The Insight of the Week 4/23-4/30 “Future of CIO 2020

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 6700+ 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 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.

Orchestrate an Extensive and Real-time Digital Organization The digital organization is a dynamic system which needs to continue evolving and adapting, explicitly seeks to orchestrate a creative environment in which people can grow and innovate; businesses focus on long-term and holistic perspective, become highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, enable dynamic resources allocation, adapt to change promptly, grasp opportunities timely, and prevent risks effectively. Here are five aspects to orchestrate an extensive and real-time digital organization.

The Monthly “Digital Boardroom” Book Tuning: The Corporate Board GRC Practices Apr. 2020 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 Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Turning: CIOs as “Chief Inquisitiveness Officer” Apr. 2020 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.

Applying a Different Kind of Rationality to Manage Business Complexity One significant effect of today’s digital economy is increased velocity, complexity, unpredictability, and a need for a faster response to changes in businesses. Digital management is multidimensional. There are different kinds of rationality that apply to different dimensions of corporate management. There is physical or technical rationality. There is emotional or psychological rationality, and there is mental or spiritual rationality, just to name a few. Each arena has its own rules and norms. Organizational leaders today should take a holistic view and structural approach to manage business complexity and improve organizational maturity.

The Monthly Communication Brief: Communication Competency Apr. 2020 The great communicators are the high-quality leaders or professionals who can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding; the great communicators are the great artists who are fluent in creative expression or metaphorical description. Communication is both art and science. How to set principles and develop practices to improve communication effectiveness and build communication competency?

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking about 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 take 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 “Discrepancy” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

There is often a difference between what organizations say and what organizations do -the discrepancy between “talk the talk, and walk the walk.”

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. 

It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Discrepancy” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 There is a significant discrepancy between traditional linear management discipline based on silos and “command-control” style and nonlinear digital management based on holistic understanding and inter-connectivity.

2 When there is a discrepancy between IT perception of itself and the user perception of IT, the top management must work closely to understand the situation from the different perspectives and make an objective assessment of IT maturity.

3 There is often a difference between what organizations say and what organizations do -the discrepancy between “talk the talk, and walk the walk.”

4 Often, in siloed society with overly restrictive boundaries and knowledge scarcity, people who do the innovation practices or experiments couldn't "walk the talk"; while innovation theorists who often live in the "ivy tower," do not get the chance to practice their innovation theories. Thus, there are some discrepancies or gaps existing, causing the high rate of innovation failures.

5 The consistency or discrepancy between behaviors and practices on one hand and stated values, vision, mission, strategy, and risk appetite on the other, is what should be audited.

6 There's a measurement discrepancy between what matters for business and what matters for the customers. Often, what is most important is what the customer does not tell you -- their unarticulated needs.

7 The existence of a discrepancy representing a wild problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.

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An Organic Digital Organization with Systematic Characteristics

An organic digital organization with above systematic characteristics is able to break away from static, stale, and slow patterns, and be able to make the continuous adjustment, improve organizational responsiveness and manageability.

Compared to the traditional organization as the mechanical system to keep spinning, digital organizations today are more like the organic living system that keeps evolving and growing. To deal with today’s business challenge, System Thinking has emerged as a popular digital principle to make tough decisions and solve thorny problems.

Diversification, hyper-connectivity, nonlinearity, and interdependence, etc, are the very characteristics of the digital era, and digital organizations are organic systems with the following characteristics.

Systems have structure, defined by components and their composition: The digital paradigm is associated with deep ecology. Consider digital organizations as self-organized but interlaced systems which have their own purpose, and the processes are determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. Digital organizations usually have both official structures and unofficial structures that co-exist antagonistically or harmoniously defined by components. The system components concerns should include such as: What do you have (people, process, artifacts), what can you achieve in the defined time frame? What element do you add in which fiscal years, and what benefit does it provide you? Etc. Business is a system, every system has its position in the hierarchy of systems. System hierarchy provides system stability and resilience. The goal of tuning the organizational design and structure is to strike the delicate balance between solid and flow and shift the overly rigid hierarchical control to a more flexible and flatter structure with abilities to interact with the expanded digital ecosystem seamlessly.

Systems may have some functions or groups of functions: The individual business units inside the organizations are called business functions with business rules and processes, etc. Functional systems are business-oriented, with the purpose to accomplish business goals and objectives. However, in many organizations at the lower-level maturity, the business is the sum of pieces, such as silo functions, incoherent processes, overly rigid hierarchy, fractal structure, or bureaucratic management style, not running as a premium whole. To improve the organizational maturity, what can be unifying is looking at each function in the enterprise as a subsystem and then finding a unified means of looking at the essence. Modern digital organizations are not just the sum of functional pieces, but an integral whole.

Systems have interconnectivity: In systems, networks, or clusters are all about business interactions and relationships. Digital business systems are not just a set of interconnected components, but a set of interwoven threads. The business management should focus on harnessing cross-functional collaboration via iterative communications, robust processes, and management innovation; managing a portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and business interdependence with the appropriate mix of business elements and maintaining the right level of digital balance.

