The Monthly “Change Agent CIO” Book Tuning: Transform IT from Change Laggard to Change Leader June 2019

Contemporary CIOs should be capable of evolving leadership skills to not only match the pace with changes in technology but also proactively drive digital transformation.

Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. A digital transformation is achieved via dynamic Strategy-Execution-Change lifecycle management, though it is not all linear steps, but an iterative, ongoing and upgoing change continuum. How to reboot IT to get digital ready and cultivate the culture of learning and innovating?

      

 Transform IT from Change Laggard to Change Leader 

Transforming IT via Multiplying, Intensifying, and Maximizing Digital IT is a paradigm shift in role, responsibility, attitude, and aptitude. There are so many things IT can help the business accomplish, but there are also many obstacles IT has to overcome. Forward-looking IT organizations experiment with different management approaches and problem-solving disciplines to transform IT via multiplying, intensifying, and maximizing.

Shaping IT Competency to Drive Digital Transformation Digital businesses are becoming complex and uncertain. Technologies nowadays are the disruptive forces behind digital disruptions, and information is one of the most invaluable assets of modern businesses. Organizations across industrial sectors rely more and more on information and technology. Thus, from a strategic perspective, to survive and thrive, it’s not sufficient to run IT as a commodity service provider, IT is the value-added business partner that makes the company different and achieve more. IT organization has more to offer but also has more obstacles to overcome. How to shape IT competency and improve IT performance and maturity.

Shaping IT from a Change Laggard to Digital Trendsetter Traditional IT organizations are often inside-out operation-driven, mechanical and monolithic, it’s perceived by business as a controller and change laggard. Because in many cases, the business continues to evolve faster in grasping the market share and winning new customers, but sometimes failed due to lack of real-time information to capture business foresight and customer insight. With the exponential growth of information and often technology-led disruptions, IT has evolved significantly in running the business today, IT also faces an unprecedented opportunity to refine its reputation from a change laggard to the trendsetter of the digital organization.

Three Practices to Fortify IT TransformationDue to rapid change, fierce competitions, and continuous disruptions often led by technologies, IT can no longer feel like it has a monopoly on delivering solutions to the business. With vendors now offering cost-effective on-demand model IT services or solutions that business can utilize directly with almost no IT support, IT should feel competitive pressure to reinvent itself as a business differentiator. In practice though, there is the gap between the aspirations of what IT could do to the business versus what the current IT “mentality” and capacity within the respective IT department is capable of providing and enabling. What are the best or next practices to fortify IT transformation?

The New Book "The Change Agent CIO: The CIO's Dynamic Role of Leading Digital Transformation" Introduction Information technology is like the growth engine of the company, CIOs are accountable for the critical part of the business that is constantly changing and evolving. Contemporary CIOs should be capable of evolving leadership skills to not only match the pace with changes in technology and the pace at which an organization can effectively manage these changes but also proactively drive digital transformation based on their vision, passion, and leadership practices. Slideshare Presentation

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5800 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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“CIO Master” Book Preview Running IT as Digital Transformer

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 9 IT Agility

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 8 Three "P"s in Running Digital IT

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 7 IT Innovation Management

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 6 Digital Strategy-Execution Continuum

"CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 5 Thirteen Digital Flavored IT

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 4 CIO as Talent Master Introduction

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 3 “CIOs as Change Agent” Introduction

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 2 “CIOs as Digital Visionary” Introduction

“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 1 “Twelve Digital CIO Personas” Introduction

"CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Introduction

"CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Book Preview

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Five-Pillar Framework to Develop the Platform Business

 In order to succeed in today’s fast-changing digital business dynamic, organizations must begin thinking about ways with dynamic planning and leverage the platform approach to scale up and broaden their ecosystem impact.

The digital organization is a dynamic system which needs to continue evolving and adapting. It can expand and amplify its influence with the ability to create new business models, run a platform business in a hyperconnected digital ecosystem - treat customers, suppliers, channel partners and industrial participants as active agents who can integrate the modular capabilities exposed in a powerful platform to create new experiences and expand its impact. Here are five essential pillars to build a solid framework for developing a powerful platform business.

Architecture and process: The enterprise consists of an amalgam of socio-systems, techno-systems, bio-systems, and Econo-systems. The business architecture tends to focus on current business state evaluation, gap analysis, capability assessment, and development of the business transformation roadmap to reach a reasonable target future state. Business architecture can be very valuable for performing a wide array of additional services, including process measurement and optimization, segment analysis, strategic positioning, and a wide array of other business functions. The rapid business model innovation, emerging digital technologies, IT consumerism, and many other factors are creating new challenges and opportunities for enterprises to grow and mature. They are also affecting business capabilities in many ways including but not limited to business relationship management, brand reputation, information management, and business competencies, etc. The emerging consensus is that Business Architecture has significant impacts on both business model evolution and business alignment. By aligning the outside view with the inside view, you can understand the needs of people but also the channels needed to support them. In fact, Business Architecture is one of the essential pillars to design and manage a platform business that can respond to a dynamic ecosystem with multi-dimensional factors impacting business model, business operations, and the company reputation for the long term success.

