The Monthly Insight: Change Management in Digital Transformation Aug. 2016

Digital transformation is a leapfrogging from accumulated changes and transcendence from transactional activities.

Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. What is the proactive and effective way to deal with changes, and how can forward-looking organizations leverage Change Management to lead a successful digital transformation?

    Change Management in Digital Transformation

• Can Change Management be a Strategic Process?: Change is the only constant now, and even the speed of change is accelerating. Thus, the change should be part of a company’s culture and should be stimulated by the top management, it is resulting in a flexible and dynamic organization able to adapt to new and unexpected situations and market demands. In doing so, can change management be a strategic process?

• Driving Change and Leap Digital Transformation in a Systematic Way. Organizations large or small are on their digital transformation journey, although there is no one size fits all solution to ensure success, but what’re the principles or logic steps they shall follow in managing such transformation in a more systematic way?

• Change Management in Digital Transformation? Almost all of the forward-thinking organizations are at the journey of digital transformation. Digital means the increasing speed of changes, hyperconnectivity, and always-on businesses. And digital transformation is the leapfrogging from the accumulated changes, so how to manage changes more effectively?

• Change as an Ongoing Capability: Change is a volatile subject, just like change itself. Everything changes continuously by following the laws of evolution, and the rate of change is accelerated. Corporate change can be a simple modification of strategy, a business process improvement or a more radical digital transformation. Either at the individual or organizational level, at the more static industrial era, change is a one-time project; at the digital age, change has to become an ongoing capability.

• Doing the Wrong Things Differently Isn't Transformation? Organizations large or small are at the journey of digital transformation. However, statistically, more than two-thirds of these programs fail to achieve the expectation. What are the root causes? Do you agree: Doing the wrong things differently isn’t transformation. That is the importance of good transformation practice within a motivated change culture oriented to the right work for the right reasons. But what are the logical steps to follow during the transformation to ensure you are doing the right things, before doing things right, also improve organizational maturity from efficiency to effectiveness to agility?

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 the 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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Three Aspects in Running a Strategic IT

Be proactive, be real, be innovative, be engaged, seek to engage others, lead by example, that is the path to run a strategic IT.

The majority of IT organizations today still get stuck in the lower level of maturity, to “keep the lights on,” and be transactional and operation driven. Therefore, business partners still think of IT as a support center and help desk organization. To transform IT into a value creator and improve its effectiveness, IT needs to become strategic and innovative. More broadly speaking, IT is about distributing and sharing information on the scale and provide strategic insight and multidimensional values to the business, which includes a seamless customer experience, an optimal business service, a commercial value proposition, or a social system which deals with and provides context for varying interest and need. But HOW to run IT as a strategic partner?

How does IT become strategic? IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the driver of business change. The good strategy and forward planning are paramount to make IT striking the right balance between long-term perspective and short-term problem fixing. As organizations that do not respond to external environmental changes will quickly outcompete as more innovative enterprises take their customers. IT can keep business areas up to date with the opportunities emerging technology and the abundance of information provided. Businesses are looking for IT to add new innovative methods for business optimization, business transformation, improving quality, agile construction etc. Thus, it's important to foster an innovation culture to create innovative IT-enabled business models and business capabilities through a combination of existing and emerging technologies. Deliver the innovative capabilities to capture first-mover advantages.

How does IT deliver maximum value to businesses? The exponential growth of the “digital transformation” opportunities is creating new innovation opportunities for the business. The role of CIOs continues to evolve rapidly in the midst of the information or digital transformation and the accelerating changes in technology. CIOs must not preoccupy themselves with operational platforms and process improvements only, and they must have a higher level of influence on how businesses change. For CIOs to be invited into the boardroom, they need to speak to the business about the strategic imperative of the organization. For that, they need to be very aware of what top people have in mind on the strategies/tactics binary and give them all the required information. The IT value itself is a multi-dimensional concept, and then, it comes analytics and metrics as a way of measuring the performance benefits of IT to business. Once this is done and the business understands the value of IT, IT can expect some sort of partnership with the business, where you have business folks coming up with further ideas on how they can benefit from IT. So the business starts seeing IT as an integral part of the business and not just as an enabler.