Systems have behavior: A system can be seen to have a purpose of its own when it produces behavior that involves information or data, inputs, processing, and outputs of material, energy, etc. The digital organization system provides a more intensive and effective working environment in which staff is motivated and empowered to make behavior changes with practices to improve productivity, efficiency, or creativity, and tackle challenges from right angles all at once. Keep in mind, most of the time. behaviors are driven by attitude, attitude results from thoughts, assumptions, and preferences. To reinforce good behavior, it’s important to provide people with sufficient and updated information, navigate people through new experiences, expose them to additional data through those experiences, and do that purposefully. The key point is to understand the elements that interact with each other and build the environment to produce good behavior.

Systems have "emergent properties": “Emergent Property" means a property that emerges after a system change such as a company merger. You might use "Emergent Property" for composite system variable value that is more or less than the sum of partial system variable values or means any outcome of a system in operation. It is important for the organization to identify emergent business properties, and how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses; products, and resources. To create business synergy, start with a set of emergent properties and then model the system that does or could produce them, make sure the system-of-interest is defined to establish the boundary and the properties that interact with the environment enables the business to achieve the defined goals cohesively.

An organic digital organization with above systematic characteristics is able to break away from static, stale, and slow patterns, and be able to make the continuous adjustment, improve organizational responsiveness and manageability. It is a dynamic system which needs to continue evolving and adapting, bringing greater awareness of intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, resource alignment, business capabilities, people dynamics, and technological touches, etc, to accelerate performance and reach the higher level of business maturity.

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The Monthly “Digital Boardroom” Book Tuning: The Corporate Board GRC Practices Apr. 2020

The corporate boards, as one of the most critical leadership pillars in modern organizations, play the crucial dual role of guidance and governance, to make a high impact on the digital paradigm shift.

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.

Here are the multiple perspectives of shaping a strategic boardroom with digital acumen.

The Corporate Board GRC Practices   

Building the High Impact Digital Board with Dual Roles of Guidance and Governance The fast-paced changes and overwhelming growth of information bring both significant opportunities for business growth and unprecedented risks businesses have to deal with. Organizations today are not mechanical systems that keep spinning in a static business environment, often go nowhere. Digital businesses are organic living things that need to continue growing in an expanding business ecosystem with high velocity and hyper-complexity. Therefore, the corporate boards, as one of the most critical leadership pillars in modern organizations, play the crucial dual role of guidance and governance, to make a high impact on the digital paradigm shift.

Three “G” Practices in Corporate Boardroom With rapid change and exponential growth of information, how successfully organizations can handle continuous digital disruptions depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment. The senior leadership of the organization such as BoDs, like the steering wheel, needs to navigate companies through uncharted water, to ensure their ships are moving in the right direction.

“Digitizing Board- The multifaceted Aspects of Digital Ready Board” Book Introduction Chapter 6 "Governance Champion" Board  The purpose of the board of directors is to direct and monitor the organization. This purpose is generally known as “corporate governance.” Governance is the structure and processes of authority, responsibility, and accountability in a business or organization. The ability of boards to oversee and advise management so as to ensure the best fit between short-term profitability and long-term sustainability. While “corporate governance” can be modeled in general terms, and while certain aspects of corporate governance are heavily regulated in some jurisdictions, there is no standard model for it because the context for corporate governance includes a wide range of circumstances and capabilities which are subject to constant variability. So Boards need to develop a good sense of the appropriate scope of decisions, and what is pertinent to its role versus what is really the purview of management.

A Board Beyond Compliance  Corporate governance is the system by which business corporations are directed and controlled. Compliance is the management discipline of designing and implementing effective steps to ensure that the company actually complies with the laws and regulations relating to its operations. There is a strong compliance element to corporate governance but corporate governance is about practice as well as policies. As one of the most important governance bodies, how can the Corporate Board go beyond compliance?

What’s the Digital Theme to Run a Global Board The world has become hyper-connected and interdependent, there are many common management practices in building a multinational organization. However, there are still very few truly global companies or empathetic global leaders or boards. From the corporate governance perspective, What’s the digital theme to build and run a global board?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 6700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. 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; 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 take 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 your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Slideshare Presentation

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The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As"  Introduction

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter 1 Introduction: The Digital Board's Composition Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter II Introduction: The Digital Board's Digital Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As": Chapter III Introduction: The Digital Board's Strategy Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter IV Introduction: The Digital Board's IT Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter V Introduction: The Digital Board's Leadership Inquiries

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The “Unusual” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

Creativity is an innate process with multidimensional thinking that generates unusual combinations of ideas or insight.

Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + "books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management.

It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Unusual” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Creativity is about connecting unusual dots, the connective mind is in demand to spark creativity and foster innovation.

2 The digital era upon us is volatile, complex, uncertain, and ambiguous, it’s important to shape high mature digital organizations via unusual angles for enforcing hyperconnectivity, interdependence, and people-centricity.

3 Creativity is an innate process with multidimensional thinking that generates unusual combinations of ideas or insight.

4 Digital leaders with strong metacognitive abilities can capture the big picture, connect unusual dots, understand patterns, discover the difference between seemingly similar things, and navigate the business context smoothly.

5 The important factor is acknowledging the culture as it is now and then works as a team to take it where you want to take it, through engagement, effective communication, respect, etc., towards a common goal. The burning example of this in real life is when an unusual thing strikes, almost all join together to deal with it as the purpose is clearly understood and accepted.