Information & Technology: Information is one of the most invaluable business assets and technology is a critical element of business competency. Information Technology provides a nervous system to improve organizational responsiveness, intelligence, and performance. Information Technology enables the business to access, consume and generate the necessary information to perform a range of business tasks. It’s the linchpin to develop a platform business by building close business relationship across the departments and integrating multiple business functions into differentiated business competencies. IT woven-digital framework leverages emerging digital platforms and tools, practices the art and science of engineering disciplines, and develops IT applications blended with current digital trends to deliver unique benefits to the business. IT-enabled full business potential is about getting involved in building great products, services or business models by relying less on silo functions and more on cross-functional collaboration and cohesive business competency Information Technology provides an important structure and a strong pillar to build a powerful platform business.

People & Culture: People are always the most critical business asset and human capital investment to catalyze business transformation and drive long term business advantage. The part of the building a platform business is to achieve people-centricity by solving customers’ problems and unleashing employees’ potential. Effective workforce management focuses on attraction, engagement and performance alignment. The traditional “command & control” style of management gradually lose its steam, the highly effective digital workplace is where collaboration and sharing are the norms, helps people at all levels within an organization to identify and develop their creative capacity and motivates them to think and do things differently. Regardless of the nature of the organization, you will also find some similarities in culture such as strong vision and leadership, outward-looking rather than insular. willing to accept a degree of risk and experimentation, etc. These forward-thinking businesses provide excellent platforms for people to explore who they are, keep their creative energy flow and then, align the energy to work at hand and inspire creativity. People-centricity is actually the very purpose of running a platform business.

Principles and Practices: The digital principles are not some out-of-date cliche or overly rigid processes to stifle innovation. Instead, they are based on the set of digital philosophy behind the methodologies and they help to shape the digital fit mindsets behind decisions, behaviors, and actions at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. Every company should also strive to explore "best practices" throughout their organization to either scale up innovation or accelerate performance. But the business management needs to keep in mind that "one size doesn't fit all". Markets change and shift, and for each company attempting to deal with these changes, there is a different path to follow. By striking the right balance of the best and next practices, setting the right principles but breaking down the old rule; the business lifecycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of reorganizing, refocusing, rebalancing resources, and redirecting people to understand the whole, in terms of its inner processes and strength, its interactions with external systems, its components, the specific interaction among them, etc., to build a powerful platform business with seamless digital flow and accelerated business performance collaboratively.

Governance & Risk Management: If a modern organization is like a vehicle, then, governance is like a steering wheel; risk management is like a brake pad and compliance is like the set of traffic rules. Thus, the purpose of GRC is not to stop the business vehicle, but to ensure it is driven smoothly with the safety control. This is particularly important to operate a large-scale platform business. In reality, though governance is one of those concepts that have received lots of “lip service.” The factors of governance effectiveness include - the organization’s risk appetite, regulatory environment, the business nature, size, and stage in the lifecycle, market environments, and current conditions, the Board's attitude to risk and reward, core business systems lifecycle, or the maturity of the Information Systems team & processes. The thing that the management would like to see is how the implementation of the strategy proposed will affect the existing business processes, roles, and responsibilities, and how much it will cost to change the processes in order to establish good governance and risk management discipline, and of course, what exact benefits it will bring to the business at the end. It doesn’t matter what the drive is, in a well aligned and architected organization, governance must be assessed at the enterprise level and managed holistically because it’s one of the most critical pillars to run a platform business.

Nowadays things are interconnected and the business ecosystem becomes highly interdependent nonlinear, complex, and dynamic. In order to succeed in today’s fast-changing digital business dynamic, organizations must begin thinking about ways with dynamic planning and leverage the platform approach to scale up, broaden their ecosystem impact and increase revenue streams, in order to harness the power of ecosystems, unlock business performance, and enforce people centricity.

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Transforming IT via Multiplying, Intensifying, and Maximizing

IT needs to be working hard to transform from a cost center to a value center by demystifying the IT investment puzzle, developing and presenting the measurable IT-driven business value.

Digital IT is a paradigm shift in role, responsibility, attitude, and aptitude. There are so many things IT can help the business accomplish, but there are also many obstacles IT has to overcome. Forward-looking IT organizations experiment with different management approaches and problem-solving disciplines to transform IT via multiplying, intensifying, and maximizing.

