Welcome to our blog, the digital brainyard to fine tune "Digital Master," innovate leadership, and reimagine the future of IT.

The magic “I” of CIO sparks many imaginations: Chief information officer, chief infrastructure officer , Chief Integration Officer, chief International officer, Chief Inspiration Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Influence Office etc. The future of CIO is entrepreneur driven, situation oriented, value-added,she or he will take many paradoxical roles: both as business strategist and technology visionary,talent master and effective communicator,savvy business enabler and relentless cost cutter, and transform the business into "Digital Master"!

The future of CIO is digital strategist, global thought leader, and talent master: leading IT to enlighten the customers; enable business success via influence.

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Initiativestoorganizationalconvergence

It takes planning, methodologies, technologies, and practices to improve convergence effectiveness.

Hyperdiversity and overcomplexity are part of the new normal; organizations need to enhance integral management disciplines such as strategy, change, information technology, process, people management, etc. The digital era upon us means convergence, connectivity, and collaboration.


Convergence cycles consolidate, optimize, prioritize, and implement the best of business initiatives based on top business goals or resource availability, to bridge digital divides, achieve multifaceted business value, improve organizational agility, innovation and maturity.

Cross disciplinary science convergence to enhance holistic management discipline: Business management is both art and science; science is the discipline to progression, The convergence of hard and soft science allows people to see further, deeper, and cross disciplinarily for making meaningful movement, enabling people to understand issues from expanded lens, holistically, bake special formulas to solve complex problems smoothly.

Science, as a response to the use of positivistic methods for studying human phenomena and reinventing contemporary society, has embraced more holistic approaches to analyze, synthesize, induct or deduct, break down problems into smaller pieces; or integrate different pieces into the whole. The hard sciences such as mathematics, physics, engineering, etc, claim objectivity by way of structured methods and empirical data sets of assessment and measurement. Soft science such as anthropology, psychology, philosophy, etc, is the foundation for us to understand people or societies holistically, not just try to fix issues, but to prevent or resolve problems effectively.

Information technology convergence:
We are stepping into the digital age with the convergence of enterprise IT and IT consumerization. IT is moving from a monolithic support center into a lightweight value generator. The very characteristics of digital organizations are hyperconnected, and interdependent; IT as a glue integrates different elements into unique business competency, keeps their organization fluid, flexible, informative, autonomous. The consumerization of IT changes the way people work and learn; today’s customers and employees expect applications to be as intuitive and task-oriented to improve their productivity, engagement and creativity.

As organizations make transition to a more "real-time enterprise"; the whole move towards non-monolithic applications has already happened. Consumerization of IT presents an opportunity for IT organizations to speed up the move toward being a proactive service provider. One of the biggest impacts from the consumerization of IT is in setting a new standard for what businesses expect from IT. It is actually a golden opportunity for IT to take the converging journey of digitalization, modernization, and innovation by enabling, optimizing and governing the consumer-driven information technology management.

GRC convergence:
GRC is not about a single role or reporting structure, as there are separate functions/roles. Neither is GRC about lumping them together but allowing different roles to work together in harmony. An understanding of the relationship between corporate governance, risk management, compliance, controls, and strategies is fundamental to the successful implementation of GRC convergence.

In practice, the higher the complexity of the organization, and the complexity of the environment in which it operates, the higher the requirement for communication, coordination, and control in order to identify and manage risks quickly, meet performance baselines and generate multifaceted business value effectively. This asks for dynamic risk management resulting in a dynamic and integral GRC solution. The more diverse, the more geographically dispersed an organization becomes, the more important an integrated GRC approach becomes.

In the current dynamic environment as changes appear more often and fast, how can you achieve the company’s strategic goals or objectives fast, safe and cheap? When many ideas do not turn into innovations, business initiatives cross-boundaries do not generate multifaceted value, that is the 'fault' of careless convergence which leads to inadequate execution. It takes planning, methodologies, technologies, and practices to improve convergence effectiveness. Organizations need to capture emerging trends, keep consolidating, integrating and innovating, to improve business agility, optimize cost, and increase business speed smoothly.

Unification

Influential leadership and effective management processes should be developed to help communicate concepts and goals smoothly, drive changes via the "pulling" factor and anticipate with unity, orchestrate a large scale of changes at a much faster rate with much broader impact in the digital era.

As both the natural world and the human world are so dynamic with a balance of energy, running a healthy organization is to appreciate diversity and bridge differences, manage continuum with focus. 

It’s important to deal with business complexity with interactive pieces and conflict goals via interdisciplinary and empathetic lenses, embracing uncertainty, identifying interconnections and interdependencies, understanding flows, unifying a set of common goals, and expediting collective progress.

The essence of seamless flow is unity in variety: There is information diversity, biodiversity, ecosystem diversity, etc. Don't judge anything until you can engage with the idea flow, then look more closely at the mechanisms that are creating the flow, and appreciate the diversity in unity. Either looking into the natural world or business world, vision needs to embrace a variety of colors, not just black and white. The best visionary leaders embrace the full spectrum of colors, respect the diversified point of view, bridge understanding differences, and move energy to a higher level by offering a clear vision of what is possible.

The unity of purpose leads to cross-boundary collaboration: If there is unity of purpose while there are different viewpoints, practicing empiricism should help to resolve the issue by integrating thoughts and viewing, harnessing cross-functional communication & collaboration. Even if people disagree with a certain subissuess, they really ought to understand why and what they are disagreeing with. From surface interesting facts understanding to deeper cause-effect reasoning, it's the deeper ones that change the mindset; it’s the effective communication to unify multifaceted understanding, it’s a systematic approach to integrate to ensure the whole is superior to the sum of pieces. Collaboration, teamwork, and unity bring strength.