6 The Knowledge Management mechanism needs to be well embedded into critical key business processes to shape a culture of learning, broaden varying perspectives, connect unusual dots, motivate people to learn, share, and improve corporate learning maturity and organizational workforce intelligence.

7 To be creative, one would have to break down some old rules, as well as take risks to be perceived as unusual, strange, or misfit. In fact, thinking outside the box is all about "rule-breaking"; the more "unruly" you are, the more creative you are.

8 A free mind has the freedom to think about everything and connect unusual dots to spark creativity. Your mind has free will to be in logic. Your mind has a free will to be beyond logic, to spark creativity.

9 The outlier BoDs are “out of the box” thinkers who can bring the fresh viewpoint and “outside-in” view of businesses, take multi-dimensional lenses to oversee and advise business strategy, and connect the unusual dots for stimulating creativity across the industrial or territorial boundaries.

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The Aspects of Outcome-Driven Innovation

An innovation ecosystem is a systematic innovation methodological environment or a sort of "professional philosophy" for innovation. 

In the rapidly evolving businesses and economic systems, the creation of new innovations is very complex but critical for the survival and thriving of companies across industries. Innovation is the development of a new combination of available resources, in a way that solves problems in alternative ways.

Customers are one of the most important links in the innovation process. Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) focuses on customer desired outcomes. Here are three aspects of outcome-driven innovation.

Customer centricity: Digital is the age of customers, the customer is the center of innovation management and they are the major focus for innovation processes and accomplishment. However, often customers don't always know how to articulate the outcomes they seek and how unmet needs translate into application designs. Thus, the customer (including prospects) should be studied and observed. Gain a deep understanding of the customers through empathy and observation with the innovator using a more inductive approach as to what the customer wants to accomplish "next."

Outcome-Driven Innovation enables customers to participate in workshops to develop innovative solutions. For every need-driven and customer-centric innovation initiative, work closely with clients to articulate their important needs; define the most compelling and novel approach to addressing their needs. The motivational construct of the customer should be placed in a judgmental role, rendering a decision about an idea. It's also important to analyze the benefits per cost of that approach, and quantify why the chosen approach is better than the competition and alternatives. It helps to assure that the results of an innovative approach will have a positive impact on the clients, partners, end-users, and the marketplace.

Methodology: In essence, innovation management is about how to manage people, assets, time, resources, and risks to achieve high-performance business goals. Outcome-Driven Innovation enables the emotion to be removed from prioritizing unmet needs, that's why so many innovation experts encourage its application in producing innovation methods. What is needed today is top-down to be more about the vision of the outcome; let employees use their brains in helping solve for leaders' intent. Every process, every expenditure of time, talent, money, or energy, and every assignment of resources should contribute to innovation success directly or indirectly.

Methodologically, there are robust processes and tools that enable an entity to generate winning concepts for innovation management on a consistent basis and via an iterative approach. It requires much more time, energy, passion, courage, experimentation, retreat, and reflection to get clear and focused on innovative ideas, business models, processes or solutions, and to then enact, embody and execute in a disciplined way.

Metrics: Innovation is a managed process that needs to be measured to drive the outcome. An organization’s innovation performance could be measured in terms of its ability to convert the ideas that enter the ‘Innovation Pipeline’ into the desired output or process improvement etc, make rough estimates such as new products, improved services, cost savings due to innovation efforts. Normally organizations look for KPIs measuring business results generated by innovation efforts. But keep in mind, solely focus on quantifiable benefits or short-term results stifles innovation or sometimes misleads management in making ineffective decisions from the long term perspective.

It is not easy to define how much was generated from innovation. You choose the KPIs by deciding which are seen as critical to making progress in order to deliver better outcomes. The well-selected measurements for assessing outcome-driven innovation helps to clarify some critical issues such as the revenue generated by innovations launched in a certain time frame; what’s the tangible value have innovation efforts brought to customers, etc. All innovation initiatives, especially outcome-driven innovation, hopefully, are started to achieve some business results directly or indirectly. Just measure that result from innovation efforts objectively and effectively, more than to measure financial results.

An innovation ecosystem is a systematic innovation methodological environment or a sort of "professional philosophy" for innovation. The customer is the center of outcome-driven innovation management and they are the major focus for innovation process and accomplishment. Innovation is a journey that involves experimentation, trial, error, research, applying structured methods or tools, reviews, systematic analysis, and debugging, etc. It is therefore not possible to pre-describe how it will work out. The purpose of Innovation Management is to prepare and manage business elements for maximizing the transformation of an idea to achieve its commercial value.

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The Monthly “Digital Hybridity” Book Tuning: The Pervasive Digitalization via Continuous Balance Cycle Apr. 2020

It’s important to understand that digital management is multifaceted and holistic. Balance, growth, and harmony are not fixed, they are flowing.

The purpose of the book “Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift” is to shed some light on how to strike the right balance of stability and changes; being transactional to keep spinning and being transformational to leap forward for making a seamless digital paradigm shift.