Multiplying: Information is abundant and technology is pervasive and business initiatives and change efforts today perhaps always involve some form of data analysis or technology implementation. Forward-looking companies expect their IT leaders to share the technical vision and run IT as a digital force multiplier to accelerate business growth and catalyze innovation along the journey of digital transformation. CIOs need to make sure that the executive teams understand what IT can do to drive future business growth and revenue generation. Running IT as a digital multiplier is not just about playing some latest technology gadgets, following trendy practices, or talking about innovation as a lip service; it has to shape the digital mindset and build differentiated business capabilities and capacities behind business transformation. It starts with the IT leader’s mentality as the strategic business executive first, and then, they can run IT as the business inside the business and digital force multiplier of the entire company. Leading companies run IT as an information force multiplier to move up their information management maturity from understanding “what happened” to “why did it happen” - dig into the root cause to what will happen - capture the trend, with the goal to run a highly responsive organization. IT as a multiplier will also enable operational excellence, business agility, new services/products delivery, workforce innovation, and customer experience optimization.

Intensifying: With the increasing pace of changes and continuous disruptions, the digital strategy execution becomes so dynamic and intensive. Innovation is intensified via complexity syndromes and the cause-effect scenario. Innovation is the most wanted change. With the exponential growth of information and continuous disruptions, the challenges will only intensify. Strategy Management and Change Management often need to go hand in hand. Either individually or at the team member, the key factor to the digital paradigm shift has been the endless self-exploration, self-managing, and self-renewal in intellectual, emotional, material, or spiritual dimensions that need to co-evolve together. Digital information technologies can be very helpful in strategic analysis and handle strategy execution intensity in a structural way. In fact, information is one of the most intensive pieces of digital transformation puzzle. Thus, a healthy cycle of information management enables real-time information flow, access, and analysis so that the information value will become readily apparent and quantifiable by association, with the goal to intensify positive changes permissively, solve critical business issues smoothly, communicate extensively, deliver visible business benefits tangibly and achieve the high-performance business outcome seamlessly.

Maximizing: Due to the pervasive technology and information penetration, businesses today not just use IT a digital extension, but leverage IT across the company to maximize the business value. To maximize IT value, besides financial ROIs, it’s also important to evaluate the overall business value from IT investment, such as quality, performance, customer satisfaction, and the varying matters that stakeholders consider important to them. it is important to leverage this knowledge to uncover hidden value, not only within IT but benefit the entire organization. To maximize IT-driven business value, IT and business have to speak the common language and communicate empathetically for improving the growth capacity and maturity of the business and rebrand IT as the trustful business partner. IT leaders need to become both business strategist and IT practitioner, always think in terms of the value-add to the business, running IT and evaluating IT performance from outside-in business and customer lens, leveraging unique IT knowledge and capability to build business competence, and maximizing IT by enabling capability-enabled strategy execution, adapting to changes proactively and doing more with innovation.

IT needs to be working hard to transform from a cost center to a value center by demystifying the IT investment puzzle, developing and presenting the measurable IT-driven business value. CIOs have to set business principles, identify and blend business processes and practices that information and technology can assist and shape the business by linking all critical digital aspects together to develop dynamic business competency, enforce the value creation and drive digital transformation via multiplying, intensifying, and maximizing.

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The Monthly “Performance Master’ Book Tuning: The Principles and Practices to Achieve Stellar Performance June 2019

Enterprise performance management is about how organizations manage performance at both strategic and operational level to achieve the well-set business goals and objectives.

Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy to the shop floor. "If you can't measure, you can't manage," legendary management guru Peter Drucker once asserted. Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions to ensure it happens. It takes multifaceted approaches from multidimensional perspectives to unlock digital performance and catalyze change.

  

   The Principles and Practices to Achieve Stellar Performance

Three Measurement Principles to Accelerate Stellar Business Performance Enterprise Performance management is a holistic management discipline involving development, enablement, and enhancement. One of the biggest pitfalls for performance measurement is about measuring the “part” with ignorance of the “whole.” Thus, outcome-based measurement practices are important to focus on the performance of the entire organization by taking a multidimensional approach to connect all important dots with multifaceted perspectives. In practice, the more meaningful and important the thing you want to assess, the harder it is to measure objectively. Here are three measurement principles to accelerate steller business performance.

Five Aspects to Unlock Digital Performance Enterprise Performance Management is a multidisciplinary management discipline. It is critical because new competitive challenges and active market changes underscore the strategic imperative of managing performance more than ever. Enterprise performance management is about how organizations manage performance at both strategic and operational level to achieve the well-set business goals and objectives. Here are five aspects to unlock digital performance.

