The Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Tuning: CIO as “Chief Innovation Officer” Nov. 2018

The digital CIOs have to wear different colors of hats and master multiple leadership personas and management roles effortlessly.

This book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. The important thing is that CIOs as the top leadership role must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth. Regardless of which personality they have, digital CIOs need to be both transformational and situational, innovative and tactical, business savvy and technology insightful, communication-effective and operation-efficient. Here is a set of blogs to brainstorm CIO as “Chief Innovation Officer.”

Creating Digital Pathways to Innovate IT: Organizations rely more and more on technology, technology needs will only expand. IT a lightning rod for change and innovation. Digital CIOs are uniquely qualified to envision technological trends and take risks above the status quo, take on a new set of activities that are involved in defining, developing, and differentiating their organization to get digital ready.

Running Digital IT Organization Through Associationism, Evolutionism, and Professionalism: The overwhelming growth of information brings both opportunities and risks to the organization; continuous disruptions often driven by technologies force businesses to improve their responsiveness, adaptability, flexibility, and resilience. IT provides competitive leverage to the business’ long-term growth. To keep IT relevant, IT leaders need to get really creative on driving changes and running digital IT organization through associationism, evolutionism, and professionalism.

Running IT as Business in the Business by Taking Innovative Approach: The digital world is so data-driven and information-intensive. Organizations rely more and more on technology, technology needs will only expand. IT is being used more and more around the globe for revenue generating initiatives and the business is becoming IT. IT has also to be run as the business in the business by taking varying innovative approaches.

The CIO as both Creative Theorist and Innovative Digital Practitioner: Digitalization is the evolutionary business transformation which evolves production, adoption, assimilation, exploitation, and exploration of value-added novelty in the business. The purpose of digital businesses today is to advocate better ways to do things, amplify collective human capability and business capacity in order to compete confidently and keep the business growth momentum.

The Contemporary CIO’s Digital Innovation Agenda: Digital is the age of innovation. Innovation, in general, is surely a management discipline. IT shouldn’t act as a controller only, limit the business’s creativity. To keep relevant, IT has to shift its reputation from a cost center to the innovation hub of the organization. In fact, IT plays a crucial role in expanding the creative side of the business, and scale the innovation effect of the organization. The contemporary CIO's responsibilities are to understand the business's collaboration needs and innovation demand today and into the future, in order to build an IT-led digital innovation agenda which covers innovation management, knowledge, technology transfer, entrepreneurship, people-centricity, and it is closely related to several other disciplines as well.

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talents. The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly. They need to lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to plumbing information and keep it flow smoothly; they also have to be like the diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.

Posted in: CIO Leadership,CIO Master,Sum UP