Digital organizations should apply the hybrid management approach, focus on building a diverse, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid organizational hierarchy, inspire idea-sharing and brainstorming, and engage employees and partners to achieve the high-performance result.

The Pervasive Digitalization via Continuous Balance Cycle 

The Pervasive Digitization via Continuous Balance Cycles Over the last couple of decades, due to rapid changes and fierce competition, businesses have been faced with increasingly more complex and pressing problem-situations, embedded in interconnected business ecosystems operating in dynamically changing environments. The digital business cycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of shaping a vision or mantra reflecting the “mind and soul” of the company to accelerate the pervasive digitization via continuous balance cycles of participation, adaptability, expansion, innovation, and optimization.

Three Digital Balance Practices for Leading to the Future The digital era upon us means fast-paced changes, continuous disruptions, overwhelming information, and a 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 that 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.

Three “Balance” Practices to Run Digital IT With the increasing speed of changes and continuous disruptions often led by technologies, the digital era upon us is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. It blurs the geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays. The hyper-connectivity and IT consumerization bring both challenges and opportunities for IT to ride the exponential growth curves, unleash its full potential, and improve organizational maturity. Here are three “balance” practices to run high performance digital IT.

The New Book “Digital Hybridity” Chapter IV Introduction: The Hybrid Digital Management The digital paradigm has many dimensions, it is like solving a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces, easy to get lost when trying to capture the big picture. Digital Management is a hybrid and holistic discipline with mixed management styles for managing everything that is necessary to get people to adopt new ways of working and running a high performance and high mature digital organization.

How to Strike the Multitude of Digital Balances for Achieving a State of Dynamic Equilibrium Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business both horizontally and vertically. Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, change is unavoidable, firms that are skilled in managing digital dynamics can gain advantages in profitability, speed, business growth, and innovation enforcement. Organizations have to strike the multitude of digital balances that impact with each other in order to achieve such a state of dynamic equilibrium.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6700+ 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 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 take 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 “Frictionless” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

To break down silos and run a frictionLESS organization, organizations can build a highly integrated business platform, fine-tune organizational structure to enable business flow, idea sharing, harness cross-functional communication, and collaboration.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management.

 It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Frictionless” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 In a frictionless digital workplace, supporting multiple paradigmatics of demand means working with multi-sided forms of demand supported by correspondingly multi-sided platforms.

2 To break down silos and run a frictionLESS organization, organizations can build a highly integrated business platform, fine-tune organizational structure to enable business flow, idea sharing, harness cross-functional communication, and collaboration.

3 People are able to work across disciplines to either solve complex business problems or overcome common challenges, and the business possesses the integral capability to manage digital transformation frictionlessly in a structural way.

4 A frictionless IT catalyzes information flow, cultivates cross-functional communication, and accelerates business mobility.

5 IT organizational maturity is achieved via harmonized communication, frictionless IT-business integration, and effortless collaboration.

6 An effortless, productive, and painless/frictionless experience is the best. Invariably, the Total Customer Experience typically comprises a complex set or series of interrelated processes or steps.

7 To fine-tune a customer-centric organization, they need to break down silos, keep information and ideas flow frictionlessly, and manage knowledge holistically.

8 By peeling back the layers after the layer, individuals and organizations can discover why they think, feel, and operate the way they do. To put another way, to overcome change frictions, they must change the belief that causes the thoughts that creates the emotion.

9 In a frictionless digital workplace, dynamic business leaders, teams, and employees have a clarified vision to think with the long-term perspective, have a passion to drive changes with everyday digital narrative, and have unique competencies to orchestrate the retrospective change scenario for reaching the high level of organizational maturity.

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IT GRC Framework and Disciplines

The ultimate goal of IT governance is to ensure the business making the right decisions and steer the organization in the right direction.

Framework means the structural skeleton which defines building blocks and how these blocks relate to each other at the conceptual level; IT plays a critical role in strategy, data/IT governance, and risk management in the digital era.

IT governance and risk management must be integrated with overall risk management and governance processes. There are the following components in the GRC framework:

The organizational relationship that defines responsibility and accountability: There are complexities, competitions, conflicts, and controversies all over the places, organizations need to manage multi-layer and multi-dimensional business relationships such as cross-functional relationship, customer relationship, vendor relationship, etc, effectively. An organizational relationship defines responsibility, one of the key principles of assigning responsibilities is to reduce as far as the possible number of people who have to be involved in each task for enforcing accountability. Accountability needs a safe environment, shared accountability or collective accountability involves shared ownership, empathetic communication, necessary resources to succeed.

Organizations must seek a process for collaboration, accountability, and most importantly, integration to create business synergy. An effective IT GRC framework helps IT management define clear objectives, processes and structures required, resources, the authority of the system, and performance indicators with solid accountability and responsibility to deliver organizational objectives and implement business strategy steadily.

IT operational deliveries and results: The overwhelming growth of information and the shortened business cycle force IT management to become more rational and logical. While some organizations are perhaps excellent in the execution of project management, they may not have a high mature portfolio management processes with the GRC discipline in place. The effective IT applications portfolio blended with current digital trends can deliver significant benefits to the business, such as customer satisfaction, business optimization, and change adaptability, etc.