How can IT maintain vigilance? With the vendors offering SAAS solutions that the business can utilize directly with almost no IT support, IT should feel a competitive pressure. IT can no longer feel like it has a monopoly on delivering solutions to the business. IT should be more integration focused rather than re-inventing the wheel with most custom development that takes place. Understanding and having a visual representation of your IT/Business capacity will result in your ability to understand where your internal resources are being deployed. It can drive IT to run more like business as well as understand the business strategies more comprehensively. With this metric in place, you can then begin to decide which business units /departments/ stakeholders are receiving too much capacity, and which ones are not. More specifically, IT value to the business can be categorized in a number of ways, such as:

- Improving Agility (Speed to Market, ability to change direction with the market, etc)

- Increasing Revenue (enable the business to gain market share, enter new markets, etc)

- Lowering Risk (reduces system downtime, create business continuity, etc)

- Lowering Cost (reduces the cost of the current business process, improve margins, freeing up capital)

Be proactive, be real, be innovative, be engaged, seek to engage others, lead through example, be known as approachable, passionate, and above all truly care about the most valuable resource you have, your fellow employees, then IT can overcome numerous roadblocks on the way to becoming a strategic business partner.  

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The CIO’s Digital Agenda: Running a High-Mature IT Aug. 2016

A high mature individual is ripened, a high mature digital organization is insight abundant.

IT is the foundation of data, information, and modern knowledge. The biggest misnomer regarding IT is that it is "just technology." Digital is about the rapidly change and continuous business flow, and IT becomes a changing organization to driving business transformation. How to fine tune IT to become high mature and get the business digital ready?

 Running a High-Mature IT  

• Three Aspects in IT Maturity?  Most of IT organizations today still run in a reactive mode as an order taker to keep the bottom line and struggle with operational efficiency. However, with the rapidly change and overloading information, technology is often the disruptive force of business transformation. Forward-looking organizations have to empower their IT leaders to lead more proactively, contribute for strategy making, and focus on innovation. In philosophy and practice, how to improve IT maturity as a true strategic business partner?

• Digital IT Maturity: Nowadays information is the lifeblood of the business, technology is often the digital disruptor, and change is the very nature of Information Technology. The irony fact is that IT is often perceived to be too slow to adapt to the changes in the majority of large enterprise organizations, and some businesses even complain their IT organizations become the obstacle to getting things done. How to speed up IT- it means IT has to adapt to changes in proactive ways, and more often, IT has to drive the changes and plays a pivotal role in digital transformation, focus on the fastest speed available - because that is where the main threat to competitiveness. It is about running IT as a business enabler to catalyze growth and improve organizational agility. In practice, how to run IT on the fast lane?

• How to Run a High-Mature IT with Digital Sophistication?  Organizations large or small are on the journey of digital transformation. The characteristics of the digital era are velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). IT organizations play a critical role in leading such a business transformation. In order to prepare for the digital paradigm shift, how can IT knit all important business elements such as process, technology, talent, culture, etc., into differentiated business competency with necessary digital sophistication which developed at the higher level via multidimensional lenses to reach digital maturity?

• Three “Q”s to Run a High-Mature Digital IT? Cross-industry sectors, IT organizations are shifting from a technology support center of a company into an information steward of business. Managing information and the information position of an organization is what ought to be called Information Management. Information Management means to have the right people get the right information to make the right decisions at the right time. And that information has the right quality (actual, right, complete,...) and quantity (the volume of data, etc) and the information is used properly. It is a strategic imperative for managing information effectively in driving digital transformation.? Here we introduce three “Q” factors in running a high mature digital IT.

