agility implies three “I”s: Incrementalism, iteration improvement. The wildly important goals are identified and prioritized. All strategy execution improvement work is done integrated with the daily operational work. It keeps the team highly motivated and accountable for the execution of the strategy. The individual that was not able to be successful before is now trained in “steps” needed for behavior change and contribute to strategic business goals. When strategic complexity can be “visualized” in a better way, individual contributors can see where they fit in the universe of work and it can bring a great sense of purpose to their work as well as their role in the strategy management.

The paradox of strategy management: Besides a clarified vision, abstract level of guidelines, a comprehensive strategic planning needs to get to the level of specifically achievable goals. There is a paradox in strategy management. For example, there is one side pressure to strategy to be holistic and comprehensive. On the other side, there are requirements to strategy to be simple and easy as the world becomes more dynamic. Digital strategy is an iterative strategy-implementation continuum. The outside-in and bottom-up feedback and inclusiveness become crucial for handling the paradox of strategy management, enforcing the effectiveness of strategy implementation continuum.

Paradox is a sort of balance, presenting the very characteristics of strategy management: “simplexity, coopetition, creanalytics,” etc, prioritizing strategic goals, and enforcing strategy management effectiveness. The right attitude is: “Keep one eye on the operation, the other on the horizon.” Unless executed well, the greatest strategy will flop and without all dependencies and influences placed in the melting pot, risk-management of the greatest strategy will be a costly activity. The management needs to clarify both internal and external beliefs around how the business is a movement for the organizational strategy enablement and improvement, maintain and fix any imbalance in key business elements such as people, process, and technology, update structures, methodologies, and cultures, develop their best and next practices, and build a harmonized working environment to achieve strategic goals systematically. 

Strategy and execution are two completely different things and skill sets, but they are interlinked. Successful strategy execution is directly related to leadership capability from the top down, as well as bottom –up collaboration. Culture as an invisible factor can either lift and sink a strategy. The drivers of culture are processes, structures, people capabilities, reward systems, etc, which are the same drivers of strategy execution. Leaders and managers should guide, direct, own the strategy they hold themselves accountable for, they should listen, communicate, and rally the team for the cause, enhance holistic management discipline to drive desired change and unlock performance.

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Innovativecomplexity

The simplicity and complexity are just opposite ends of the same spectrum. That compounds all "problems." You need complexity to understand and appreciate the simplicity and vice versa.

It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interaction, you can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. 

Companies that are skilled at managing complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more sophisticated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value, differentiated digital capabilities and the unique set of business competency.

   Innovative Complexity

Innovativecomplexity A new paradigm arises out of new knowledge, such as the age of enlightenment and customer-centricity. Organizations ``become complex," as an evolutionary trend, not for their own amusement, but do it to respond to environments proactively. It is sensitive to the emergent factors; it generates a variety of options to deal with environmental complexity, velocity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.

InnerconnectivitySimplicity-Complexity Simplicity vs complexity is an age-old dilemma even in English Grammar! The simplicity and complexity are just opposite ends of the same spectrum. That compounds all "problems." You need complexity to understand and appreciate the simplicity and vice versa. It's all about balance and perception.

“Simplexity” as the Characteristic of Digital Maturity Modern businesses become over-complex every day, they also become part of the dynamic and complex digital ecosystem. If we accept the business and the world are complex, somewhat unpredictable or not completely predictable, we have to accept uncertainty. Because uncertainty comes with complexity. Simplicity vs. complexity is not only an age-old dilemma but also the opposite ends of the same spectrum. Complexity can either stimulate or stifle innovation. In fact, “Simplexity” is a portmanteau word to reflect the digital reality and how to strike the right balance to achieve the next level of digital maturity.

Variety of Complexity Change is overwhelming, and complexity is inevitable, but they are both facts that are happening all the time and at a faster pace than ever before. Complexity means increased uncertainty in things outside our control and uncertainty in the results of implementing strategies. Complexity is diverse, ambiguous, and dynamic with unpredictable outcomes.

Innercomplexity Complexity blurs-lines, mixes colors, blends flavors, complexity is -a diverse, dynamic thing.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making an influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8900 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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Innovativeleadership

Being innovative is a growth mindset and a proactive attitude.

Due to the complex nature of modern businesses, business innovation today is more complex, often the “cross-science” management discipline. Today’s leaders need to deal with constant ambiguity and unprecedented uncertainty, they naturally gravitate to a leadership role when things are unknown, things will change, technology is involved, a tough problem has to be solved, etc.

Leadership becomes more open and omnipresent in the digital era, as the characteristics of innovative leadership show the following dispositions: visionary, learning agile, adaptable, competent, courageous, and curious, etc, they can see things differently, do things in alternative ways and walk the talk to build the highly innovative organization.