Purpose of unity leads to strategic goal implementation:
From surface interesting facts understanding to deeper cause-effect reasoning, understanding of complex problems should be enhanced at many levels and it has to be explained from many perspectives. It’s critical to unify the varying viewpoints, variety of information, and diverse cultures to gain a holistic understanding of issues and problems facing us. Once the staff appreciates their objectives and with a purpose of unity, they should be pulling together, so leadership should be able to implement their strategic goals appropriately. Complementary teams collaborate to co-create ideas, competitive teams compete by generating fresh ideas, they can both produce positive results if setting the unification tune for problem-solving. To unify common beliefs, bridge differences, and explore the emerging digital horizon, the management needs to connect the right dots, applying an effective framework approach to structural problem-solving, and improve business effectiveness.

Companies today need to understand the dynamic competitive landscape, make alliances with global ecosystem partners that can help the business succeed. Influential leadership and effective management processes should be developed to help communicate concepts and goals smoothly, drive changes via the "pulling" factor and anticipate with unity, orchestrate a large scale of changes at a much faster rate with much broader impact in the digital era.

Illustrateleadingindicators

Select the right set of leading indicators of improvement, innovation, and investment, and measure them effectively.

Organizations across the industrial sector are faced with frequent disruptions and constant changes. In order to not only survive today, but also thrive in the future, one of the most crucial strategic imperatives for them is to identify business strength and develop their collective potential to accelerate future performance. 

The concept of leading and lagging performance indicators, relies on an understanding of the cause-effect relationships between Key Performance Indicators in the different perspectives. Leading indicators focus on measuring the effort with a longer-term investment perspective; it takes multiple periods to have an effect on the financial KPIs. That is why they are seen as "lead indicators."

Learning and growth are “leading indicators”: The learning & growth perspective is where organizations build institutional capacity and capabilities. Investments in talent learning and professional growth affect the corporate culture and values, especially on innovation and empowerment. Visionary business executives and talent managers have a unique perspective to define leading indicators, encourage learning and employee career advancement, discover business strength, and explore organizational potential. They set relevant leading indicators to assess the effectiveness of culture development, employee rotation programs, creative activity facilitation, differentiated business competency, with the goal of bringing tangible potential maximization.

Leadership and talent training are “leading indicators”: Training and development plans for the individual need to be in line with what the organizational needs for the future. Because it is based on need, it has a greater chance of a successful outcome. Leadership development programs followed by an assignment to test the application of learning during the entire assignment goes a long way in making it a success at both personal and organization levels. Thus, setting relevant leading indicators enables the management to keep track of progress of such programs. You can do all of the training you want to do, but if you don't let people get some practical experience at leading, they don't get to apply what they learned to practice. It’s also important to provide them information-based feedback, allowing them to keep improving. So the relevant leading indicators enable the management to make an objective assessment of long term return on investment, and continue building business advantage.

Process optimization is a “leading indicator”:
Processes underpin business capabilities. Process management effectiveness and efficiency achieved through process optimization directly impact business management success, especially for the long run. Process related parameters or leading indicators should be set right once the processes for improvement are identified, to build business capabilities which directly impact the success rate of strategy management. Process optimization efforts to improve customer satisfaction are usually dependent upon a large number of internal business processes working effectively and efficiently; to digitize touch points of customer experience; or produce the product or service demanded by the customer at a customer-value proposition selected by the organization. Process measures are therefore considered lead indicators of customer satisfaction.

There is a cause and effect relationship between objectives and the associated measures; select the right set of leading indicators of improvement, innovation, and investment, and measure them effectively. It's important to collect the right data and measure leading indicators in the right way, for motivating organizations to unleash full potential. By clarifying the concepts such as leading indicators and lagging indicators, organizations can develop strategy mapping, execute and measure things holistically, create multifaceted business value tangibly.

Inclusion

Inclusion becomes an integral leadership tone and managerial process for maximizing collective human potential and improving business maturity.

We are idea-rich and vision-clear through inclusiveness; inclusiveness has the positive connotation associated with the words such as information, intention, or intelligence.

 “Incluversity” (Inclusion + Diversity) allows us to explore options that one individual or a homogeneous group might not have uncovered; collectively, an inclusive organization is immersive, informative, interactive, interdependent.




Inclusive leadership: Leadership is an influence based on leaders’ unique character, mindsets, strengths, and personalized styles. As we move forward and upward, we will understand that we are all leaders with different expertise in the different arena with our own subject domains. Inclusion only happens when the ‘inclusiveness mindset’ is available with top management. 

Forward-looking organizations proactively cultivate authentic leaders who can amplify their influence through their personalized leadership core value, styles and practices. Great leaders build a fearless and inclusive working environment to spur creativity; recognize talent, and support people and also stretch them to live to their full potential.

Inclusive understanding: Each of us is a complex blend of contrasts: positive and negative; intuitive and logical with imperfect judgment. Embrace inclusiveness includes different thinking styles and cognitive differences. It’s critical to close the gap between subjective perception and objective perception, integrate thoughts to address ignorance, minimize assumptions for making sound judgments in the team setting. 