• How to Build a High-Mature Organization: An organization or company may be in business for many years, but has not matured its management practices or lack of well-defined sets of business principles. Most of the organizations stick to the lower level of maturity mode (reactive, inside-out, and operational driven), how can they move up the maturity level to become truly proactive and outside-in, more culture intelligent and people-centric.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with 3000+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovativebodleadership

Innovative corporate boards set the culture tunes so that innovation becomes a daily routine to run a high-performing digital organization with people- centricity.

People are always the most invaluable asset to businesses. The digital workforce in organizations today are multi-generational, multicultural and multi-tasking. The traditional people management practices are often outdated due to the fast pace of changes and continuous digital disruptions.

Although knowledge is abundant, insight is still in scarcity. The digital Board will help to set the principles to innovate people management and embrace digital fitness. Those guiding principles should be at the forefront of the mind of anyone doing the talent recruiting and management because finding the right person who fits the right positions to do the right work will lead to greater success for both individuals and the company.

Here is the “Digitizing Boardroom” Book Introduction Chapter 7 introduction

Good directorship is about creating the greatest value to motivate top leadership and people development: Board motivation and inspiration can come from any type of personal interaction. It’s always good to make a board meeting a positive experience. How the C-suite feels before and after a board meeting, their energy levels, self-confidence, the frame of mind, and the understanding of the rule, etc, these factors are crucial in organizational performance. It is combining a range of value creating, motivating, and monitoring strategies rather than following best practice heuristics that by their nature of being most practiced, but provide no competitive advantage.

Boards oversee business strategies, a solid people development strategy needs to be well-defined based on the business’s long-term perspective well mixing with short-term needs: The main goal of modern talent management is to put the right people in the right position with the right capability to solve the right problems. There are many factors to consider when hiring and managing talent, but first, you need to define talent unless “hiring talent” means “hiring employee.”

 BoDs can contribute to talent management by setting good policies and clarifying the important questions such as - how do you define talent? How do you measure talent? How do you know a candidate’s talent? How do you know what talent is required for each job? How do you differentiate potential from the performance? And how do you match a candidate’s talent to the talent demanded by the job? Etc. Many say talent shortage is artificial, BoDs, top executives, and talent managers have to open their own mind and work collaboratively, to discover talent via the emergent digital channels and explore the alternative digital pipelines, in order to hire and engage talent in the digital way.

The Board’s role in managing people management risks: Digital organizations are always on, interdependent, and hyper-connected. Organizational risks include talent-related risks and are frequently identified by organizations as some of the most critical issues they face. The board plays a crucial role in GRC practices, which include identifying talent gaps, overseeing the talent strategy as an integral component of the business strategy, and being aware of talent management related risks such as capability risks, capacity risks, cost risks, reputation, and regulatory risks,, etc.

 To look forward, today’s BoD and talent managers must isolate and address a much broader array of talent risks and take into account a critical need to craft a solid talent strategy that supports business strategy and capital investment, identify talent bench strength and weakness, forecast talent management capacity, and measure talent to well reflect its business value.

Leadership and talent development and talent management innovation are important. Talent Management innovation needs to be a hot topic of the Board, in a philosophical than a scientific way. Thus, it needs to be a hot topic of the Board. The core of such brainstorming is to be more philosophical than scientific at the board level. Top leaders such as BoDs need to become change agents and talent masters, organizational talent management, performance management, knowledge management, and culture management need to be well integrated into a holistic people management approach, in order to align organizational vision with staff engagement. And then, Innovative BoDs set the culture tunes so that innovation becomes a daily routine to run a high-performing digital organization with people- centricity.


"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 8 A Culture Savvy Board Introduction
"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 7 A "Talent Master" Board Introduction
"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 6 A "Governance Champion" Board Introduction
"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 5 An IT-Friendly Board Introduction
"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 4 An Innovative Board Introduction
"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 3 A Performance-driven Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 2 A Strategic Board Introduction
"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 1 23 Themes of Digital Boardrooms Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Preview

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Introduction, Slideshare Presentation

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How to Run a Digital Organization with Autonomy

High level of autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity.