Innovative leadership is more open, influential and interdisciplinary: Since innovation is fundamentally about challenging common beliefs, breaking assumptions, having more assumptions uncovered will lead to greater innovation. The difference between innovative leaders and conventional managers is not about how many answers you have, but about how well you can ask the open questions to attract fresh insight and leverage all sorts of information to perceive the big picture into which the knowledge fits, connect wider dots to discover patterns, generate novel ideas and enhance leadership influence.

Innovative leadership goes beyond the status quo, to value collective wisdom, which helps you actually understand the problem from different angles in order to solve it in a better way. An innovative leader has the transdisciplinary knowledge and cross-functional experience to connect the dots via unconventional connections, promote a healthy climate for innovation, inspire team members to create a portfolio of new ideas, concepts, and scenarios, coach team members on innovation management practices and how to overcome the barriers to innovation.

You can become an innovative leader if you put constant effort to nourish these human instincts that are innate: humility, curiosity and creativity: Truly curious people are more interested in what they don't know rather than just providing answers to show what they do know. Leaders with intellectual curiosity are able to ask insightful questions, appreciate invaluable feedback, initiate creative dialogues and healthy debates to brainstorm fresh ideas and unique insight for spurring innovation all the time. Leadership is an ability to be able to not only ask the right questions but understand the context. Intellectual curiosity is one of the key ingredients to spark innovation. The style of innovative leadership is to be inspirational and inquisitive, to lead boldly by asking “Why not,” to articulate the strategic rationale and boost creative energy by asking “What if” or “How about” to reimagine new possibilities.

It is good to be confident in a natural way and there is no egotism in that. When you identify with your higher self, strength, or some other definition of the higher part of you which is not ego, you feel totally at peace to keep mind flow and stimulate creative energy. Greater leaders can strike the right balance of confidence and humility; knowledge and imagination, and deal with leadership paradox smoothly. Listening to others' input with humility may be useful to facilitate deep empathy which, in turn, facilitates creativity seeds and cultivates the culture of curiosity and creativity. Deep listen; make room for others to discover their own insights; or give room for their perspectives to emerge to the collective creativity,

Top leaders with high-level innovation competency can set the tone for encouraging innovation and build a unique innovation capability portfolio: Leadership in the coming decade will need to be more adaptive and distributed, as the command-and-control style that has dominated the twentieth century gradually lost its steam due to blurred territories and rapid change. When people have the courage to leave inside box thoughts and standards to seek additional resources, updated knowledge, and gain new experiences, they are open to stepping outside that box into unfamiliar territories, spur innovation proactively, and build professional competencies to innovate. The leaders with cognitive brain power and creative energy can clarify a clearer vision, shape advanced mindsets, and build a portfolio of innovation capabilities in lifting leadership effectiveness and deepening leadership influence.

Innovation becomes simply creating value by solving simple or complex problems in alternative ways. Top leaders with high-level innovation competency can set the tone for encouraging innovation and advocating changes. Developing people’s innovative mindset and innovation competency raise different "learning" issues that organizations must deal with smoothly. Innovation competency differentiates creative leaders from traditional leadership; transformative leadership from transactional leadership. The essence of innovative leadership is to be openness, show flexibility, break down outdated rules, explore the emerging opportunities or new ventures, deploy great ideas, optimize processes, and build long term business advantage.

Being innovative is a growth mindset and a proactive attitude. Innovation leadership is in strong demand as organizations need to invest in the cultivation of capacity for innovation and recognize innovators with varying talent and strengths, manage a healthy innovation portfolio with the right mix of incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation, to reap the short-term gain and long-term innovation benefits in a structural way.

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Inneragileprocessintelligence

In practice, business intelligence has a lot of potential, allowing enterprises to interpret their past to better plan their future for enforcing a growth cycle.

Today’s digital business environment is dynamic, complex, and uncertain. There are always different complexities at a different time or dimension, business intelligence is an effective tool to apply business insight to drive decision effectiveness, increase business-value creation and improve organizational agility via integrating process management & business intelligence, enhancing governance disciplines.

Integrate process management and business intelligence: In order to operate a real time intelligent business, processes shouldn’t be dumb. There are sorts of process intelligence which implies information & feedback. The next generation of process management will integrate business intelligence, not only implement automation but also enhance learning as a process, optimize the process design with advanced analytics capabilities, enable knowledge sharing, and unify processes to fit the purpose of business systems.

As decisions become more complex and involve more diverse stakeholders, you need a sound process to frame decisions, spec out your options, weigh them appropriately with the right people, and actually make effective decisions consistently. An organization with fine-tuned business processes that embed business intelligence mechanism allows information and idea flow to get nurtured, harness cross-functional communication, and mass collaboration, improve decision coherence, and turn opportunities into business value systematically.