Running Digital IT as Business Performance and Productivity Booster Information & technology management is not for its own sake, but to deliver quality services and solutions that drive business growth and improve organizational maturity. Improving productivity and accelerating business performance are some noble business goals behind running a digital IT organization. This includes all aspects of the company, such as information management, logistics, application throughput, employee engagement, and overall health of the organization, etc. But more specifically, how to run digital IT as business productivity and performance booster?

Three “P” Factors in Achieving IT Performance Excellence Digital technologies are often the disruptive force for innovation and exponential growth of information is the lifeblood of the digital organizations today. However, many IT organizations still get stuck in the reactive mode, keep the lights on, take orders from business users only, put little emphasis on driving business change or innovation. If this is the case, IT leadership, strategy, and capability need to be well aligned, and "business sentiment" needs to get put into something more tangible, such as, how to increase business profitability, improve productivity, and optimize processes in order to move up to the next level of IT maturity. Here are three “P” factors in achieving IT performance excellence.

Three Growth Forces to Accelerate Digital Business Performance The digital organization is the dynamic business ecosystem with the two most basic systemic structures which are the balancing cycle and the growth cycle, and their emergent characteristics just happen to be balance and growth. Change is the new normal, and change can be an opportunity, but at the end of the day, it needs to be all about moving the business numbers upwards. Although we have to change with the "tide," companies that lead in digital transformation, are much more likely to have a top executive team who understands digital opportunities and threats and who can enforce the business growth forces for the strategy execution and accelerate digital business performance.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5800 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The "Performance Master" Book Introduction Slideshare

The "Performance Master" Book Preview

The "Performance Master" Book Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 1 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 2 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 3 Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 4 Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 5 Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Conclusion

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection I

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection II

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection III

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Shaping Digital Organization via Contextualization, Synchronization, and Harnomization

The more effortlessly you can contextualize business understanding, synchronize information flow, harmonize business relationships, align, integrate, and optimize the important business factors inside an organization, the closer you can accelerate performance and lead transformative changes seamlessly.

Organizations all face fierce competitions and continuous disruptions. How successfully the organization can handle “VUCA” digital new normal depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to changes. The organization has become "unconscious" if it is no longer responding to the external environment or shows internal culture inertia or frictions. It’s crucial for business management not letting things “falling apart” but building an “integral whole” and shaping a high mature digital organization via contextualization, synchronization, and harmonization.

Contextualization: Today’s business is hyper-complex and interdependent, business managers need to have a contextual understanding of the interconnectivity of the business elements underlying the surface, get to understand the whole meaning of functional dialects and perceive the business insight in a cohesive way. Contextualization is about having an in-depth understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context or the core issues of a situation which leads to true understanding and resolution. Knowledge is concrete, and intelligence is contextual. Contextual intelligence is a higher-level of digital fluency. In the dynamic digital business, logic is often nonlinear and multifaceted, to solve complex business problems, understanding context is often the first and the critical step in enforcing understanding and creating the relevant context to make an everlasting solution - without it, you are working without any boundaries or cause more side effect later on. That means contextual thinking, interdisciplinary knowledge, efficient technological platforms and tools, and structural management practices, etc, are all important factors in managing a dynamic digital business.

Synchronization: For organizations adapting to the increasing pace of changes, timing is crucial to run a real-time business by capturing emerging opportunities and managing emerging risks effectively. The high-responsive organization can synchronize their business, more precisely, information, at the multiple levels of the business and presents the recognizable digital rhythm to keep the business moving forward with the right pace. The power of information helps the business become highly responsive by ensuring the right people getting updated information to make effective decisions timely. Information nowadays is permeating into everywhere in the company and growing exponentially. A healthy information management cycle is not just about upgrading the information management system but developing an integrated enterprise-level business management solution that collects, stores, cleanses and combines information from multiple sources by breaking down silos, enables the secure sharing of information, and presents them in an user-friendly” format, refines information to the business insight for supporting users at the different level of organizational hierarchy in a way that encouraging effective and cohesive decision-making. The insight-driven digital transformation can create the business synchronization of all functions running at the multiple levels of the organization seamlessly and run a smart and mature digital organization.