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

Self-aware leadership: Leadership is the state of the mind, and leadership is all about change. Digital leaders are change agents who present authenticity, creativity, and wisdom at the core of leadership principles. It is important that leaders first know themselves before leading others. If you know yourself, you are also better suited to tackle different challenges that will come your way as a leader; to make you think about what truly drives you as leaders and why. To run a self-autonomous business, self-leadership is the first step, that means leaders need to lead themselves first, define leadership strength, exemplify leadership quality, amplify leadership influence, and practice leadership disciplines. Knowing who you are or being self-awareness, allows you to become better leaders. Knowing who you are and how you react and respond in different situations can help you understand and improve cognitive, relational and assertive actions you take on a day to day basis. Digital leaders and professionals with self-awareness mind help you build on your strengths and improve on your weaknesses. It allows you to leverage that knowledge to increase the influential outreach for the betterment of others. It provides clarity, versatility, gives you directional opportunities for personal growth and helps you avoid blind spots and lead digital transformation seamlessly.

A self-adaptive digital business ecosystem: With rapid changes and continuous disruptions, a self-adaptive capability or functionality is generally a requirement within digital business systems. The business agility based on self-adaptation is the capability to adapt to the change and make "conscious" business choices seamlessly. Self-adaptation is a phenomenon strictly linked to see learning and knowledge increases if shared and consumed. A key element in self-adaptive organisms is people. Organizations are made by people and run for people. Consider nature and culture as to self-organized but interlaced environments, and humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions. From the economic and organizational point of view, people are able to adapt themselves and their organization through a collaborative and peer to peer approach better adapt to changes and build a fluid digital ecosystem with autonomy.

Self-disciplined teams filled with self-motivated digital professionals: Discipline means embracing certain values and principles. Based on these values and principles, develop some guidelines and policies and then take a structural approach to manage the business in an autonomous way. Many organizations adopt agile as a management philosophy to run a self-disciplined and highly autonomous digital business. Discipline doesn’t mean overly prescriptive, it is critical to follow "people over process" principle. A self-disciplined team is often composed of many self-motivated people who can adopt personal drive and focus on performing well in new and changing context (self-motivation), as well as motivational leaders who are both self-motivated, and can motivate people moving more into the area of coaching or mentoring because you are motivating people by allowing them to learn by giving them the time and the confidence to work out for themselves what needs to be done in certain situations. Self-motivation is to get yourself doing things with discipline, practice and achieve the ultimate goals. A self-motivated person is more driven and adapts to changes, a motivated leader with the right approach can drive the team to become self-disciplined and achieve better business results.

High level of autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity. Running a self-autonomous organization is to improve business efficiency, effectiveness, and agility. Highly mature digital organizations have the high-level digital capability not only to build a digital business with people-centricity, but also to catalyzing enterprise-wide transformation via self-aware leadership, self-adaptive systems, and self-disciplined and self-motivated people. They have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation.

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The Monthly Insight: Five Big “WHY”s in Change Management Aug. 2016

The big "WHY" questions help to clarify the very reason to change, and to manage it seamlessly.

Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. In order to lead change proactively, the big WHY inquiries are crucial, in order to make effective changes, not for its own sake, but achieve the well-defined business results.

    Five Big “WHY”s in Change Management

• Change Management Starts with Big Why: Change is everywhere and it happens every moment in the workplace, but, unfortunately, people rarely recognize that; or sometimes change is for its own sake, so how to manage change by starting with Big WHY?

• Why Does Change Have to be Comprehensible?  Change is inevitable, but more than two-thirds of change effort fail to achieve the expected results. Too often top management says they need to change or selects a set of numbers relative to goals and then unleashes a fancy name program on the organization and says "Change”! So it's no surprise that won't work. But why does change have to be comprehensible, and how to make change sustainable?