Combine business intelligence with rule management associated with business process management to improve decision effectiveness and increase performance: All company’s performance is directly related to the decisions people make every day, across the organizational hierarchy, the activities they take, so make business intelligence-driven performance management more “visible” for them. There may be aspects of the work that could be easily defined and captured as activities in business processes. These activities are usually executed by knowledge workers, who can apply knowledge in a way that can't be captured easily in a well-defined activity that is governed by a set of business rules.

Performance Management is more as decision management. Performance management process’s main goal is motivation and retention: There needs to be a baseline process defined across the organization to allow for consistency of the decision effectiveness. High performance organizations combine business intelligence with rule management to improve business performance management by monitoring processes from outside-in perspective and implementing process intelligence.

Business agility is enabled via intelligent processes linked dynamically, ruled by data governance and principles: Organizational agility is about the company being able to satisfy customers by consistently delivering high quality, invaluable products/service with minimal dela. To make an objective assessment of business agility, the management should ask a set of questions such as: How much does the organization's agility affect what the organization wants to achieve? How effective is your business agility measure at creating awareness? People are the most successful factor in building a high performance business. Could the success agile formula be: Good people + average processes = Success. Great people + average processes = Guarantees Success.

Typically, business intelligence without data quality is useless because you're not basing your decisions on good quality information. Data governance really comes down to making a proactive decision about what data is needed, what it means to the enterprise and how to understand the quality of data. Business intelligence applications are pretty close to useless without data governance in place and enforced. Data governance leads to excellent data quality which in turns leads to business intelligence for improving decision maturity and overall organizational maturity. There will always be non-agile processes somewhere in the background, and these need to work effectively alongside the agile way of working. The well-established disciplines and highly skilled and motivated individuals can help to oil the wheels.

In practice, business intelligence has a lot of potential, allowing enterprises to interpret their past to better plan their future for enforcing a growth cycle. It makes digital influences which touch every aspect of the business across the geographical and business territories, and shape a dynamic and ever-expanded high performance business.

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Innovativeness

There are many reasons to innovate and there are numerous ways to nurture creativity for achieving desired results and amplify collective human impact.

Being innovative is a state of mind. The most important capability of the innovative mind is the willingness and ability to explore new lenses to understand things differently for solving problems in alternative ways.

 It’s about seeking out new knowledge, connecting wider dots to fuel creativity, developing an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to develop creativity and be innovative from an individual endeavor to a team activity to a collective effort for amplifying human potential.


Innovation & novelty: Innovation is an exploration, production, adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of value-added novelty in business and social spheres. Creativity is a cognitive process with the ability of divergent thinking, a novelty-seeking behavior, and a “putting together” convergence scenario. Innovation is a process to transform novel ideas for achieving commercial value as "intentional novelty bringing sustainable benefit.”

A highly innovative organization is the one in which creativity is a significant part of business and novelty is injected into the culture of the organization, enabling business professionals to break down thinking ceilings or management bottlenecks, overcome conventional practices, spark novelty, exercise their talent, unlock their performance and potential, streamline idea flow and catalyze innovation. As a matter of fact, digital organizations will be organized as an organic system which is self-discovering, self-renewing, generates patterns, structures, innovative activities, and above all, creates novelty over time.

Innovation & incentives: Innovation often implies high return, high risks. The best leaders know what their people need and when they need it. The incentives will increase the willingness of employees to share ideas, break down conventional wisdom, initiate continuous dialogues to solve problems innovatively. Regular feedback is a must and incentives should be comparable to expectations set and engage more people as advocates in building the creative momentum.

If everyone understands the part they play in nurturing an innovative organization, and they are provided the right kind of incentives, in most cases, people will do the right things, set metrics and checkpoints, ensure proper innovation management with the right speed. Customers also play an important role in innovation management. Many organizations are incentivizing their customers in the form of lucrative discounts and freebies to fill in the feedback, which can truly help you improve innovation effort to delight customers.

Innovation & learning: Creativity is an innate process to generate fresh ideas. Can creativity be taught; how can today’s education system produce more innovators? Education should promote creative thinking, and creativity can be nurtured by an open working environment in which people learn to think interdisciplinarily, generate fresh ideas, implement life changes with the positive attitude, encourage and reward "creative thinking, solve all kinds of problems in alternative ways. Let creativity run wild, with a clearly defined end goal.

In today's fast-changing digital era with "VUCA" normality, formal education alone is not sufficient to build innovative capabilities such as creative thinking, or innovative problem-solving. Therefore, it creates an innovation gap when we are moving to the deep digital reality with abundant information. The goal of creative learning and education is to inspire and develop creativity in a structural way and teach techniques to play creativity oddballs skillfully. Modern educators are like skillful craftsmen and engineers to shape creative talent; they are also like dedicated gardeners, to discover innovative ways to educate, nurture creativity and keep them growing and mature.

