The New Book "The Change Agent CIO: The CIO's Dynamic Role of Leading Digitalization" Summary

The priority for CIOs is to genuinely position IT as an integral and inseparable part of the business to lead the digital paradigm shift.

“The Change Agent CIO: The CIO’s Dynamic Role of Leading Digitalization“ is to share insight into the multifaceted CO leadership disciplines and multidimensional change agenda of IT. The digital CIOs are in demand to “disrupt,” inspire changes and accelerate digital transformation. They are change agents to reinvent IT as the business growth engine, optimize business processes and structures, rejuvenate the corporate culture and communication, and raise their intellectual voice to lead change interactively, innovatively, and relentlessly. Slideshare Presentation

Shape the vision: Leadership is all about future and change. Leadership vision is to serve as a compass and enabler for steering the business in the right direction. To clear the path of digitalization, whether that is the elimination of obstacles or providing coaching and guidance or making leadership influence, CIOs and their teams can play a large role in shaping a vision of the firm as a place where passionate individuals want to. The expectations for CIOs have grown multi-fold, digital CIOs have to keep evolving and playing the situational leadership all the time. The success of IT leadership has to do with the definitions or scope of the role that the CIO is playing. The purpose of this book connect with and learn from one another. Vision should have a direction which sets clarity. As IT leaders, CIOs need to have the technological vision and awareness, as more often than not, technology becomes the game changer and innovation driver for running a digital business. No matter where you are in IT, the world changes with accelerated speed. IT is in the middle of a sea change, CIOs need to have the capacity to learn, relearn, and adapt. CIOs are expected to constantly propose new ideas and challenge the status quo, have the willingness to try something new, to test, to learn what you knew again, with the new perspective, to listen and remain balanced. A CIO’s technological vision should be an attainable subject to current time and its ability to adapt and help the business gain the competitive advantage for the long term.

Ignite the passion: The need for change is obvious. The range of emerging digital technologies fosters a deeper sense of digital connections and vision to changes. Simply put, IT can no longer just be about numbers and algorithms; it has an opportunity to be a significant catalyst for passion and a tool for encouraging questing and connecting the innovation dots. Passionate CIOs dare to practice out-of-the-box-thinking, introduce new business concepts, develop cross-functional systems, platforms, procedures, and tools for the efficient use of natural resource and investing in human capital to maximize collective potential. The digital setting and tools necessitate a new way of thinking, a creative way to do things, and a flexible way to work smartly to ignite latent worker passion and bring together disparate parts of the organization to achieve digital harmony. CIOs need to become the passionate change agents to retool the organization culture, build up a positive emotional environment, communicate relentlessly, inspire passionate employees, and foster collaborative business relationships. If a digital leader like CIO has a clear vision and is passionate about a certain goal, and then, it has the potential to be contagious and spread throughout the team. Keep in mind though, CIOs are senior leaders, their passion should never take precedence over making sound judgments. Following the passion also requires a good sense of judgment that you are on a right path to the vision you set. Passion enables determination, creativity, strategy, and talent. Passion aligned with focus, capabilities, and meaningful work is a destination for both individuals and businesses.

Orchestrate the digital ecosystem transformation: Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that simply adopting a new digital technology is insufficient. Thus, the CIO as a change agent not only touches his/her own function but also needs to make a significant influence on the entire organization and the emerging business ecosystem. Digital Transformation is the change, but on a grand level, at the level of the system, differentiates in terms of the end result on a systemic level. Thus, it takes strategic planning, structural methodology, and continuous practices in orchestrating such a digital paradigm shift. The pervasive digitization requires both business and technology professionals to rethink how things are done in their organization and how to align the different parts of the business ecosystem to adopt more digital points of integration. You have to transform the company's underlying functions and the organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed. To effectively respond to the new dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive and innovative. The CIO should run IT as the linchpin to orchestrate a high performance and high-innovative digital organization.

IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. The priority for CIOs is to genuinely position IT as an integral and inseparable part of the business to lead the digital paradigm shift. CIOs are change agents, for IT to enable and catalyze business transformation, for IT to have an oversight of the key business processes and influence of the organizational culture. Digital CIOs have both vision and passion, capability and capacity for entering into the new world of the change and innovation, build a comprehensive change agenda with a few crucial highlights to drive changes with focus, and practice leadership influence through their unique insight and intellectual voice.

Posted in: Change Management,Digital Master,Digitalization