• Why is Successful Change so Difficult? The phrase "The only constant changes" refers to the obvious fact that we see all around us which is that things are constantly changing. The pace of change is accelerated in every vertical sector, and even every corner of the world, however, 70% of change management projects failed, why change, or more precisely, successful change is so difficult?

• Three Big “WHY”s in Change Management: Change is the most significant characteristics of the digital age, and it’s multifaceted. The change also becomes an important business capability, not just an ongoing project or a one-time business initiative. “Change Management” is an overarching term that encompasses extensive planning, communication, discovery, creativity, measurement, etc. But the first step first, you need to figure out what are the very reasons and what are the ultimate goals for changes? What are the big WHY questions you should ponder in order to manage change more seamlessly?

• WHY Is It So Hard to Measure Change? Change is the only constant, and Change Management is one of the most important business initiatives for leading organizations forward. However, most companies do not understand the value that change management provides. In most cases, many managers do not understand how to qualify or quantify how change management adds to the bottom line. It seems self-evident that there needs to be some way to 'measure' change, whether quantitative or qualitative, anecdotal or empirical. Otherwise, how can the proposed change be justified? If certain 'important' change is immeasurable. But how can you know whether there is a benefit that is worth the cost (in resources or peoples' time and effort)? How can you know if the enterprise is at least headed in the 'right' direction? How can you get people on board? What kind of change do companies want to measure? Why? Or for whom?

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 the 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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Innovativechampionboard

Governance is like the steer-wheel (governance is “steer” in Greece), to ensure organizations running in the right direction and head to the destination.

The purpose of the board of directors is to direct and monitor the organization. This purpose is generally known as “corporate governance.” Governance is the structure and processes of authority, responsibility, and accountability in a business or organization. The ability of boards to oversee and advise management so as to ensure the best fit between short-term profitability and long-term sustainability. While “corporate governance” can be modeled in general terms, and while certain aspects of corporate governance are heavily regulated in some jurisdictions, there is no standard model for it because the context for corporate governance includes a wide range of circumstances and capabilities which are subject to constant variability. So Boards need to develop a good sense of the appropriate scope of decisions, and what is pertinent to its role versus what is really the purview of management. Here is the “Digitizing Board- The multifaceted Aspects of Digital Ready Board” Book Introduction Chapter 6 "Governance Champion" Board.

Governance disciple enables better decisions: Corporate governance is not about maximization, but about optimization. Governance is a sophisticated process that if well executed, will lead to better decisions. It will allow not only to protect the existing value but also to create new value for its shareholders. It is important to emphasize that governance is fundamentally about having a systematic approach to making decisions within the corporate entity. The boards play crucial roles in taking an oversight of assessment - gauging conditions and choices; taking an oversight of appropriation - matching priorities and resources; and oversight of accountability -scoring activity and net results.

Governance is a “framework” for policies and processes: It enables the Board to govern and report to shareholders and stakeholders. Governance is first followed by risk management as delegation flows from the board down to the rest of the organization. Governance is the framework, and risk management is the mechanism. The two go hand-in-hand. They really cannot exist exclusive of each other. The business framework of “rules of engagement” are set out by the members of the board, stakeholders and investors that drive business strategy, business value, corporate responsibility and managed risk. Governance is all about conformance and performance. It means to conform to regulation and performing well to achieve business goals.

Don’t just see governance as constraints, but rather an opportunity: Effective governance facilitates the successful functioning of an organization while ensuring there are adequate controls in place to operate responsibly in accordance with its values but not to the extent of restricting the aspiration to achieve its vision through an ambitious mission. It helps to manage collaborative results and best practices that view the organizational objectives holistically and with the correct strategy lens or focus. Governance is indeed about how well an organization is being run and if set up right, it should effectively oversee the achievement of the vision, mission, and objectives.

Governance is like the steer-wheel (governance is “steer” in Greece), to ensure organizations running in the right direction and head to the destination. Corporate governance has a great impact on corporate performance. Good governance must create excellent performance, especially for the long-term business growth. The companies which have great performance must also have good governance structure and behavior as well. And GRC is about collaboration and harmony, not only a new organizational structure. And keep in mind about the rule #1 of governance: Prevention is superior to fixing.