Portfolio management is essential to successful corporate governance and as such, a comprehensive fusing of a firm's strategic capabilities. The bigger the program and the longer the time between major delivery points, the greater the risk going up exponentially. Thus, a well defined IT GRC framework is important to priority settings, budget planning, resource reallocation, and technology diversions, etc, for not just delivering what the business asks for, but being able to provide the ”best solution” for the business.

IT Policy Management: The policy is a set of principles for decision making or guidelines to drive behaviors. The policy as a compass will guide all levels of the organization to function more as the human body operates with the cells and organs in a cohesive way. IT policies and principles provide a robust foundation that makes it possible to straightforwardly derive solution-level governance and ensure the effectiveness of IT management practices.

In practice, making good policy is actually part of governance discipline. Establish policies and procedures help to ensure understanding, ownership, and accountability by management and employees. No process works without policy. A process in and of itself must be governed or it won't be followed and the best procedure or program cannot enforce it. People in high-performance organizations follow the good policies voluntarily for their own benefit and make the workplace highly productive, autonomous, innovative, and delightful.

Risk management assessment and reviews: Organizations encounter more risks than ever due to over-complex business dynamics. Lacks risk awareness creates more blind spots uncovered and gaps unfilled. It is important for leveraging an effective IT GRC framework to identify vulnerability in the control via risk assessment and determine the potential range of consequences ($, business interruption, reputation, etc.). All of these are applicable to the entire IT organization (data, security, operations).

Risk Management mechanism needs to be well embedded in both soft business factors such as corporate culture and hard organizational elements such as processes or procedures, etc. Highly effective Risk Management is not just about risk mitigation or controlling, but more advanced as risk intelligence; because it enables the accumulation of enough resources to thrive by capturing opportunities in it and adapting to the uncertainty and changes.

Commitment compliance via meeting legal, regulatory, or corporate requirements: Compliance is the management discipline of designing and implementing effective management steps to ensure that the company actually complies with the laws and regulations relating to its operations. Information Technology brings significant opportunities and risks to the organizations today, the business expects IT to play a critical role in GRC, to ensure rigorous compliance with regulatory requirements in order to run and protect business flawlessly.

The effective IT GRC framework and compliance tool monitors change, alerts the organization to risk conditions, and enables accountability and collaboration around changes impacting each firm. Not only is compliance part of governance, in fact, depending on the industry and company situation, but a well-governed organization could also go beyond that compliance which is necessary and appropriate, to a state of compliance that creates a competitive advantage.

IT fails due to the lack of governance structure when dealing with complex IT management that involves a high level of change at the process, people, product, or technology level. The best approach for IT GRC has been the one that has aligned the framework approach with the maturity of the IT function and the expectations business leaders have, from ways of working, political equations among key leaders, and the decision-making approach in the organization. The ultimate goal of IT governance is to ensure the business making the right decisions and steer the organization in the right direction.

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The Monthly "100 IT Charms" Book Tuning: Running People Centric IT Apr. 2020

Digital IT needs to be run as a people-centric organization to enchant customers, empower employees, evolve business partners, and invite all sorts of business partners for feedback.

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.

      

People-centric IT 

Running a People-Centric IT Organization Traditional IT organizations are often inside-out operation-driven, mechanical and monolithic; nowadays with the increasing speed of change and lightweight digital technologies and services, digital IT needs to be run as a people-centric organization to enchant customers, empower employees, evolve business partners, invite all sorts of business partners for feedback, and ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time to make the right decisions. To put it simply, IT is a people-centric organization.

Digital CIOs as Anthropologist: How to Run a People-Centric IT organization Contemporary CIOs are no longer just glorified geeks, but business savvy strategists and versatile digital executives. Great CIOs have multiple personas, varying personalities, and impressive leadership profiles. Digital leadership sophistication is crucial in complex problem-solving and strategy management. Digital is the age of people, how to truly understand your people, and run a people-centric IT organization for improving business maturity?

The New Book “100 IT Charms” Book Introduction Chapter VI People-Centric IT organization Traditional IT organizations are often operation-driven, inside-out and monolithic, but the digital era upon us is about people. IT needs to be run as a people-centric organization to enchant customers, empower employees, evolve business partners, and ensure the right people in the right positions to get the right information at the right time to make the right decisions. IT should take preponderate importance in the coming year to make sustainable IT-business relationships and build a people-centric digital organization.

Three Clarities of Running a Customer-Centric IT Customer Experience Management is key to every business. It is not just important, it is vital for growth, development and to make sure you stay in business. IT has both internal and external customers. it has to deliver the quality services and solutions to delight internal users and engage employees in improving productivity and creativity. IT is also an integral and critical element in building business capabilities for digitizing every touchpoint of the end Customer Experience and building a customer-centric organization. So how to run a customer-centric IT organization?

The Multiple Aspects of Driving Success of Digitizing IT Digital businesses become more dynamic and hyperconnected, what technology is expected to do has changed significantly over recent years, although every company has its own circumstances. Overall speaking, IT has become so critical that there’s no function that can be run without certain information or technology evolved. IT also has to reinvent itself that it can be perceived as the strategic partner and innovation hub of the business. Here are a multitude of aspects to drive the success of digitizing IT.