Harmonization: Digital business is fluid and also complex. It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interactions and interdependent relationships. Business management has become an art out of necessity to address the concerns, handle conflicts, clarify business strategies, and give everyone a voice in how the organization and the people in it can prosper and thrive. They have to keep experimenting with better business design - the design most fit for achieving the organizational goals and reaching the sate of zest, fluidity, and harmony. They also need to clarify both internal and external beliefs around how the business is a movement for the organizational enablement and improvement, keep developing their best and next practices, maintain and fix any imbalance in key business elements such as people, process, and technology, update structures, methodologies, and cultures, and develop a harmonized working environment to achieve strategic goals. The harmonized digital workplace is in which collaboration and sharing are the norms, learning and creativity are encouraged, the silo has been taken down to keep information flow, decision bottlenecks have been broken down by reducing business tensions, frictions, and conflicts that arise. Thus, the digital leadership is less about controlling, more about influencing, mentoring, empowering, harmonizing and orchestrating toward the next level of the organizational maturity.

The future of the digital organization should present high responsiveness, adaptability and learning agility. They should keep experimenting with new things and exploring better ways to run the business, then applies those lessons to succeed in new situations and makes a leap of digital transformation. The more effortlessly you can contextualize business understanding, synchronize information flow, harmonize business relationships, align, integrate, and optimize the important business factors inside an organization, the closer you can accelerate performance and lead transformative changes seamlessly.

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The Monthly Foresight: Future-Driven Digital Management Practices June 2019

Digital leaders today should be able to navigate through the future of the workplace and workforce management by sharing a clear vision, providing directions and advancing leadership influence.

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most wanted trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? How to lead to the digital future effortlessly?

     Future-Driven Digital Management 

Navigate through the Future of Workplace and Workforce Management: Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics such as hyperconnectivity, interdependence, velocity, and complexity in various shades and intensity. Digital organizations need to be organized in such a way that it is a part of the hyperconnected modern world, solid enough to manage orders from chaos and fluid enough for adapting to changes and keeping the business highly responsive to the dynamic business environment. Digital leaders today should be able to navigate through the future of the workplace and workforce management by sharing a clear vision, providing directions and advancing leadership influence.

Running a Future-Driven Digital Organization Digital organizations are the living systems which keep growing and maturing. Organization of the Future is an organization designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of the “VUCA” digital new normal, hyperconnectivity and fierce competition. Reimaging the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unlocking business performance and potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form. Digital leaders must realize that you cannot wait until there is an immediate pressing task, continuous adaptability is necessary in an ever-changing world, in order to run a future-driven digital organization.

Running a Future-Driven IT Organization to Catalyze Growth? ROrganizations large or small are on the digital journey, corporate IT needs to shift from a back office support center to a future-driven growth engine. Because more often information is the lifeblood and technology is the disruptive force of digital transformation.

How to Learn from Feedback and Move toward the Future As Albert Einstein wisely said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results." We can live in a split second, or we can extend our presence to include the instance of our previous experience and also the opportunity of our future action. This is a different perspective on feedback because we effectively connect our past learning to our future operation.

Three Digital Balance Practices for Leading to the Future The digital era upon us means fast-paced changes, continuous disruptions, overwhelming information, and shortened knowledge life cycle. Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity. Leading evolutionary changes and driving business growth is the never-ended journey which takes planning, methodologies, and practices. It’s important to understand that digital management is multifaceted and holistic. Balance, growth, and harmony are not fixed, they are flowing. Here are three digital balance practices for leading to the future.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with about #5800th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The New Book “100 IT Charms” Quote Collection V

Running proactive IT goes beyond business and IT alignment, more about IT-business engagement.

The purpose of the book “100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready“ is to articulate different flavors of digital IT organizations and brainstorm the best and next practices for running highly innovative and high-performance IT. Digital charm is not based on the style presented on the surface but on a set of unique competencies to make IT shine through as a business differentiator.

Slideshare Presentation 

87 The goal of running high performance IT is to make improvement in business fundamentals and achieve high-performance business results in the long term.

88 Due to fierce competitions and rapid changes, making continuous improvement is critical for digital businesses to survive and thrive today.

89 Every IT project is a business initiative; compelling business cases describe the initiative’s benefits and cost flow.

90 Continually accelerating changes in IT digital transformation requires faster responses and better performance metrics.

91 Running a budget-smart IT organization takes principle, discipline, methodology, and practice.

92 Take multi-phased approaches to build transparent IT for re-energizing its value proposition and unleashing its full potential.

93 It is not the measurement that is important; it is what you do with the data obtained from the measurement.

94 IT performance needs to well reflect the multidimensional business value in which IT can contribute both strategically and operationally, to capture both short-term gain and long-term win.

95 IT leaders need to be fully aware of the promises and perils of performance management and play the number game wisely.

96 Outside-in IT performance perspectives and outcome-based measurement practices are important to improve IT maturity and focus on the performance of the entire organization.

97 Performance Management is a holistic management discipline which needs to connect many relevant dots to involve development, enablement, and enhancement.