Even though people have different intent, personality traits, working styles, It’s important to get managers to recognize how inclusion improves retention, engagement, etc, as opposed to being an exercise in mandatory compliance, reinventing new knowledge, and developing creativity cohesively.

Inclusive culture:
Inclusion needs to be set as a digital culture tone. Culture improvement is critical; actually, one of the most challenging aspects of people management is about understanding the role that organizational culture plays in the distinctiveness of the organizational capabilities. Effective inclusion efforts can bridge innovation gaps and build a complementary team to generate creative alternatives regularly and frequently. 

There are lots of ways to build a culture of inclusion and empowerment. Technically, corporate culture is created out of the systems, processes, human capital, and associated continual development, organizational hierarchy, and strategy design. It's important to apply inclusiveness as a principle with a set of processes & practices to share the challenges and collective wisdom, line up on a shared target, maximize the collective human potential, and improve organizational unique competency.

We are stronger through appreciating diversity and advocating inclusions. Inclusiveness has to go beyond as a "check-the-box" compliance tool, it’s crucial to build an inclusive working environment that willingly confronts varying conflicts, tensions, and makes changes. So inclusion becomes an integral leadership tone and managerial process for maximizing collective human potential and improving business maturity.

Illuminateleadershipviablogging

Isn't it a tough journey to write 9600 blog postings - to pursue the digital way of brainstorming, innovating and story-telling?

Leadership is complex yet simple: Complex in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. Simplicity in that the substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about the future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation. The purpose of the book: Leadership Master - Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity is to convey the vision of digital leadership, share the insight about leadership maturity, and summarize five emergent digital leadership trends Here is the monthly tuning of digital leadership.


               Illuminating Leadership via Blogging


Illuminatingleadership Isn't it a tough journey to write 9600 blog postings - to pursue the digital way of brainstorming, innovating and story-telling? Leadership is complex and situational; there are numerous variables that need to be leveraged in assessing contemporary leadership effectiveness. Leadership is complex, although it has many facets; at its core, the foundation of leadership is based on authenticity, developing interdisciplinary knowledge and multidimensional intelligence to inspire creativity, deal with paradox, overcome silos, advocate inclusion to make progressive influence..

Illuminateblogging Blogging is -like you are - designing, solving - your own jigsaw puzzle, with thousands pieces in it; shuffle it, reimagine it, discover clues, underneath, assemble it, piece by piece, patiently; glue it up as- a holistic picture, unbelievably.

Interdisciplinaryleadership The increasing level of uncertainty and complexity, hyperconnected & hyper-diverse nature of digitalization breaks down the functional, geographical, organizational or even industrial border, businesses today become much more nonlinear, interconnected and interdependent than ever. It means to have better opportunities to connect the cross-boundary dots if ever it makes sense.

Innovateleadership The hyper-connectivity, knowledge abundances makes everything so transparent. There is the emergence of a new breed of organization that is held together by vision and inspiration rather than fear and control; by purpose and engagement rather than silo and inertia; by growth and learning rather than complacency and stagnation.

Inspirationalleadership In face of “VUCA” reality, the corporate leaders need to observe, perceive, and pay attention to the myriad of internal, external, national or global forces that define and influence the way we do business and run contemporary societies these days.

Initiateleadershipinterface Leadership is about direction and change; it’s the influence based on philosophy and a set of practices to persuade and innovate. Blogging is a type of thought flow, energy glow; it is the flow that casts its glow, sparkling a radiance all around. It’s a tough journey to celebrate 9100 blog postings - to pursue the digital way of brainstorming, innovating and story-telling.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached million page views with about 9600+ blog postings 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 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 your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

Illuminatealternatives

Alternative is about -choice, creativity, freshness; people enjoy -alternative ways to -learn, work, purchase, today. Can you -tailor their needs to-provide choices, make them feel- special, empathetically?

The world we co-share is-

hyperdiverse, over-complex,

full of color theme,

mixed sound tones,

can you gain -

enriched knowledge,

understand -

different viewpoints,

to solve problems,

alternatively?


The "view of -

the digital landscape has-

many dimensions,

informatively,

anthropologically,

ecologically;

even though there’s -

only one destination,

it may take a multi-route to -

get there;

can you explore -

alternative paths,

take adventurous journey,

courageously?


Alternative is about -

choice, creativity, freshness;

people enjoy -

alternative ways to -

learn, work, purchase, today;

can you -

tailor their needs to-

provide choices,

make them feel-

special, empathetically?


Alternative is about -

innovation, insight, inclusion;

a "decision" has -

lots of -

connotations of finality;

one alternative perhaps has-

a lot more strengths than another;

can you frame-

the right question -

to determine -

the kinds of alternative,

emerging from -

choices largely?

Shall you study-

the choices,

select the best implementable,

tap alternative pipelines to -

recruit,

take alternative channels to -

communicate;

generate distinct alternatives to -

solve problems,

innovatively?

Initiateboardgrcoversight

Governance is about doing the right things, and cannot be completely automated, it is a fundamentally human activity. 

Governance is like the steer-wheel to ensure organizations running in the right direction and head to the destination. Good governance is less about structure and rules than being focused, effective and accountable, with a great impact on corporate performance. 

The corporate board directors as the digital overseers today need to understand things and circumstances in a holistic way, deal with opposing views, cultures, constraints, and competitions, in order to steer the business in the right direction, help the business achieve high performance with consistency.