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 minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6700 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating 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 take 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 “Variable” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr. 2020

The digital ecosystem is complex and volatile, being digital is the state of interconnectivity. A simple variable can be both cause and effect.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Variable” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Often we ignore the problems around us because we can't know the exact cause and effect so the solutions are vague, variable, or unknown.

2 Hard work is only one variable in the success equation, but it is one of the "controllable" variables.

3 Because of interconnectivity and the many potential options in a complex system, a small effect in one place can cause a cascade of events that produce deceptive output measures that are highly variable; thus producing averages that can be misleading as indicators.

4 The incomplete assessment of measurement variables would mislead the management making ineffective decisions or focus on short-term business results only. The comprehensive assessment of the measurement variable should tell the full story.

5 The emergent property implies varying meanings: You might use "emergent property" to mean a property that surprisingly emerges in system operation, or you might use "emergent property" to mean a property that emerges after a system change (a company merger). You might also use "emergent property" for composite system variable value that is more or less than the sum of partial system variable values.

6 General Systems Theory is a related modern concept to HOLISM: It says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated.

7 A correlation between two variables does not necessarily imply that one causes the other.

8 The digital ecosystem is complex and volatile, being digital is the state of interconnectivity. A simple variable can be both cause and effect.

9 Psychology itself would be very difficult to apply and pursue if critical thinking was not a variable in the equation of its realization.
10 Effective global leaders with culture empathy can lead effectively in a global business environment; articulate and embody the diverse values and culture of the organization; respect colleagues and reports with empathy; engage effectively with multiple internal and external stakeholders, customers and partners worldwide; make effective decisions by leveraging variable factors; create core competency to expand global business growth, and nurture a working environment in which global team and the virtual team can thrive.

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Apply Balanced Scorecard Approach to Measure Business Architecture Performance

The role of Business Architecture is to design and manage the digital business that can respond to multidimensional factors impacting business model, operations, and reputation.

 As the digitized business ecosystem becomes hyper-connected, over-complex, and interdependent, organizations all face fierce competition and an ambiguous digital environment with "VUCA" reality. Business Architecture (BA) should play a critical role in designing and managing future businesses that become truly proactive and move up the organizational maturity level.

The scope of BA is broad. To measure and monitor the effectiveness and performance of the BA, organizations can use the performance monitoring framework such as a Balanced scorecard which includes the following perspectives:


Cost reduction by standardization and resource consolidation: The business management systems have an architecture, an effective business architecture helps to manage business complexity and optimize the organizational cost significantly to better compete in a global marketplace. The challenge is to have visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs. The cost optimization metrics include such as forecast benefit, project cost (hard dollar & soft dollar), benefit/cost projection, a calculation of the cost to fix structural quality problems, etc. When selecting the right set of metrics to evaluate BA for cost optimization, ask whether the metrics can reveal anything meaningful for the identified purpose, and ensure the management buy-in for the metrics collection processes. BA performance can be assessed objectively via its cost reduction and complexity management efforts.

Improvement in business efficiency by process optimization: Business Architecture is more than a "hint of the business process." It contains most of the time, all primary business processes, and their interrelation or interconnectivity. The process-oriented BA perspective enables business management to make continuous improvement by system optimization and process streamlining. The goal of optimization is to eliminate unnecessary complications but improve the overall business capability management maturity, with better timeliness of reporting to tune operations and reduce waste. To measure BA effort in business efficiency means a way to measure how well you are doing in terms of available resources and budget. At some point in the enterprise evolution, business effectiveness and efficiency are also correlated specifically when the organization reaches its capacity.

The exploitation of opportunities by bringing innovation and research: The business ecosystem keeps evolving when the company broadens its scope and consumes resources of all types; authority, when the business architecture becomes stable and competition for leadership and profits within the ecosystem gets brutal and renewal, when continuing innovation must take place for the organization to thrive. BA enables continued strategic renewal through orchestrating cross-functional collaboration and the differentiated business competency in the business ecosystem. Measure BA’s effort to explore the business growth opportunities by facilitating and monetizing innovation, and providing a balanced focus on achieving both short term and long term objectives.

Solving business problems (merger, divestiture, expansion of business in new market/regions, new products, etc): Problems that arise in organizations are almost always the product of interactions of parts, never the action of a single part. Business Architecture is a strategic problem-solving tool for corporate leaders to gain a systematic understanding of business relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, interconnectivity, and orchestrate the organizational interrelationship between people and processes. To assess BA effort to solve prioritized problems, the main emphasis is in doing better pre-work, such as defining the measurement and the "success criteria," take consideration of the range of options, rather than the traditional "jump to solution" problem-solving method. The evaluation of problem-solving effectiveness with BA as a great tool is to ensure the real problems have been fixed and cause the least side effect as possible.

Enforcing governance to ensure an operational model of the enterprise is aligned for its vision: Governance can begin with a framework (such as BA) and a set of policies to be put in place, depending on the nature, scale, and complexity of the organization, to gain an in-depth understanding of one's risks and conduct. Evaluate BA as a governance enabler is to assess how effectively BA can be used to raise visibility and awareness for many things that are captured at the different levels of the organization, as well as how mature the governance should be handled and prioritized in such a manner that they're inherent in the way without negatively impacting the working flexibility to ensure clear and concise information to key decision-makers.