There are many reasons to innovate and there are numerous ways to nurture creativity for achieving desired results and amplify collective human impact. It is a strategic imperative to develop the organizational level innovation competency by tapping organizational potential to innovate, investing in the cultivation of capability and capacity for innovation, developing innovation leadership, nurturing a culture of creativity, to lead a more advanced society.

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Issmartprocessbornoutofstrategyvisually?

Processes give -data a shape; information makes -process smart scientifically.

Process is -

sort of known

from flowing;

process never -

stands alone,

rarely is -

the sole source of-

information;

process is -

low hanging fruit,

to reap;

process is-

a solid step to-

accomplish a thousand-mile journey,

accumultatedly.


Is process like social wind,

or cloudy sky?

full of -

dynamism?

Can process be -

rigorous,

transparent;

goal-driven,

handle ad-hoc,

exceptional matters,

smoothly;

underpin capabilities,

integratively?


Is the process top-down,

or bottom-up?

Will process walk through-

the the rocky road,

dive into -

the mighty water

start climbing the-

value trails,

becoming people-centric

seamlessly?


Processes give -

data a shape;

information makes -

process smart,

scientifically.

Is a smart process born-

out of a strategy-

build intelligence,

visually?

Process is "smart" -

when it accommodates-

controlled excursions away from-

what would otherwise be-

a rigid sequence of steps,

process can build -

a journey with -

solid footprints,

effortlessly.

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Itintegrator

Information is permeating into every corner of the business and becomes the lifeblood of the digital organization.

Information is the gold mine of the digital business; technology provides new frontiers for work systems. The power of information management is to deal with the mountain of information with both technology and human know-how, convert information into invaluable knowledge or real-time insight in handling unprecedented complexity and solving business issues effectively.

 The challenge is having a harmonized vision about overall information management philosophy, capabilities, structure, and maturities

IT is an integrator to glue up all-important elements seamlessly and make people change, process change, and technology change sustainable for the long term: IT is more like glue than a tool for blending all important elements into business competency and integrating policies, programs, and structures for managing a balanced business portfolio to improve business effectiveness. To explore the digital new normal and leverage IT as an integrator for building a people-centric organization, it’s necessary to rethink the fundamental way to run IT - from “aligning IT with the business,” to “integrating IT into the business," and "aligning IT with customers. “

Ask users, customers, and different stakeholders what their expectations are of IT and whether or not IT meets those expectations. Exploring the potential of IT won’t happen with “old thinking”; as conventional thinking of IT just leads to a burden of support for regular operations whereas the true potential is about getting involved in building great products, services or business models by relying less on silo functions and more on cross-functional collaboration.

The merit of IT needs to focus on solving business problems, not just conquering technical challenges: IT is a solutionary to manage information life cycle and ensure the right people getting the right information timely to make the right decisions effectively. Information-technology is almost solely about means; the goal is to provide IT-enabled solutions to deal with complex problems or overcome common challenges. Most IT organizations are still overloaded and understaffed and get stuck at a lower level of business maturity. Looking broadly and understanding problems deeply enable leaders to provide mindful and pragmatic pieces of advice and invaluable recommendations to the business on how to leverage IT in problem-solving.

Thinking creatively about a problem requires being close to the problem and understanding the context and intangible variables of effective problem-solving. The real problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually discovering the best solution to that problem, not just the band-aid approach or getting stuck at the “we always do things like that” mentality. IT has to walk the talk, be open to diverse opinions and feedback and strive to provide innovative solutions for meeting the business’s requirements based on systematic understanding and customer insight and strive to exceed the expectation of customers.

Information Technology is a significant part of Knowledge Management as it pertains to organizations because information is situated between data and knowledge: Think of the large volumes of information captured within areas of the enterprise (Marketing, Sales, Product, Support, Legal, Finance, HR, etc.); think of all the collection, coordination, categorization, mappings, and meaning that is all derived from modern IT; IT is the foundation of data, information, and modern knowledge. A huge percentage of IT is about the identification and advancement of knowledge for the enterprise and its people.

With the help of digital technologies, knowledge management is not all about IT. In this exponential growth of the information age, there isn't really much of an enterprise without the massive oceans of information that flow through the enterprise, at any given split second. Information is the needed data; knowledge is refined information. When the business wants the data & information, it needs technology; and when it wants to view the data in ways that they can understand, it is information; and when they further refine information into the knowledge, which becomes the invaluable asset of digital business. 

Information is permeating into every corner of the business and becomes the lifeblood of the digital organization. Digital technology is lightweight and powerful. IT is at an inflection point to speed up digital transformation, modern IT organizations need to be the explorer for stepping into the deep, deep digital normality with the abundance of information and the sea of changes, to become a value creator and solutionary.

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The ubiquity of information has provided both growth opportunities and increasing risks to organizations across industries.

Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses in the right direction and achieve expected business results. 

Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals. 