Business model oversigh
t: Contemporary businesses are dynamic and informative, the business context reflects both complexity and chaos, each of these contexts requires intelligence into effective business innovation. They need to reinvent business models and create new revenue streams in face of fierce competition. rapid changes. At a conceptual level, a business model includes all aspects of a company’s approach to develop a profitable offering and deliver it to its target customers.

There are different approaches and various tools could be taken to innovate business models. Insightful BoDs can ask open-ended questions to business management, methodologically review a list of levers for business model innovation, clarify the business competencies, strategic concerns, to ensure the business model innovation can bridge the “to be” state of business with the business realities of today.

Business value chain oversight: The purpose of running a business is to create customers and generate value to its shareholders. The value of the organizations goes beyond economic value, to include other forms of value such as employee value, customer value, supplier value, alliance partner value, managerial value, brand value, educational and societal value, etc. BoDs can leverage the lens of business capability and its ecosystem perspective, to understand multidimensional organizational value, the value chain of business, and the value chain of the business ecosystem in which it permeates deeply and competes fiercely .

With a clear business value stream view, all parties can agree on the common value propositions. Corporate board’s value chain oversight helps the management to break down silos, enhance holistic management disciplines, lubricate multifaceted business relationships, and improve organizational effectiveness.

Crisis management oversight
: The corporate boards oversee risk management effectiveness, an effective crisis management plan is an essential part of a company’s overall approach to risk management and business continuity. At crisis points, this is when change becomes inevitable. The right attitude is to be responsive to the situation and deal with it proactively. Along with reputation oversight, crisis oversight as a component of overall risk management oversight, has become an increasingly important issue for corporate boards.

The corporate board must be comfortable that management is identifying and appropriately responding to risk, and that the board itself is apprised of the most significant risks facing the company. Corporate boards need to keep shaping their leadership competency and improving governance effectiveness. With the corporate board’s oversight of effective GRC discipline, the crisis can be overcome by working harder and smarter.

Governance is about doing the right things, and cannot be completely automated, it is a fundamentally human activity. Sound governance is part of eliminating risk and improving business effectiveness. To oversee a variety of business success factors and key leverages, the top seasoned board of directors with decades of experience should clarify the vision and share invaluable lessons in the past from time to time insightfully. In a high mature organization, governance must be viewed and assessed at the enterprise level, developing innovative governance practices for accelerating business performance continually.

Illuminatelogicofhybridity

It is important to clarify the hybrid logic behind complex problems, discover patterns, and capture profound insight in order to make effective decisions and solve them in a structural way.

We live in the hybrid world with hyperdiversity and all sorts of alternative solutions. Digital leaders and professionals need to leverage hybrid logic which is based on a set of interdisciplinary and integrative thoughts and reasoning to understand the complex world and solve many of today’s complex problems that require strategic consideration, systems understanding, cross-cultural and cross-generational perspectives to come up with innovative approaches.


Hybridity of analytical logic and intuitive logic: Analysis is about using quality information to capture fresh insight. Intuition is the ability to have quick insight. So analysis is “slow thinking” logic, and intuition is a quick thinking logic. Many may think intuition is opposite to logic, but more precisely, an intuitive mind is a complementary thought process to rational thinking. Hybrid logic enables us to balance out the biases from which the poor decisions are made. 

In the human context, information analysis + intuition drives awareness and discernment, following the logical steps in decision smart: Study the situation; ask questions; collect information; articulate logic; filter out the bias; perceive the consequences, assess the outcome.

Hybridity of rationality based on hard science and nonlinear logic based on human science: There is logic behind any problem, it’s important to avoid the trap of emotional turbulence or unconscious bias based on personal perception, incoherent logic. Besides rational reasoning based on hard science such as mathematical induction-deduction scenarios, the nonlinear logic can be clarified by digging into the cross-boundary disciplines about complex problems, physiologically, sociologically, or philosophically. To put simply, human science provides a great angle to understand issues comprehensively in order to handle them holistically. 

Digital leaders and professionals should listen to the stories from the opposite sides and take the multidimensional lenses to perceive the multi-facet world via interdisciplinary inference or reasoning. They are able to see things underneath and around the corner, be sensitive to the emerging trends, and take a balanced view of digital flow in order to solve problems smoothly.

Hybridity of critical thinking logic based on independent understanding and collaborative logic based on collective insight:
Given the complexity and uncertainty of the business world and given the fallacies of individual decision-making, more often than not, lack of knowledge and scarcity of insight lead to poor decision-making. Independent thinking is extremely important to make sound judgment in the digital era in which information is only a few clicks away, but the true insight has been inundated with outdated knowledge. Independent thinking means you do not follow others' opinions blindly, but practice critical thinking, analyze and synthesize all sources of information to form your own opinion. 

However, each individual has a limited cognitive threshold. It is always beneficial to communication, interpretation, and accuracy of overall results when multiple heads with cognitive differences come together to interpret and define information sources and outcomes. Such collaborative logic helps to balance out the biases, generate more viable alternatives, resources, criteria, etc, all of which is shown to improve the quality of understanding.

The problems today usually have many causes and can be very complex, you can't figure out the exact cause and effect so the solutions are vague. You cannot make a true paradigm shift without an in-depth understanding of the digital interconnectivity and embracing the multitude of digital hybridity. It is important to clarify the hybrid logic behind complex problems, discover patterns, and capture profound insight in order to make effective decisions and solve them in a structural way.


Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Illuminateriskintelligence

The ubiquity of information has provided both growth opportunities and increasing risks to organizations across industries.