98 IT is an enabler and catalyst for the company to reach the next level of business growth and maturity.

99 IT has to move up its maturity from a reactive support function to a business innovation hub, a strategic business partner and a digital game changer.

100 It’s not a matter of being reactive or responsive. It is not a matter of being fearful or brave. It is a matter of adding value to the business or not.

101 Frictionless IT catalyzes information flow, cultivates cross-functional communication, and accelerates business mobility.

102 Running proactive IT goes beyond business and IT alignment, more about IT-business engagement.

103 Running faster IT is the prerequisite for running a digital adaptive and high mature digital business.

104 Running a real-time digital IT organization means high-responsiveness, high intelligence, and high performance.

105 The pervasive changes or IT consumerism require the balance of “old experience” and “new ways to do things” the “learning and doing” continuum.

106 Organizations rely more and more on information and technologies; the IT department has more and more to overcome in running at the digital speed.

107 Every IT organization has to set its own pace; explore its own set of the best and next practices, build business competencies, and elevate digital maturity.

108 With rapid changes and continuous disruptions, adaptability is generally a requirement within digital business systems to accelerate the business speed and develop the organizational competency.

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The Business "Problem Framer": Where to Start

There are often multiple and inter-related dynamics behind complex problems and it’s critical to leverage effective tools, methodologies, or practices to frame the right problems.

We live in an era full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. The result is a higher risk of business conflicts and change inertia, etc. Organizations shouldn’t just respond to the dynamic digital environment in a reactive way. They need to have a deep insight to identify critical problems and take a holistic approach to solve them effectively. A solution is nothing if the problem is not perceived. Creating awareness of the problem is the first step, but where to start?

Internal (SWOT) assessment: The digital world is complex and uncertain, the world boundaries close in, business weaknesses and strengths are inseparable, opportunities are tightly mingled with threats and vice versa. Because in today's digital dynamic, business opportunities and threats cannot exist without a context of interactions. Everything depends on the time horizon used to define opportunities and threats.“SWOT” analysis is a good tool to help business leaders and managers ask great questions, put a category (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to certain characteristics of the organization, give them relevance in problem-framing processes. More specifically, keep conscious of business weakness or deficiency, frame the most critical problems or challenges facing organizations, and solve the issues with the largest potential impact on the long term success of the organization. In practice, one of the big pitfalls in business problem-solving is that too much focus is given to deal with the short-term threats without dynamic planning to leverage medium or long-term opportunities and vice versa. Thus, SWOT assessment help managers perceive problems insightfully, frame and solve problems systematically.

External assessments (benchmarks/customer feedback): Every organization is different with different requirements, technologies, and workforce, and they are at a different level of the organizational life cycle. The external assessment such as benchmarks or customer feedback provide the business management some invaluable input to diagnose business issues and frame the important problems need to be fixed. More specifically, benchmarking is like a quick health check that highlights the areas in which business improvement or a quick fix might be required. Feedback on business performance or outcomes helps the business management identify existing issues and make a timely adjustment for improving future performance in order to keep the business relevant. But keep in mind though, benchmarking usually means apple-to-apple comparison. Often, it can only provide a backward-looking perspective because the data, necessarily, refers to how both the 'peer group' and your own organization has performed in the past. The real-time feedback on action/realization/ implementation provides insights that can genuinely help management teams identify the emerging problems in order to improve business performance, customer satisfaction or the overall organizational maturity. They are useful tools to frame the right problems if being used properly.

Interdisciplinary problem-framer: We live in the hyperconnected and interdependent world with blurred boundaries and extended dimensions. The view of the complex business problem has multidisciplinary perspectives such as socio-cultural, socio-technical, socio-economic, organizational, scientific, artistic, and the philosophical, just to name a few. Thus, to frame the right problems, it’s the importance of framing the multidimensional thinking mindset first to identify critical business issues or spot emerging problems via interdisciplinary ecosystem lens. It is necessary to leverage digital management methodologies and practices, to enable business leaders or professionals framing bigger thinking boxes and gaining an in-depth understanding of the problems. More fundamentally, people are often the center of problems, not systems or processes. Every serious problem we face today has often been caused by human dysfunction - usually at the mindset level. In other words, the wrong focus, the wrong assumptions, the wrong value, the wrong ends or the wrong means. Thus, it is important to gain the necessary knowledge to understand the holistic digital ecosystems. Secondly, it is critical to understand how the people factor affects the business system. People have to frame a new mindset, learn how to apply the new lens of the digital era, acquire updated knowledge and new ways to frame and solve problems based on the expanded point of view and interdisciplinary practices.