Initiate Risk Analysis

 

Initiateriskanalysis Nowadays, opportunities and risks co-exist, risk management is the discipline of managing risks and opportunities; risk intelligent organizations allocate sufficient time to identify opportunities whilst they are managing their risks. Strategic risk management actually creates value by identifying opportunities to capitalize on uncertainty and volatility to maximize gains and improve competitive positioning.

Innateriskcultureissues The ubiquity of information has provided both growth opportunities and increasing risks to organizations across industries. However, many companies are immature in the way they do their Strategic Risk assessment and management, enterprise risk management is blamed as a time wasting and unproductive exercise.

Innerriskintelligence The “VUCA '' reality brings both an abundance of opportunities and the flood of potential pitfalls, any business can be at risk for survival at any minute due to continuous fast-paced changes and continuous business disruptions. Organizations that think of risks only when they talk of Risk Management are potentially missing the benefit of growing their business with the wisdom of their risk knowledge.

Initiateanalytics Information exponentiality, over-complexity, interdependence, hyper-diversity, etc, are new normal. An organization needs a vision of becoming an intelligent organization. There's a mixed bag of stories about data analysis exploration and exploitation. There is a variety of analysis; the failure rate of analytics is still considerably high, which makes many executives hesitate to invest in leading organizations to achieve high ROI by deploying their data successfully.

Initiateinformationanalysis Organizations across the vertical sectors are inundated with overwhelming growth of information There are plenty of organizations doing the analytics, but not yet have matured the process enough to drive the front end systems for getting desired results. The connection between the analytics and the operational system has not been made seamlessly yet. Analysis can be used as an effective tool to align important business activities that have a three-way impact - revenue, cost and investments at the same time.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with 8900+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Illogic

Practicing digital management is about taking a holistic view and applying an interdisciplinary management approach to lead changes or implement strategy.

Today’s digital businesses are nonlinear, volatile, interdependent, uncertain, they face fierce competition and ambiguous digital environments. Many business changes or transformational efforts are symptomatic of not having a comprehensive understanding to identify business vulnerability formulas. 

How leaders tend to restructure or reinvent the management practices if they sense things are becoming dysfunctional, and often with mixed results. How to overcome barriers or pitfalls on the way to drive transformative changes/

Change resistance: Change is inevitable, the only differences are the reasons and goals behind the change and its scope, depth, breadth of change management. The management needs to clarify: Why do you want to change, what do you need to accomplish, what does it consist of and what does it impact. Both personal and structural resistances need to be addressed effectively and efficiently. There are both positive and negative intent behind the change resistor. If someone is "resisting" change, what's that about? Are they perhaps interested in "stability," "think things are on the right path" or “getting stuck at the status quo”?

Good anticipation in planning is key for a smoother change, while regular updates and plan adjustments will enhance your chances of success. It’s critical to clarity on what the "resistance" is all about and look closer to the reality of what's going on. It is also wise to look for a "positive intent" behind a "resistor" – could it be a balancing mechanism to understand the psychology behind change and improve change management effectiveness? If you can tap into, better understand and work with the energy of resistance, you can also accelerate purposeful change.

Skill shortage: People are often the center of the change, but the weakest link in change management. When change fails to achieve higher than expected results, is it caused by a skill gap? talent scarcity? Or simply putting the wrong people in the position to solve wrong problems? From a talent management perspective, most of the time, it is a combination of the multiple factors - lack of a solid recruitment strategy, ineffective talent research & recruitment, wrong communication channel, or weak employer branding are all big obstacles to attracting the right talent and using them in the right way.

To dig through the root cause, talent managers should ponder: What do you mean by skill gap in the context of your organization? Does your organization take advantage of the latest technologies such as social platforms or workforce analytics in talent hiring & retention? Many say, talent shortage is artificial, the talent managers have to open their own mind, to discover talent, craft a robust and integrated talent strategy, leverage the latest digital technologies, in order to hire and engage talent in the digital way, put the right people with the right talent in the right positions to solve right problems.

Logic incoherence: We live in a mixed world full of order and chaos, physical and virtual interaction, positive and negative elements, right and wrong, information and emotion; we need to reach a stage to assess logic of everything: thoughts, words, actions for dealing with complex problems, driving changes, or rewriting the rules of the competitive game. Incoherent logic behind change or problem-solving cause delays, silo mentality, waste resources, stale knowledge, inflexible processes, incompetent employees, or unsatisfied customers.

In face of fierce competition and rapid changes, one of the most obvious symptoms of business distress is the widespread problem of incoherence. In running today’s dynamic organization, a simple variable can be both cause and effect. Linear thinking implies the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, but it’s only part of a story. Problem-solving based on linear logic and analytics can sometimes cause more problems later on if ignoring the interdependence of a variety of connected issues. Business logic becomes nonlinear as organizations or human societies turn to be more hyper-connected, and interdependent. It’s important for organizational leaders and professionals to apply a multidimensional thinking box to understand business context and sustain diversified viewpoints into holistic perspectives without enlarging cognitive/decision gaps and causing too many side effects.