In business, every day is a risk, the generic risk management includes how organizations manage technical, economic, legal, political, social and reputation risks, etc. Risk management requires clear vision and a strategic mindset, and be cautious of hidden pitfalls from achieving business goals. 

Organizations have to look into an unknown future, envision unseen, and attempt to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities, to improve business agility and resilience.


Integrating risk management into the everyday business operation helps to move the organization forward in business excellence: The more diverse, regulated, and geographically dispersed an organization is, the more important an integrated or federated risk management approach becomes .Instead of risk management being viewed as the role of a few people in risk management, it needs to be viewed as the responsibility of every person in the organization, to assess their risk appetite, increase risk awareness, cultivate a good attitude to enhance risk management discipline.

An organization sooner or later will hit some crisis points in which a disruptive and unexpected event threatens to harm the organization. Strong risk management needs to be integrated into organizational culture-collective mindset and behavior to run a risk intelligent organization. All people must support it if the management wants to improve risk management effectively in organizations. It's important to increase corporate reputation capital, embed risk control mechanisms into key business processes, measure, manage, or model risk, not just control risks, but improve risk management methodology, technology, and overall risk intelligence.

Using information based analytics or feedback-feedforward cycle to optimize decision-making and improve risk management: With frequent disruptions and exponential growth of information, high velocity and uncertainty, risk analytics tools help the management identify potential pitfalls, the root causes of business problems, to improve organizational risk assurance system robustness. People are still the weakest link in Risk Management, they usually are the greatest source of risk -both classical downside risk and upside risk. The enterprise risk management would be making continuous improvement based on the feedback management.

To develop a people-centric risk management practice, businesses weigh risk and reward, take prudent risks and find ways to mitigate risk rather than eliminate it, and drive change large or small proactively. The value of analytics driven risk management could be in decision effectiveness, operation excellence, strategic resilience, improved reputation, increased confidence in management, etc. To embed risk awareness into corporate culture, do not ignore the relevant information and invaluable feedback because it informs you with greater clarity, and helps you overcome high risk, and improve problem-solving effectiveness.

Improving risk management maturity from value protection to value creation:
Every risk has opportunities in it. Every risk has opportunities in it. More often, business is still fundamentally looking at risk in a negative context. Organizations that think of risks only when they talk of Risk Management are potentially missing the benefit of growing their business with the wisdom of their risk knowledge. For leading organizations, enterprise risk management is already an integral compe­tency and top priority of business executives. They explore growth opportunities and create multifaceted value from it.

The companies with more mature risk management practices generate the highest growth in revenue by identifying the upside from a specific uncertainty one is threatened with, not just mitigating risks, but increasing risk intelligence for grasping value creation opportunities such as: accepting and owning the right risks to achieve competitive advantage; using risk management savings to fund strategic corporate initiatives; achieving high returns from risk investments.

Forward-looking organizations are on the journey for digital transformation. The ubiquity of information has provided both growth opportunities and increasing risks to organizations across industries. Strategy, people, processes, structures, etc, need to be glued up via the latest information technology into core competency, enabling companies to move up from risk mitigation to risk intelligence, for improving organizational agility and resilience.

Initiateglobalinquiries

Talented people across the globe can share insight, co-create new knowledge and co-solve common challenges smoothly.

We live in a time of rapidly changing technology and business dynamics at the dawn of the Digital Era, the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, and a huge skill gap in the workforce needs to be filled due to the continuously updated technology and regulation, digitalization and globalization, etc. .

The book “Talent Master - 199 + Questions to See Talent from Different Angles“ is the guidebook to help digital professionals shape their digital fit mindset, improve multidimensional digital intelligence, build a unique set of digital capabilities, inspire creativity, improve professionalism, and unleash their full talent potential.

        Initiate Global Inquiries

InitiateglobalinnovationInquiries We live in a global society with enriched knowledge, diversity of talent, and a sea of difference. People perceive things differently, prioritize differently, evolve changes at different speeds. Thus, progress is not universal truth but relative truth. As your type of progress may not be progress to others. Every endeavor has benefited some but not all humankind, which makes the endeavor relative and not absolute.

Initiativestocarryon Because the world becomes hyper-connected with blurred territories, rapid changes and frequent disruptions, we have to be humble to admit there is known unknown, unknown unknown; we need to learn from our ancestors, learn from each other, learn cross-generationally, carry on abundant global art, science, or cultural heritage.

InitiatecrossboundaryresearchThe global world becomes more hyper-connected and interdependent, humans have broken science into many disconnected domains,” with each having its own cryptic jargon. So people with different expertise will only produce dots from their own field in their specific jargon, having difficulty connecting cross-boundary dots for generating fresh insight.

Unleashpotentiality Potentiality is a gift for humans, with a great deal of what defines us as intelligent beings, full of imagination, potent energy, hidden strength, and creativity. Discovering potentiality, developing talent are continuous efforts and distinct actions for progressive business professionals; it's one of the greatest visions and collaborative efforts of modern society.

Initatecapabilityassessment People are always the most critical success factor of the company. All knowledge professionals today need to continue to learn, develop the fitting mindset with high-mature competency; build their integral professional capability continually

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about 9600+ blog postings 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 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 your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

Initiativesofclevel

In the senior position, top leaders stay on strategic focus rather than just the tactical details.

In the age of people-centric with “VUCA” characteristics, being a leader takes one to have a desire to do better than others in certain domains, corporate leaders can foresee business trends, capture business insight others can not. 

