CIOs as “Chief Information Officer”: How to Ensure Information Robustness and Innovation Excellence

Digital organizations are information overloading and knowledge abundant, but very few of them are truly running the digital-savvy and high-intellectual business.

The most powerful and differentiating tool in today's businesses is information; the aim of managing the information and the information position of an organization is what ought to be called Information Management. Information is the lifeblood and dynamic business ingredient that allows the company’s continual growth. CIOs as “Chief Information Officer”: How can you create the great condition to ensure information robustness and innovation excellence?

Permeating information into every corner of the business: Many organizations feel overwhelming by the exponential growth of information. Information is the most invaluable commodity individuals and organizations produce in the digital environment in which they currently function, and it’s one of the most invaluable business assets need to be managed successfully! Information does not live alone but permeates into everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. There seems to be the unrealistic expectation that if you have a great business and it’s working OK, the information will flow around smoothly; knowledge, ideas, solutions, and advice will easily transfer to achieve its business value. In practices, Information Management takes strategic planning, systematic approach, and scientific methodology. In many legacy organizations, their methods, and procedures to process information are siloed and outdated, stifle information flow, and thus, business flow. Even in a small company, variation between the amounts and type of data need to support different lines of business can be challenging. Information Management entails collecting, organizing, retrieving, acquiring, maintaining, securing, updating, distributing, sharing, publishing and achieving information. Information Management is all about ensuring information robustness, having the right people to have the right information to make the right decisions at the right time. Identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses; products and resources; like information flow in business processes, for example, and then its own value will become readily apparent and quantifiable by association. Information Management lifecycle with data, information, knowledge, and wisdom at the different stages evolves how to refine information to gain business foresight and customer insight in order to run a highly intelligent and high-performance digital organization.

Continuously share knowledge and generate new knowledge: There is no hard asset that you can buy today that will guarantee the success of your organization. But effective information management will help the business make a large leap of achieving long-term business prosperity. To reach information robustness and knowledge abundance, you need to not only assimilate the existing knowledge, more importantly, but you also have to create the new knowledge, more frequently to replace the out of dated knowledge. Because siloed or outdated knowledge stifles organizational change and decreases business speed. Knowledge workers with intrinsic motivation like to share their knowledge to learn more by themselves; they are perfectly able to find a balance between sharing knowledge and ensuring sharing knowledge will not become a goal in itself. The ultimate business goal is to improve productivity and encourage innovation. Having knowledge is a good thing, debating, sharing, and exploring what to do with that knowledge and connecting disparate ideas that don't seem to fit together naturally will lead to new knowledge or idea generation. Make the conscious application of what we know and at the same time stay open to the unknown, new thinking and knowledge can emerge. Knowledge Management methodologies and tools do play a major role; but ideally, knowledge sharing needs to be embedded in the work style and well-placed knowledge management system, to make it an effortless business activity and ensure information robustness and knowledge update.

Encourage innovation experimentation by exploration of newly acquired information or fresh-minted theories: The original germ of a creative idea is often, if not always arrived through the interaction of ideas from different domains of thoughts and experiences, or information without boundary. Nowadays, information is often the most time-intensive piece of innovation puzzle. To move forward from information robustness to innovation excellence, cross-pollinating ideas, collaborating and sharing knowledge are what spurs innovation. Absorbing knowledge is only the beginning of learning. How deeply your understanding is based on the mindset, logic, lenses, and methodology you leverage to interpret things and connect dots to spark creativity. Knowledge workforce today uses the diversity of ideas as a rich source of connectivity and relationship, to foster innovation and provide the breakthrough thinking to arrive at creative outcomes that would be otherwise very unlikely. Keep in mind though, building a learning organization is not the goal or a vision, the ultimate goal is to ensure such organizations keep tapping their innovation potential and they know the tasks and knowledge required to sustain itself and create an environment and business systems to reap innovation fruits.

Digital organizations are information overloading and knowledge abundant, but very few of them are truly running the digital-savvy and high-intellectual business. Information technology should be seen by any business as the growth engine as well as the business optimizer which continues trimming the wastes and eliminating the cost, to ensure information robustness, knowledge abundance, and innovation excellence in order to reach the high level of business maturity.

Posted in: CIO Debate,CIO Leadership,CIO Master,Information/Data Management,IT Innovation