Practicing digital management is about taking a holistic view and applying an interdisciplinary management approach to lead changes or implement strategy. To reach the high level of digital maturity, an organization of today or the future needs to create a new paradigm shift, replacing confusion with clarity by listening and collecting feedback before making assumptions; striking the paradoxical balance of creativity and process; innovation and standardization, etc, to improve business agility and performance.

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Unfolding

Change is the “now,” transformation is a journey and needs a larger strategic investment. It requires step-function changes in tools, culture, leadership, process, or the overall integral management competency.

Providing personalized services or solutions to its customers has become the new normal to run a people-centric organization. The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. 

Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most desired trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? How to lead toward the digital future effortlessly?

    Unfolding

Innovativesociety Modern society is a dynamic continuum with collective human progress. Real societal advancement is made through the work of forwarding-looking minds, renewing creative energy, updating knowledge, exploring growth opportunities, and driving progressive changes. Change is the “now,” transformation is a journey and needs a larger strategic investment. It requires step-function changes in tools, culture, leadership, process, or the overall integral management competency.

Unfoldingdigitalorganization The organization as a whole is more about people, process and technology integrated into a set of business capabilities for achieving business results at both strategic and operational level either consciously or subconsciously. With high velocity and unprecedented uncertainty, the future of the workplace will be shaped by changes that take place in the way people relate to themselves and to the experience of their environment and others around them.

Innovating Future via Alignment The black and white boundaries continue to diminish due to the occurrence of increased economic integration among industries, nations, and people movement across cultures. Heralding a dynamic organization needs to leverage the holistic perspective to emphasize communication, participation, relationships, collaboration for unlocking business performance and potential continually.

Uncoverfutureviaprediction Nowadays the perspective of rapid change and abundant knowledge unfolds into a wider multi-dimensionally systemic business continuum. The goal of the business forecast is about predicting what will happen and taking steps further, what shall you do upon it.

Unfolding Future via Forecasting We live in a complex business environment with a high degree of unpredictability and ambiguity, the highly complex and dynamic system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort. The business leaders today need to see further than what all others see; seek input for future adjustments, and orchestrate dynamic competencies via managerial activities, and ensure the company capabilities fully support the strategy as well as improve the overall business agility and maturity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8900th blog posting 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. 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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Innovationirrationality

Innovation focus and capabilities an organization demands depend on the circumstances the business is in.

Innovation is utilizing what you already have in a unique way that has not been done before and using that thing to make profit. But most organizations cannot walk the talk, to truly get innovation spurred and reap the benefit from it. 

A successful business discovers their unique strength to innovate, finds its greatest stability when the parasitic and collaborative elements within it find a balance. However, innovation overall has a very low success rate, what are innovation pitfalls? How to build high-innovative organizations?

Innovation as serendipity: There are “aha moments” for creativity; serendipity plays some part in the innovation effort sometimes, there are plenty of stories over the years about great ideas evolving out of chance interaction, sudden flashes of insight. However, innovation is a process that needs to be managed smoothly to improve its success rate. Different organizations are at the different stage of business growth cycle and vertical sectors, different types of innovation should be managed via tailored management processes, help the organization adapt, improve, grow, and ingrate

Innovation is done by people and for the people. People are innovators, framework, process or tools are enablers. Innovation is a manifestation of a unique trait in some people who consciously or unconsciously strive to do better through changes. Make the innovation process as visible and company-wide as possible. Overall speaking, the success of innovation management is never an accident, it’s a holistic management process with an iterative thought-out planning and execution continuum.

Innovation as a lip service: For many less innovative organizations, innovation is just lip service, everyone talks about it, but very few people, especially leaders are creative enough to live on it and knowledgeable enough to really work on it. As they lack a good strategy to manage innovation, they become too dependent on satisfying corporate regulation or protocols, and not get around to developing a culture that fosters innovation until it is too late.

There is innovation friction. Once people get into a routine at work, they typically do not like to hear about how things could be done differently and boost creative energy. It is likely that if you are creative, you will challenge the status quo as you break through the conventional wisdom and push toward the path that few people have taken. Organizations set clear goals, clarify the logic on how to implement it, build a balanced innovation portfolio and manage cost, time, and risks skillfully.

Innovation as a hammer: Innovation is the means to the end, but not the end itself. If innovation becomes the hammer in search of a nail for aggressive business, diminishes creativity, and ultimately much of the stability of any given company. The "VUCA" new normal forces digital leaders and professionals to be cautious of barriers and pitfalls of innovation management. Businesses have limited talent and resources, they should set the right priority for taking innovation initiatives, be proactive, and get really creative on how to apply multidimensional disciplines to manage innovation. In fact, there is art embedded in scientific design, construction and optimization.