Senior leadership makes influence from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical changes. They need to be fluent in multidimensional thinking and must participate in shaping a company's vision and strategy, cultivate a culture of innovation and participate in digital dialogues for orchestrating transformative changes and societal advancements.

C-level advocates agile principle and enhance agility: Doing Agile is only an engineering practice, but being agile is the multidisciplinary challenge and a digital management philosophy that focuses on interaction, improvement, iterative change continuum. C-level executives have to understand and essentially accept the idea, otherwise, it could collapse when a conflict between Agile team and the rest of the organization arises and reaches executive level.

C-level needs to focus on creating the right organizational culture, in which people can take ownership of their processes and believe they will benefit from doing so. For a change of that magnitude, support from top down is required. To build an Agile organization, you need buy-in from all levels within the company, apply agile principles to scale up and develop a set of practices to build a truly agile organization.

C-levels sponsor business process improvement initiatives: Business process management usually introduces a structured and systematic way of working that directly impacts business performance and culture. Business process management means change, change takes courage, strategy, and methodology. Business process management will become relevant to the C-level when it contributes to getting relevant performance issues on their business transformation agenda proactively.

Process is an important domain sometimes worth senior leadership attention because change or innovation management can be looked at deeply via the process lens: Are business processes too rigid to adapt; too fragile to handle disruptions, or too inside-out without embracing people centricities? Are there any fundamentally different approaches to process management that would provide more flexibility, sensitivity, and responsiveness? Business process management adoption cannot be done disparately from cultural change within a company. Thus, C-level’s oversight and sponsorship improve business effectiveness, efficiency and resilience.

C-level orchestrates customer-centric conversations and practices:
Customer experience is the key differentiator and an important strategy for long-term business advantage. You have to put the customer at the heart of everything that you do as a business, great customer experience management is a differentiator for companies. The balancing act of looking to increase profit while keeping the customer-centric strategy of the business is challenging. It’s important to get the C-suite behind customer experience initiatives and orchestrate efforts for improving people centricity by convincing top management the value of customer experience with both “Hard Data” and soft touch.

Different C-level roles understand the importance of Customer Experience from their own lenses. There are a number of business areas that can be transformed by a systematic yet sensitive approach to customer feedback. Without the CXO participation, the initiatives to improve customer experience may wither away; getting the C-suite stand behind Customer Experience initiatives can truly make customer experience an important component of business strategy, embed the culture of customer-centricity, and manage Customer Experience systematically.

In the senior position, top leaders stay on strategic focus rather than just the tactical details. They should have a certain level of ambiguity tolerance to inspire a culture of innovation, people-centricity, risk-taking, appreciate different perspectives, and different ways to frame a set of issues, take growth paths for experimenting, exploring, solving problems creatively, and amplify leadership influence continually.

Initiateinnovationconnectivity

Seek to connect meaningful dots, discover ideas collectively, prioritize, and implement them to realize differentiated value and shape high-innovative organizations or societies.

The essence of innovation is made of trying new combinations of known things or doing things alternatively. The blurring borders of the business ecosystem make the world hyper-connected, and interdependent. Innovation becomes more complex, organizations today can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. The dynamic innovation planning, designing and dot-connection are all crucial to manage innovation as a process and improve innovation effectiveness.


 

Innovation & architecture:
Innovation is not serendipity, forethoughtful organizations innovate structurally, and build a healthy innovation portfolio with both incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation in a structural way. Business architecture is both an opportunity and a constraint for innovation management. The most valuable thing of applying business architecture is recognition that innovation risk and opportunity are essentially the flip-sides of each other. 

The quality of business architecture depends on the quality of the information the enterprise understands of itself. Those who say "architecture rules constrain innovation" should be treated with caution. An effective business architecture is like an enormous box of Lego bricks, providing an enriched innovation context, enabling business leaders and professionals to connect wider dots, generate fresh ideas and realize them smoothly.

Innovation & strategy: Innovation is a critical element of the business strategy and the unique business capability. A good innovation strategy will include where the company plans to focus its innovation efforts, how it links to the rest of the corporate goals and action plan must be put in place to achieve the innovation goals. A strategy built around some clear value perspectives (such as people-centric value) automatically provides a basis for innovation & business development. 

Innovation strategy is not about solving a single problem creatively, but rather a concerted solution to a multi-faceted strategic set of problems. A solid innovation strategy management requires distinct patterns of capabilities, the continual attention to emerging opportunities and risks in the organization and its external environment, and how this affects the future of the organization, build a culture of creativity, and encompass repetitive or iterative processes to create.

Innovation & Intelligence:
Information is the real-time intensive piece of innovation management. From an innovation management perspective, identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses, products, and resources; how it triggers novel ideas. The information system as the backbone of innovation management helps to optimize the usage of information, enable users to refine, visualize information , and create novel ideas. 

That means the information-based analytics doesn’t just serve up pretty charts and graphs. It’s important to unlock imagination, look for insights to capture innovation opportunities and manage risks. In practice, “VUCA” is the business reality, information is useless if it is not being used to refine business intelligence, generate ideas, manage innovation, improve organizational agility and resilience.

There is a paradox in innovation, there are many dots to connect for spurring innovation. Innovation is to simplify; in fact, one of the very goals for innovation is to simplify the old way to do things, or to manage the complexity in an optimal manner. All intelligent things have complexity in it; a certain level of complexity is also a foundation to spark the next level of innovation. So digital organizations need to awaken the ecosystem consciousness, try to digitally connect key resources/assets/talents in their vicinity or context, seek to connect meaningful dots, discover ideas collectively, prioritize, and implement them to realize differentiated value and shape high-innovative organizations or societies.

