Friday, July 31, 2020

The Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Turning: CIOs as “Chief Inspection Officer” July 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 Inspection Officer” 

 

Scrutinize IT Cost, Complexity, and Footprint via Architectural Lens Due to the increasing pace of change, the exponential growth of information, and fierce competition, IT plays a critical role in leading digital transformation. The value-based IT management can leverage useful tools like IT architecture to gain a holistic view of IT cost, complexity, or footprint, be able to increase visibility, and shape varying options to improve IT manageability.

Cause-Effect of IT Planning Fallacy IT management is complex and multifaceted, IT planning is an integral component of business strategic planning. To make planning effective and practical, IT leaders must ensure the organization has a clear vision, well-defined strategic goals, and gain the contextual understanding of the inter-connectivity of both visible and invisible business success factors.

Unpuzzling IT Complexity Information is growing exponentially and the nature of technology is complex, there is a multitude of complexities in the organizational scope. The emergent digital complexity includes hyper-connectivity, hyper-diversity, and hyper-dynamism. The goal of an IT organization is not to make things more complex. The fact is that IT has to become the business optimizer for managing complexity and unlocking organizational performance. Unpuzzling IT complexity means to improve IT organizational maturity from functioning (have redundancy) to firm (work solidly), to delight (“just right” simplicity).

Assess IT Applications by Setting Good Criteria Due to the increasing speed of change and the overwhelming growth of information, business executives really do see value in emerging digital technologies. And they're strong believers that the future will rely heavily upon information technology. At the same time, they're frustrated with "outdated" IT-led business solutions that don't live up to their expectations.

The Various Causes of Dysfunctional IT The contemporary organizations have different functions, structures, layers, and systems with Information Technology as the linchpin. The digital paradigm shift has come to a change in organizational forms away from the overly rigid hierarchies managed through command and control to more fluid and responsive network forms.

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.