The successful businesses are the ones that have learned where the innovation hotspots are, how to innovate more smoothly. Innovative companies with creative culture encourage thinking and doing things differently, to make the work more productive, fun, effective, error-free etc, develop a scientific set of methodologies and practices to implement innovation systematically. It’s important for companies to craft their own version of the playbook to focus on doing more with innovation in a structural way.

Different organizations have different strengths and competency to innovate. Innovation focus and capabilities an organization demands depend on the circumstances the business is in. Assessing innovation capability maturity is important because it helps the organization identify innovation bottlenecks and avoid pitfalls on the way in order to improve the innovation management success rate and build a high-innovative organization.

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Integrationconnectivity

Integration is not always about cost effectiveness, but what drives the need for better performance.

The purpose of integration is to enforce collaboration and unification in order to create business synergy, improve the value from existing organizational systems and the need for better business intelligence, applications optimization, performance acceleration, etc. 

Integrating the right systems for the right business reasons can be extremely valuable. However, integration can be very difficult, costly and hard to justify the ROI. It might not be cost effective in the short term but in the long term, it will be.

Integration vs. alignment: It takes time, vision, and the willingness drive to change, and take alignment to ensure all organization action is directed to achieving common strategic goals and objectives. Strategic alignment is important in working to a common goal, integration enables the organization to use resources scientifically and increase multifaceted business value. By integrating, you are creating a case where you force an organizational alignment to the integration for creating business synergy.

Alignment goes beyond conformity and order taking. From alignment to integration, you integrate when a justification can be made for doing so. It needs to include a close partnership with interpersonal communication, value analytics, and governance. Those organizations that have a more mature strategic alignment -integration, outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to the business dynamic.

Integration vs. standardization: The goal of standardization is often to improve business efficiency and increase reusability. The purpose of integration is to enhance unification and collaboration. Standardization and integration are strategies/responses to particular demands, which will give rise to the outcomes being sought and thereby the benefits. Standardization should be done at the solution level. To try and standardize just for the sake of standardizing, is a waste of resources and time.

There should be some justification for standardization or integration. Due to the silo mentality and lack of cross-functional communication and collaboration, if standardization requires compromising on the functional or performance needs of one or more groups involved, then obviously it is not a good idea. The traditional overly rigid hierarchical setting makes the standardization process and practice challenging. There are a variety of integration such as technical integration, operations integration, governance integration, policy integration or customer-centric integration. Integration also needs to be dealt with the big picture such as architecture to ensure the goal of integration is aligned with the strategic goals of the organization. High standardization and high integration lead to unification and improve organizational agility and speed.

Integration & optimization: Effective management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process. In reality, many companies that get stuck at the lower level of organizational maturity operate as the sum of pieces, rather than an integral whole, Integration is about unification; optimization is about leveraging information technologies to lower costs, improve operations, and increase revenue, to ensure the organization as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

It is challenging to take the converging journey of digitalization, modernization, and innovation. It is a golden opportunity for digital leaders to lead the way by consolidating, integrating and optimizing the business to accelerate performance. It is through this comprehensive understanding that effective business management would be able to identify true cost savings, workflow optimizations, and additional revenue opportunities. There are both hard and soft success factors to unlock performance. It takes a very concerted and organized effort and a strong desire to build a high mature organization.

The impact of today’s technologies, their integration with other new technologies, seems to be more profound, especially given the concurrent ecosystem changes going on. Integration is not always about cost effectiveness, what drives the need for better performance. Those organizations that have better integration maturity outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to increasing pace of changes, develop a cohesive set of business capabilities, deliver, innovate and ultimately excel in returns.

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Initiateriskanalysis

Companies that think of only risks when they talk of risk management are potentially missing the benefit of growing their business with the wisdom of their risk knowledge.

Nowadays, opportunities and risks co-exist, risk management is the discipline of managing risks and opportunities; risk intelligent organizations allocate sufficient time to identify opportunities whilst they are managing their risks. 

Strategic risk management actually creates value by identifying opportunities to capitalize on uncertainty and volatility to maximize gains and improve competitive positioning.

Assess business risk profile: In high mature organizations, risk management is already an integral compe­tency and top priority for C-Suite executives, providing them a holistic process for connecting the dots on managing risk across the organization effectively. There’re a growing number of organizations shifting their risk management orientation from bottom-up to top-down, with more senior management and board involvement to assess risk profiles and improve risk management from risk mitigation to risk intelligence.

Uncertainties, inherent variability, and the unknown interdependencies are among sources of risks; strategic risks perhaps cause fatal business failures. Any risk management infrastructure, regardless of the level of risk management maturity of the organization, should be able to alert senior management and the board that this is happening; focusing on strategic risks for board presentations to feed strategic planning and decisions. Strategic risk is auditable; from a GRC perspective those accountable for oversight such as BoDs have to establish just how deep they wish to probe strategy and risk, identifying and assessing risks and adjusting the business speed.