Understanding

Increasing global connectivity, uncertainty, chaos and ever-rising customer & employee expectations perhaps are some of the reasons behind understanding gaps.

The digital organization is a living thing, it cannot be taken apart. From one generation to the next, the substance of leadership does not change, it’s about the future, change, and influence. However, digital leadership trends will continue to emerge.

 Here is a set of featured blogs to dig into the “keywords” of the 21st century to brainstorming the future of digital leadership.




 

                Understanding



Universalunderstanding Compared to the industrial era with static knowledge and overly restrictive boundaries inherited from the last century, today’s hyper-connected and interdependent world has blurred boundaries, abundant information, and hyperdiversity (multigenerational, multicultural, multi-devicing workforce). Organizational leaders and professionals should develop global cognition by opening their mind, having intellectual curiosity to embrace the variety of perspectives, define universal leadership principles to lead change, inspire innovation, gain universal understanding of complex issues, develop universal cases to solve problems that can make significant impact on the global scale.

Understanding Contemporary organizations and societies are complex and informative; usually lack of the breadth of knowledge or fresh insight is the root cause of poor judgment. The in-depth understanding of either problems you intend to solve or the people you try to get to know have become an important quality for digital leaders and professionals.

understandingII Understanding has happened to humans, which is a reflection of the intellect that has evolved. Our mind is a complex system of complex systems and many of them are very difficult to understand and grasp. We shape our thinking and the way we perceive and know things. The most important capability of the cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding, address our ignorance and assumptions we make to minimize it.

Increasingtecontextualfluency In a world of complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity, no one can control the outcome of emerging events and unexpected disruptions completely. That means the future cannot be, in any way, deduced from the past completely.

Understanding Can we understand -different perspectives without -pushing toward the one, that we think is- the truth? Shall we examine -ourselves to- make sure- we are open to- true understanding?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making an influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #9600 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 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.

Initiatecareerrefinement

It’s important to refine a career journey with solid footprints to accelerate performance and unleash potential.
We live in a complex business environment with a high degree of unpredictability and ambiguity, change is the new normal with increasing paces. Business leaders and professionals need to broaden their outlook, envision the bigger picture, analyze their strength and weakness, identify decision blind spots and growth bottlenecks, refine their character, mindset, capabilities, experience, etc, develop a unique professional profiles, make "conscious" choices all the time in order to improve problem-solving effectiveness, professionalism, refining their career journey with professional advancement.

Refine character & mindset: We all have some inner strength, perhaps some weakness as well. We experience all kinds of situations good and bad in our lives that require inner strength and moral courage to deal with. Character is based on authenticity, who you are inside, spiritually; mindset shapes who you are cognitively - how you think, decide, act. It is a construct formed in the mind and we know that the mind of every individual is different - cognitive perception, psychological responses, and subsequent manifestations in action will be different for each individual. 

Advancement is a refinement journey starting at the mindset level, with your version of strategy. Character decides who you are; strategy guides you on who you want to be. People with strong character can think originally &; act cohesively and be “who they are '' authentically. People with a growth mindset can think independently with the capability to make a good judgment, decide effectively, solve problems thoroughly, make change progressively.

Refine capabilities: Capability is the ability to do certain things and solve certain problems. Thus, the professional capability maturity assessment is based on the scale and scope of problems you can solve, and the degree of impact you can make on your surroundings. The capability is not the same as certificate, major, skill, or experience, etc, which are “nice to have” ingredients to build professional competency. Linear capabilities are usually based on the skills sharpened via training or years of experience, usually focusing on one specific discipline.

To build the next level of professional capabilities, it’s important to gain insight into the dependency of capabilities. build integral competency with core focus, fluency, coherence. At a high advance level, people are not only fluent in making professional deliveries, but also becoming more influential on innovating, coaching, and driving transformative changes.

Refine professional experience:
People have an accumulation of a set of working and life experience. There is positive or negative experience; experience can either advance or stifle you. Any lessons learned from experience are helpful in future progress. The better way to define experience is “Lessons Learned”; refined from “Experience to Education to Wisdom. “

If lessons are not Learned, then it is not an impressive experience. When experience saturates your mind, you are not open to understanding beyond what you’ve already known. The experiences become a hindrance to future progress when it resists you to intake knowledge, or de-learn and relearn when necessary. Our intentions to gain experience needs to be pure and the aim should be driven towards discovering the truth, driving us towards progress.

Being a digital professional inherently and inextricably links with high levels of “professionalism.” People are always the center of changes. Mindset-attitude-behavior fine tuning conveys authenticity, demonstrates accountability and professionalism. It’s important to refine a career journey with solid footprints to accelerate performance and unleash potential.

Initiatecorporateboardoversight

The substance of corporate board leadership is all about guidance, performance, and conformance.

In the face of “VUCA” reality with dynamic change and fierce competitions, the open digital paradigm is not just about opening your technology, processing your information; it's a new paradigm shift from process driven industrial economy to people-centric innovation era.

 Compared to traditional governance approaches which focus on compliance; effective governance today should understand performance and compliance are the two sides of the same coin. Insightful corporate boards initiate invaluable oversight of organizational competency, reputation, and accountability to ensure business running in the right direction with premium speed.