The role of Business Architecture is to design and manage the digital business that can respond to multidimensional factors impacting business model, operations, and reputation. The balanced scorecard approach to measure BA helps to set metrics, understand business results, make decisions, and assessing the business progress. Classically, BA delivers value from a long-term strategic alignment perspective. Increasingly, Business Management expects BA to have a clear calculation of ROI, and get both some quick wins as well as long term benefits.

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The Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Turning: CIOs as “Chief Inquisitiveness Officer” Apr. 2020

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.

    CIOs as “Chief Inquisitiveness Officer” 

CIOs as “Chief Inquisitiveness Officer”: Three Big “WHYs” to Reimagine IT for Getting Digital Ready Different IT organizations and enterprises are at the different stage of the business maturity, IT can be used as a tool, enabler, integrator, catalyzer, or a digital game-changer to meet the ultimate goal of an organization's short/medium/long-term strategic plans. Many IT organizations are at the crossroad, should they continue to be run as the cost center to keep the lights on only, and gradually become irrelevant? Or should they take the bold steps, move up the maturity level to get digital ready? The answer seems to be no brainer, but CIOs today, in fact, face numerous management dilemmas. They have to reimagine the new possibilities, convey a clear technological vision to both convince and deliver the alternative view of IT being a profit enabler and innovation engine. Digital CIOs are “Chief Inquisitiveness Officers,” they have to keep asking thought-provoking questions to brainstorm the better way to run IT.

CIO as Chief Inquisitiveness Officer: Can, Shall or How CIOs Say “I Don’t Know” At the industrial age, managers or leaders seem to be expected to have all answers, now businesses are moving to the digital era with "VUCA" characteristics (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), although there’s a mountain of data, and information is only a few clicks away, indeed, in many circumstances, finding an answer to a complex problem takes collective insight and collaborative effort. So, as a senior-level business executive, can, shall, or how CIOs say “I don’t know”? How does someone in the highly visible position such as CIOs say "I don’t know" about the key business issue or technology problems without compromising his/her authority, career, and influence?

“Does Superior Execution Require the Leaders’ Inquisitiveness? The characteristic of the Digital Era is the increasing rate of change and continuous disruption, and this isn’t going to change. Preparing a strategic plan is important because it points the organization in a direction where it can maximize its value position and reap as many benefits as possible. But the more challenging part is strategy execution, statistically more than two-thirds of strategy implementations fail to achieve the expected result. How to diagnose the root causes of problems? Does superior execution require the leader's inquisitiveness? And what is the best scenario to manage the strategy execution continuum?

Are We Entering the Digital Inquisitiveness Era? We are in a time of tremendous change, the dawn of digital age, the path to the next level of innovation, also the era of confusion and information overload. Can we participate peacefully, look forward optimistically, and engage constructively for mutual benefit? Are we entering the inquisitiveness era to stimulate imagination momentarily?

Harnessing Innovation by Practicing Open Leadership Styles Innovation is more than designing new products or services, it is about establishing and nurturing a way of thinking where innovation is in every aspect of the business. The art of innovation is that it involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel. The science of innovation is to take a structural approach to manage innovation. It requires collaboration, openness, sharing, and joyful teamwork. This is radically different from the command-and-control style of management. Digital leaders today can harness innovation by practicing open leadership styles and improve innovation management effectiveness.

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talent. 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 diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.

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The “Impulse” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

A combination of conscious and unconscious factors allow us to follow through our initial creative impulse; the idea generation process is also the capacity to focus.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Impulse” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Going digital means that you have to strike the right balance between chaos and order, stability and changes, and set a viable path to shape the impulse of a digital organization.

2 When our imagination is engaged, our passion flows, and our impulse to act is high. The higher the level at which we are engaged and stimulated to imagine, the more likely we are to take action

3 A combination of conscious and unconscious factors allow us to follow through our initial creative impulse; the idea generation process is also the capacity to focus.

4 To make a leap of digital transformation, forward-looking businesses leverage innovativeness as a basis for achieving the kind of transformative change that propels global growth. It requires that the top leadership team such as the board needs to be creative, develop the best and next practices to harness innovative impulse.

5 Optimism and Pessimism are very fluid perceptual phenomena. We do tend to follow our conditioning as a normative cognitive impulse - but - We tend to perceive reality in a selective way, in such a manner that we confirm our prior beliefs.

6 Adaptability is the characteristic that makes someone better at almost anything in an ever-changing environment. This doesn't mean changing things for fun or impulse but assessing an environment and adjusting to it (person, thing, event, etc.).

7 This is because the data giving rise to insights is contextually constrained for a specific purpose. The pathetic organizational impulse is to discard the structural and relational bedrock - the part that adds meaning and relevance to the data for purposes outside the original parameters.

8 Nature has its speed, impulse, and rhyming, from four seasons to time frame, from wax & wane of moonlight to ebb and flow of sea; nature leaders are also dynamic and innovative.

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Business Model, Business Strategy, and Business Architecture

Dealing with dynamic business reality is a strategy’s job from “Why Business Models Matter” to “How to leverage Business Architecture as a facilitation tool” for implementing strategy, driving change, and orchestrating digital transformation.