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Quote Collection 2

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Quote Collection 1

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Conclusion Running a Digital Ready Board

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 8 A Culture Savvy Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 7 A "Talent Master" Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 6 A "Governance Champion" Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 5 An IT-Friendly Board Introduction 

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 4 An Innovative Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 3 A Performance-driven Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 2 A Strategic Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 1 23 Themes of Digital Boardrooms Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Preview

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Introduction, Slideshare Presentation

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Three Best Practices to Run a Frictionless Digital IT

Focus on being a solution-driven organization, innovation engine, and run IT as a business.

Businesses are transforming from an industrial era with knowledge scarcity to the digital era with information abundance. Technology plays a pivotal role in such a paradigm shift, and the information is penetrating into every core process of the organization. Companies that lacked the skills to manage information technology effectively suffered compared with competitors that had mastered those skills. Besides setting digital principles to follow through, which best/next practices should IT leaders develop and practice for running a frictionless digital IT?

Contextual understanding practice: Traditional IT organizations were run as a siloed support center, an order taker, and a help desk, CIOs are technology geeks or tactical managers who don’t understand the business side of story comprehensively. However, hyperconnectivity and interdependence are the digital nature of the business these days. In order to improve IT maturity, IT leaders have to gain a contextual understanding of the business. Because IT initiatives are unlike others as they are always enterprise-wide, and IT oversees business processes that underpin digital capabilities. Thus, the contextual understanding of business helps IT leaders treat every IT project as a business initiative. When it comes to collecting the business requirements, IT needs to take the traceability path of where the requirements come from, and IT requirements need to be functionally structured to serve each functionality the enterprise needs, and it often requires multiple organizations to produce the overall functionality/capability required. IT management should practice contextual understand via knowing where all the functional boundaries are and it requires a holistic perspective and ability.

Continuous Optimization Practice: IT oversees business processes that underpin organizational capabilities. A CIO must also be able to develop and optimize the IT operations within itself. It is one thing to have the IT resource aligned with the business strategies/ objectives, When a CIO is able to position and maintain the IT organization to ensure it addresses both "IT Effectiveness" and "IT Efficiency," they have earned their stripes. In addition, all IT spending must be looked at through an investment lens, provide a framework for thoughtful and informed decision-making. Etc. Thoughtful cost-cutting and investment with an eye towards the future is the signal of a well-run company. Mistakes are made when the all-in value of a business line is not taken into consideration when making budget decisions. There are few business units that are as deeply embedded into each corporate function as IT. Hence, IT has to leverage knowledge to uncover hidden value via continuous cost optimization practices, not only within IT but benefit the entire organization.

Cross-functional Collaboration Practices: Silos are inevitable in every structured organization, the functional silos in traditional organizations in the industrial age intend to achieve a certain level of business efficiency. Silos have caused some obvious issues, Silos are a method of containment and storage: bounded groups or insular tribes are evidence of silos, and silos are reservoirs for homogeneous thinking, limiting the organization's creativity and innovation. Silo thinking leads internal competitions with ignorance of the fact that the business as a whole should be superior to the sum of pieces. It is the responsibility of the leaders to initiate his or her team to break the silos and realize the common goals or strategy which are far more important than the personal and departmental goals. There are negative conflicts when the organization has little collaborative competency; and when they integrate, there is more potential to innovate and create value, more so when the collaborative competency of the organization is strong. Fostering collaboration is the key to creating a seamless organization when in pursuit of a strategy.

Either setting digital principles or developing the best and next practices, IT leaders should remember that IT is about the Information, and focus on being a solution-driven organization, innovation engine, and run IT as a business, rigorously identify and pursue business value, the business will ultimately benefit from it. If IT leaders are tuned into their business and their organization, they can be successful in any economic climate.

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