Digital disruptions are inevitable and digital transformation is unstoppable. There are often multiple and inter-related dynamics behind complex problems and it’s critical to leverage effective tools, methodologies, or practices to frame the right problems, look for patterns rather than isolating causes and solving them systematically.

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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 6/27/2019

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking, brainstorming, innovating and sharing.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 5800+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.


Master Pairs of Paradoxical Roles of Innovation Leadership Leadership is all about change and innovation. We all know that the "good old days" of prospects knocking on your door are gone. The businesses and the world have stepped into the digital era with "VUCA" characteristics (Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity). Innovation is the most desired change. As change is often uncomfortable, yet the necessary part of reaching the future and sustaining business success. Innovative leaders are in strong demand, they are able to think of new ways to run the business and master the paradoxical roles of innovation leadership effortlessly.

The Monthly “Digital Boardroom” Book Tuning: The Strategic Competencies of Corporate Board June 2019 Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses in the right direction and achieve expected business results. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals.

The New Book “100 IT Charms” Conclusion: Shape High Mature IT Organization Organizations across vertical sectors rely more and more on information technology, and IT needs will only expand. Thus, the CIO’s ability to build differentiated business capability is now greater than ever. How well an IT organization can adapt to the dynamic environment directly affects the future of the business. IT charm is based on its core competency and unique styles of influence to run a digital organization. Slideshare Presentation

Leading Digital Transformation Steadfastly By Dealing with a Set of Paradoxes Smoothly Digital transformation represents the next stage of business maturity, which will improve how the organization works and interacts with its ecosystem, making people at the center of its focus. There is no prescribed formula to digital transformation. Building the bridge between today and the future requires vision, enthusiasm, planning, capabilities, and actions. It’s important to strike the right balance of a set of paradoxes and commit to a more responsive way of working to lead digital transformation steadfastly.

Running IT as Innovation Accelerator Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. Innovations in the digital era are coming at seemingly much fast space, IT can contribute significantly to business innovation because business initiatives today nearly always involve some form of IT facilitating for predicting, automating, changing, and innovating. The frequent disruptions and fierce competitions push businesses to speed up and grasp growth opportunities by running IT as innovation accelerator.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The New Book “100 IT Charms” Quote Collection IV

IT has to continue to evolve the digital dynamic and reinvent itself as a strategic business partner and an innovative game changer.

The purpose of the book “100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready“ is to articulate different flavors of digital IT organizations and brainstorm the best and next practices for running highly innovative and high-performance IT. Digital charm is not based on the style presented on the surface but on a set of unique competencies to make the IT shine through as a business differentiator.

Slideshare Presentation 

65 Digital CIOs have to develop a set of organizational core competencies and shift IT reputation from a cost center to a profit center.

66 IT has to continue to evolve the digital dynamic and reinvent itself as a strategic business partner and an innovative game changer.

67 The high caliber IT organization is at an inflection point to orchestrate critical business processes, tools, and products to drive digital transformation from strategy to deployment.

68 The challenge is about having a harmonized vision of overall IT management philosophy, capabilities, structures, and maturities in a digital organization.

69 Learn the business, be the business, and become the business.

70 Running a niche player IT means IT is agile enough to adapt to changes and nimble enough to ride above the change curves; IT is the business competency.

71 Defining the enterprise business capability is part art and part science.

72 Only functioning as a whole brain, IT can strike the right balance between stability and agility, creativity and standardization, innovation and risk intelligence.

73 With advanced management approaches and technologies, IT is moving up its maturity from functioning to firm to delight.

74 The versatile IT can only be run by versatile IT leaders and talented IT professionals.

75 The focus of digital IT needs to provide business capabilities, not just services or solutions.

76 The CIO role has never been just about managing the status quo, the digital shift for IT is to become an innovative and effective business solver.

77 The role of IT today for many organizations is a business solutionary and the constructor of business competencies.

78 Digital technologies provide new frontiers for work systems and information is the gold mind of the digital business.

79 Information Management is a key differentiator between digital leaders and laggards; high-performing organizations and mediocre companies.

80 IT plays a pivotal role in bridging the industrial age and the digital era.

81 Innovation becomes simply “creating value by solving simple or complex problems” timely.

82 The role of digital IT today must become the lubricant to fine-tune digital continuum, a solutionary to business problems, and an optimizer for business processes and capabilities.

83 To fix the root cause of dysfunctional system, you need to look out of the system in order to look into the system.

84 Due to the complex nature of technology and overwhelming growth of information, running simplified IT is not so simple, it takes the right strategies, methodologies, processes, and practices.

