Digital power is the combination of the power of knowledge, the power of information and technology, the power of people, and the power of creativity.
The digital era upon us means fast-paced changes, continuous disruptions, the exponential growth of information, the emerging lightweight digital technologies, and shortened knowledge life cycle. Clearly, the IT organization needs to reinvent itself from a monolithic back-office function to a mosaic style business growth engine. The role of CIO needs to go through significant changes for getting digital ready. IT leaders must understand what strategic goals of the company are, how they are manifested within the organization, and how they, in turn, build competitive advantage and drive the business forward. They need to develop the best and next practices to lead differently, and shapen multiple skills, be able to advise, influence, and guide for ensuring the right things get done and things get done right.
The “Out-of-the-Box” Thinking: Compared to traditional CIOs who are often perceived as the controller; digital CIOs, are born to change, and practice “out-of-the-box” thinking all the time to connect wider dots for sparking innovation. Nowadays, information is the gold mine all forward-thinking organizations across sectors dig into and technology is one of the most critical ingredients in almost all critical business competencies. The high-performance corporations embed the power of information in its fiber to build the long term sustainable business advantage. IT leaders should wear multiple personas, practice “out-of-box-thinking” all the time, to reimagine and reinvent IT as an innovation engine. They experiment with new ways to do things, test, learn, improve, and manage a healthy IT management portfolio. To refresh IT leadership, some companies also take the “fresh blood” scenario, bring in a CIO from outside the vertical industry to reinvigorate IT for connecting wider dots to spark innovation.
Prioritization: A company has finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectation. There are always some constraints for IT to manage a healthy portfolio of “running, growing, and transforming business” To overcome IT fatigue, improve IT effectiveness, and thrive in the long term, IT needs to do pre-planning, planning, prioritizing, and adjusting all the time. Prioritization brings transparency and aligns IT portfolio management with strategic business goals and objectives. Prioritization is also the process and method that people communicate either top down or bottom up and impact how a creative approach is taken in the organization. It forces people to be more creative, and come up with better ideas, as well as managing them in a structural way. Prioritization starts with a right mindset, craft an executable strategy, with IT strategy as an integral component, maps business goals with employee goals systematically, and laser focuses on the most critical challenge business needs to overcome.
Just-in-time IT management: Today’s organizations are at a crossroads in which the segregation or siloing of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other to respond to changes in almost the real time. Just-in-time IT management means that IT management needs to become a “living process,” with frequent evaluations, listening, revisioning, and innovating.IT has to be configured in a way to understand the business and set the architecture to deliver business solutions to meet market needs continually. Just-in-time information management involves the use of technologies and processes of capturing, refining, developing, sharing, and effectively applying organizational information timely, acquiring the ability to develop new products or services, with the aim of optimizing the business value that is generated. Real-time collaboration is now all about real-time sharing, transparency, active listening, and two-way trust in the wisdom of the team in order to create business synergy.
Creative selection: IT is transforming and moving to reach higher maturity in the digital age. IT talent skills gap is not fiction, but reality. IT leaders need to take a proposed scenario: First, understand the problem by going to the root cause - are there any disconnect of IT’s short term staff needs and the long term talent perspective? Now, in many companies, it should take preponderant importance of developing sustainable IT-business relationship and focusing on business-IT integration rather than the alignment, is the key to digital transformation. IT should understand their customers, their business, provide innovative solutions and systems to support and make the business to grow and gain competitive advantages, Thus, IT needs to have talent with both technical proficiency and business acumen; the balance of hard & soft skills, to boost performance and unlock potential. IT skills gap can be bridged through creative selection, as the saying goes -hire for character, and train for skills. Look for the traits such as intelligence, motivation, problem-solving, self-learning and communications, etc, truly treat talent as the human asset and capital to invest in, not just human resource to plug in.
Digital power is the combination of the power of knowledge, the power of information and technology, the power of people, and the power of creativity. Digital CIOs need to understand relations and dynamics between consciousness (thinking), energy, and information deeply, develop the best and next practices to lead differently, shape differentiated business competencies in order to ride the upcoming change waves and lead the journey of digital transformation effortlessly.
0 comments:
Post a Comment