Today, “business model,” “business strategy,” and “business architecture” are among the most sloppily used terms in business; they are often stretched to mean everything and end up meaning nothing.

Business models describe, as a system, how the pieces of a business fit together. The business strategy articulates what you intend to do or accomplish in terms of managing both resources and constraints to having the critical success factors in place and achieve the set of strategic priorities. Business Architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and transformation.

Business Model is a simulation of different strategy scenarios; Business Architecture helps to leverage multi-choices of strategy: A strategy is an architecture for change. A real strategy is a complex scenario, and it is supported by a model - an analytical business model. People want to see how things add up. That is the difference between a business model and a business strategy. There is a process of considering different strategy scenarios. Each scenario is backed by a business model. The strategy scenarios are then compared based on their expected value. A business strategy is conceptual and usually consists of a set of choices about what to do. The business model is then the simulation of business strategy, and it is a numerical discrete event simulation. The real value of Business Architecture is about keeping the priority in balance and visualizing business improvement efforts.

A business model is a description of the way in which an enterprise intends to make money. A business strategy diagnosis problems; makes choices and takes actions. Business Architecture designs the fundamental organization of a business system: A business model describes what a business will do to make money. A strategy describes how a group of people should change their behavior to help either improve the ability of the business to perform as its model predicts or to change the model to behave differently. Business Architecture is the fundamental system of the business embodied in its components such as structure and processes, their relationships to each other for streamlining business flows, and to the value system environment, and the principles guiding the business design and evolution to realize the vision and implement business strategy.

The business model is usually a quantitative and analytical model for how the strategy will work. Business Architecture can bring together purpose, use, aesthetics, and more to create an environment to suit the purpose: The way that the business plans to make money is a strategy for making a profit. The business model is how they plan to do that. A business model's strength is that it focuses attention on how all the elements of the system fit into a working whole to implement the strategy. Business Architecture brings a systematic understanding of how relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business functions. The essence of a business model is that it defines the manner by which the business enterprise delivers value to customers, entices customers to pay for value, and converts those payments to profit.

In today's digital dynamic and unstable business circumstances, sooner or later, and it is usually sooner, every enterprise runs into competitors. The evidence points to strategy emerging rather than being prescribed. Dealing with dynamic business reality is a strategy’s job from “Why Business Models Matter” to “How to leverage Business Architecture as a facilitation tool” for implementing strategy, driving change, and orchestrating digital transformation.

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The Monthly Organizational Structure Tuning: Reinvent Digital Organizational Structure Apr. 2020

 To keep the digital fit, the organization has to keep optimizing its functional or structural design and management pyramid to achieve a high level of autonomy and the state of digital equilibrium.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, processes 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.

From an organizational structure perspective, how can you fine-tune the digital dimensions of your organizational development to harness innovation?

  Reinvent Digital Organizational Structure

Fair Reasons to Fine-Tune the Organizational Structure The digital organization is an integral business system with policies, cultures, work climates, people (employees, customers, partners, etc.) and processes. To keep the digital fit, the organization has to keep optimizing its functional or structural design and management pyramid to achieve a high level of autonomy and the state of digital equilibrium. The whole business ecosystem needs to communicate, negotiate, and cooperate with each other for catalyzing changes and harnessing innovation. Here are some fair reasons to fine-tune the organizational structure for streamlining the digital flow and improving organizational maturity.

Three Considerations in Reinventing IT Organizational Structure Many IT organizations or enterprises as a whole intend to reinvent their “stale” working environment with 20th culture such as bureaucracy, the inertia to change, reward mediocrity, homogeneous leadership & talent team, over-complex business processes, inefficient communication pipelines, etc. However, reinventing organizational structure is not an easy task, it takes both strategic planning and operational alignment to make it work and improve organizational maturity. Below is some collective insight on how to reinvent the IT organizational structure and build a highly creative and productive working environment.

Three “DE” Effort in Digitizing the Organization Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Businesses become hyperconnected and interdependent and get involved in the dynamic digital ecosystem all the time. Given the power of the cloud, social, mobile and analytics digital technologies to fuel business innovation, capability orchestration, and employee collaboration, digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business. However, the journey of digital transformation is a thorny journey, not a flat street. You have to remove the roadblocks and eliminate the barriers all the time. Here are three “DE” efforts to shift from “doing Digital” -applying digital technologies to “Being Digital” - Running a highly mature digital organization.

Key Design Characteristics of Digital Organizational Structure As we are going forward towards radical digital transformation, business management is responsible for enabling a collaborative, innovative, and productive working environment. Design thinking does need more recognition as a “mainstream” thinking in business management disciplines and problem-solving processes and practice.

Three Aspects of Designing a Viable Digital Organization? Digital organizations are the complex ecosystem with the blurring line between functions and geographic locations. Going digital is a long journey with all sorts of barriers and pitfalls on the way. You have to strike the right balance between order and chaos, change and stability, innovation, and standardization. Viability is one of the very characteristics of the digital organization. You may leverage design thinking to reinvent an organization that can enforce collaboration and harness innovation by creating business synergy, maintaining viability, and making strategic effects.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6700+ 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 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 take 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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