The Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Turning: CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer” May 2019

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 Intrapreneur Officer.”

CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”

CIOs as Chief Intrapreneur Officer: How to Encourage Creativity and Manage Innovation It's common that many IT companies tend to focus more on their core competencies with age and often forget about the value of innovation. Without encouraging creativity, organizations would be upstaged by the ones that are creative because disruptive innovation will happen no matter how well you prepare. Digital IT needs to be run as a business, and digital CIOs should be the “Chief Intrapreneur Officer,” with “whole brain” thinking: Being logic in your mind based on your years of engineering training and experiences and be creative in your heart, dream big and think big. Because the CIO’s vision will directly impact their organization’s strategic perspective for the long term. So, how to encourage creativity and manage innovation effectively?

Three Perspectives of Intrapreneur Leadership? Corporate Entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship has been recognized as a potentially viable, it means for promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and enforce competitiveness. Being entrepreneurial is first the mindset, then an attitude and skills are the easier part to be developed. Here are three aspects of intrapreneur leadership.

CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”: Practicing Entrepreneurship in IT Contemporary CIOs have multiple personas, "Chief Innovation Officer," and “Chief Intrapreneur Officers,” are the most pertinent titles for CIOs to fit the digital leadership role in running IT as a business. Companies are recognizing that IT is roughly coupled to the business strategy as an innovation engine. With the increasing pace of changes, CIOs generally have greater opportunities to stand out and practice digital leadership in driving innovation across their companies. Being entrepreneurial is first the mindset, then an attitude and skills are the easier part to be developed. More and more forward-looking IT organizations are practicing entrepreneurship and running IT as a software startup to play the niche and make continuous deliveries.

CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”: How to Sow IT Innovation Seeds via asking Open-Ended Questions Intrapreneurship is about creating a new venture from within an established company to look for changes and explore new opportunities. Many IT organizations become the change department of their company and they have to become the innovation engine of the business as well. Intrapreneur CIOs need to be dynamic people with vision, openness, inquisitiveness, growth and complexity mindset. Intrapreneur leaders practice entrepreneurship in the large enterprise to rejuvenate culture, advocate digitalization, inspire innovation and accelerate the speed of changes. They master at asking open-ended questions to sow innovation seeds and reimagine IT to reach the next level of organizational maturity.

Running IT as the “Center of Possibility” IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. To keep IT relevant, IT management shouldn't just practice some transactional activities or act as a controller only. It has to explore both the art and the science of digital management discipline, run IT organization as the “center of possibility,” to accelerate its performance and unlock business potential.

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.

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