Grasp value creation opportunities: Create a safe environment for learning from failures, accept and own the right risks to achieve competitive advantage, use a value oriented enterprise risk management approach, leverage risk management savings to fund strategic corporate initiatives. Information is one of the most invaluable assets of the company, risk management can apply advanced analytics tools to increase decision-making effectiveness, improve controls around key processes and optimize risk portfolio, to achieve superior returns from risk investments.

Strategic risk is knowingly assuming a risk that is worth the effort to predict, analyze, because it is believed that the potential reward outweighs the potential downside. It's crucial to provide information to the assurance lines that evaluate the business risk profile for analytical breakthroughs and managing the “shade of gray” effectively. The risk management can take charge with risk issues and have been seeking to improve their ability to define and communicate a clear, consistent, enterprise-wide message about healthy risk appetite and a variety of possible situations and risk scenarios.

Optimize cost in risk management effort: Generally, risk management is costly; the more thorough the approach -challenging assumptions, and unintended consequences, the greater the cost. The challenge for management is to have visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs in risk management initiatives, reducing the cost of the current business process. In fact, companies that lacked the skills to manage cost effectively suffered compared with competitors that had mastered those skills. Potentially a larger cost management opportunity is the transparency in sourcing decisions to allow for cost-effective sourcing strategy.

As financial performance is highly correlated with the level of integration and coordination across risk, control and compliance functions. The management also needs to assess how much time organizations spend sorting and classifying risks versus exploring and evaluating opportunities. The secret to risk management effectiveness is the degree to which delegation can be leveraged in "processing" risks. If senior risk managers have to micromanage all risks, eventually, key risks or opportunities will not be effectively managed.

Organizations that think of only risks when they talk of risk management are potentially missing the benefit of growing their business with the wisdom of their risk knowledge. Risk management needs to get integrated, risk management works best when it is part of the culture and a management core competency. The efforts on managing risk holistically or in a more integrated fashion are critical for the long run,

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Information & Insight

The value of information is to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before.

Information is the most invaluable business asset nowadays. Information Management means that the business has the information, information has the right quality, information needs to be used properly, as managing information and the information provisioning is a strategic imperative.

 In reality, information/knowledge management in many organizations are too hierarchical, too centralized for moving with faster speed. Therefore, more attention needs to be placed on the conditions that allow information to flow and generate value rather than try to manipulate or control information.

Information Management should be managed holistically in order to truly capture its business value and improve business responsiveness and maturity: The data is the foundation of creating insight, the insight perceives the new business opportunities and risks. In reality, the organizational modern data environment is fraught with inconsistency, redundancy, and multiple data and knowledge platforms. If there's a lack of quality information and holistic understanding, the business intends to solve symptoms but cause more problems later on or perhaps on the other side of the company.

It’s important to have some more integrated information life cycle management solutions to conquer data challenges, provide data accessibility and availability, ensure transparency and visibility, enable trust and reliability.

Creating engagement around insight, not reporting the facts: As companies around the world transform themselves into the digital business that is based on information, innovation, and intelligence, it depends on their ability to well align the strategy and execution, for delivering the solid result. To qualify under Advanced Analytics, there needs to be some level of sophistication but obviously the line between simple and advanced is fuzzy sometimes. Businesses need to find parts of the organization that uses analytics effectively to generate business value. So they can develop their best and next practices, scale up and build an intelligent organization.

By leveraging quality information based analysis, improved decision making will only come when insights from the analytics system are directly matched to improved decisions and better outcomes. For any analytics strategy to be managed smoothly, that will often require significant organizational change, education, and evangelism by someone in the senior team, capture digital insight about customers’ need and employees’ engagement; ensuring these insights are used in the process of decision making should be one of the keys to success

Enabling scenario and forecasting to promote decision alternatives: The advanced analysis based on quality information enables business management to predict the emerging trends, prevent risks, and grasp opportunities to innovate. The point of forecasting, which implies a range of outcomes, is not to predict precisely what will happen, but to help you make decisions and take actions to achieve expected results.

Information analysis based scenarios can be very strong planning tools qualitatively, and get you the best time-value result. You can use your scenarios to explore how your current strategies will or will not help you against possible disruption and compare your strategies to your current competitors and even invent future competitors. An effective decision-making scenario takes well alignment of people, process, and technology. After the initial learning curve, the group decision-making sessions are short, productive and well documented, to improve decision effectiveness and analytics maturity.

The digital paradigm arises out of abundant information and fresh knowledge. The value of information is to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before. Organizations can harness the power of information to provide the business with a more fact-based vision of where to aim and how to get there. Organizations can acquire the ability to reshape products, services, and customer engagement to accelerate performance and improve business maturity.

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