85 IT has to work towards building better credibility as a business solutionary and gain respect from business peers.

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The Monthly “Digital Fit” Book Tuning: Stretch the Strength to Keep “Digital Fit” June 2019

 The digital organization’s long-term advantage is based on its unique strength which can be built and stretched through the combination of talent, resources, processes, and technologies.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. But what are digital organizational traits, how to define digital fit and take a structural approach for digitalization?

Stretch the Strength to Keep “Digital Fit”

Building the Bona Fide Strength of Digital Business With rapid changes and overwhelming growth of information, neither business nor life is linear or static these days. The digital organization’s long-term advantage is based on its unique strength which can be built and stretched through the combination of talent, resources, processes, and technologies to perform a set of business activities and achieve high-performance business results. Here are three efforts to build the bona fide strength of the digital business.

How to Build Organizational Innovation Strength Today, innovation can happen anywhere, anytime; it expands both horizontally and vertically. But it’s common that many companies tend to focus on their core competencies and often forget about the value of innovation management. Without innovation, organizations would be upstaged by the competitors that are creative because disruptive innovation will happen no matter you prepare well or not. Every organization has the capacity to innovate both as one of the initiatives or in a sustained way; both at the individual level and organizational level. How to build organizational innovation strength by taking a logical scenario?

Inner Strength Comes from Mind or Heart Life is a journey. Stress and extreme circumstances will test us. Hopefully, we will survive. And in the surviving get stronger. Until you begin to look inside self to value the strength you never knew you had, you would ponder around: where does such inner strength come from your mind or your heart? inside-out or outside-in; should you focus on practicing the strength; or strengthening the weakness? From individual strength to collective strength, how to build a strong team?

Creativity Strength Creativity is clearly a competency at both individual and corporate level; the question is how to identify and build your creative strength, and how does it become the competitive differentiator and bring the financial benefit?

Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Strength Every person is unique and we all have our own strength and weakness. Knowing who you are or being self-awareness, allows you to become a better person or a higher quality professional. Knowing who you are and how you react and respond in different situations can help you understand and improve the cognitive, relational and assertive actions you take on a day to day basis, understand your strength also helps you to unleash your full potential and better manage your career path and professional life in the long run. What are insightful questions to assess your (or others) strength, not for making a pure self-judgment, but to understand yourself (or others) in profundity?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5800+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The New Book “100 IT Charms” Quote Collection III

 IT plays a significant role as a linchpin in knitting all critical pieces of the business into innovation competency.

The purpose of the book “100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready“ is to articulate different flavors of digital IT organizations and brainstorm the best and next practices for running highly innovative and high-performance IT. Digital charm is not based on the style presented on the surface but on a set of unique competencies to make IT shine through as a business differentiator.

Slideshare Presentation 

45 Modern IT has many faces. The “art of possible” is phenomenal to rejuvenate IT.

46 Foster innovation by leveraging disruptive technologies and streamlining information flow.

47 IT is the super glue to integrate people, processes, and technologies into unique business competencies such as innovation.

48 CIOs play the bridge role of combining the art and science of digital innovation and running IT as an innovation integrator.

49 IT is the key component in catalyzing digital innovation and building up differentiated innovation capabilities nowadays.

50 IT is the business in the business and digital growth engine of the entire organization.

51 An outlier does not lack knowledge but has interdisciplinary knowledge to see things differently.

52 Digital transformation represents a break from the past and presents a high level of impact and complexity.

53 The transcendence of information management to innovation management enables IT to help the company recharge the business model and build a competitive advantage for achieving long-term business prosperity.

54 IT plays a significant role as a linchpin in knitting all critical pieces of the business into innovation competency.

55 The priority for today’s CIO is to genuinely position IT as an integral and inseparable part of the business as the “digital whole brain.”

56 Digital is the age of people and options; it provides opportunities to think of new ways to do things.

57 Improvement and achieving the right balance in any truly customer-centric organization requires all team members to believe that things can be improved.

58 CIOs have to advocate for “departmental immersion” and other strategies to help IT become seamlessly integrated and be aware of the organization as a whole to achieve high-performance results.

59 Embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of the business venture.

60 IT leaders need to think like the anthropologist for running a people-centric organization to enchant customers, empower employees, and evolve business partners.

61 When you really understand or attempt to capture the insight about what the customer actually wants; it is when you can really develop an experience that fits them and their needs or desires.

62 Walking the customer talks is a broader and longer journey with many leaps and jumps, bumps and curves, perils and pitfalls on the way.

63 Modern digital technologies bring unprecedented convenience for people to learn and work, improve their productivity, learning agility, and innovativeness.

64 Innovation has to become the philosophy and part of the DNA of an organization.

65 It takes a few key building blocks including leadership, strategy, structure, and capability to shape a customer-centric digital business.

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