Competency oversight: Either individually or at the business level, competency emerges from a blend of collective corporate mindsets, capabilities, and disciplines to take certain activities for solving certain problems and achieving quality results. Capability-based strategy has a significantly high success rate. Corporate governance needs to be part of strategic planning because if it isn't, strategy planning and management becomes a synonym for wishful thinking. Corporate governance is where resources are allocated, talent and aligned to turning the strategy into a reality.

Business competency oversight is crucial to identify and strengthen the weakest link in strategy management, laser focus on the most critical perspectives to run a competitive business, and ensure business success in the long run. The corporate board’s oversight of business character, capacity, and competency is to ensure that all different hard and soft business success factors are aligned seamlessly to enable strategy implementation, performance improvement, talent development, business growth & differentiation.

Reputation oversight: GRC is moving more and more to be the hub and harbinger of values, innovation, and cultural things. As one of solid senior leadership pillars, the corporate board’s oversight of reputation management is to protect and nurture a strong brand, improve crisis and risk management effectiveness, harness corporate value, purposes, and brand coherence.

In order to identify the sources of reputational risk and address them, as well as manage them effectively, keeping close monitoring of reputation management for business transparency and analysis of potential long-term strategic cause-effect, sequences-consequences. Organizations should identify patterns for good governance, enhance a strong corporate brand, and develop a strong reputation for improving organizational maturity.

Accountability oversight:
Organizations inspire learning and encourage autonomy. People are accountable to what they say and what they do. It is important to run a high-performance business with collective accountability that involves shared ownership, empathetic communication, and continuous improvement. Corporate board’s oversight is important to develop a culture of accountability with characteristics such as engagement, motivation, respect, and credibility as these are vital aspects of top-performing enterprises in our modern economy.

The corporate board’s monitors business performance. Performance management system enforces accountability. Corporate accountability further improves organizational effectiveness, performance, and resilience. The measure of accountability implies resilience which is determined not by whether an individual, a team, or a holistic organization, makes a mistake or not, but on how quickly they can recover so that customers, staffs aren't negatively affected by the breakdown, improve business agility, and ensure the organization as a whole is superior to the sum of its parts.

Enterprise becomes more complex than ever, governance is a plausible way to understand enterprise complexity, risks, or compliance rules or laws; governance enforcement makes complex things less complex. As the governance discipline has in the past continually changed its shape and matured, it will continue to do so as the winds of change in the corporate world blow across the business ecosystem constantly. But the substance of corporate board leadership is all about guidance, performance, and conformance.


Monday, August 29, 2022

Initiatives

Build core business competency, improve organizational resilience, keep learning and improving to gain a competitive advantage in the face of fierce competition and business dynamics.

Change is an ongoing business effort and innovation is a unique business capability to reinvent business, but not to reinvent the wheels. Innovation happens anywhere in an open environment, with ecosystem involvement. 

There are many components in an effective innovation environment or ecosystem, how to take business initiatives, put all necessary ingredients together to improve organizational long term advantage.




Balancing: Increasing pace of changes and dynamic marketing conditions brings huge pressures for organizations across vertical sectors to keep reinventing themselves structurally. They need to be centralized to keep crucial issues under control; but decentralized to encourage autonomy. The variety of business management such as change management, IT management, and knowledge management need to strike the right balance of centralization and decentralization, transaction & transformation; process and creativity, etc, for improving strategic flexibility of the organization.

Because having too little oversight and too much decentralization leads to a lack of a business system. On the other hand, if there is too much centralization and inflexibility, there won’t be room for growth and stifle the speed of changes. The challenge is balancing day-to-day operations with the resources for strategic initiatives when they are shared to ensure that the strategic goals for the long-term are still met.

Navigating: Complexity and uncertainty is part of the new normal, without forethoughtful leaders with navigation capacities, businesses would find themselves setting radically different trajectories, they are facing daunting tasks of navigating the business context with largely uncharted territories. An interdisciplinary lens allows the organization to explore change, especially the large scale of business transformation in all directions and experiment with innovation courageously.

The corporate leadership with navigation competency requires the multidimensional understanding of both tangible and intangible business success factors, overcome silo or overly rigid polarity, to lead change steadfastly. Innovative navigators are able to think out of the box, connect unusual dots, update knowledge, and reinvent new concepts to broaden perspectives on how to spot opportunities for business innovation fluently.

Agile
: Agility is the ability to "pivot" and change direction in response to market pressure or to create market opportunity. "Agility" is a fast, sure response to external stimuli. Business agility requires a set of complementary & strategic business competencies. It is the reciprocal of the lag time between recognizing an emerging business opportunity and being able to act on that opportunity promptly. Many businesses aspire to agility when they are burdened by brittle, tightly coupled systems constrained by rigid roadmaps and deployment schedules due to the underlying technical difficulty, integration dependencies, and testing complexity. It requires a good understanding of what is meant by strategic agility, how to fine tune processes, update technology, and explore talent for improving business agility. The business aspiration to agility can often be leveraged to help align business and technology stakeholders around the case for application modernization, rationalization, integration, innovation, optimization.

The progress of the world is pushed forward by quality leaders and professionals who are applying vision, expertise, and techniques, using broad and diverse skills to build core business competency, improve organizational resilience, and keep learning and improving to gain a competitive advantage in the face of fierce competition and business dynamics.

Itinvestment

When board directors or senior leaders have sufficient knowledge and understanding of IT, they can make a sound judgment about IT investment and know how to assess IT performance objectively.

Information technology is the linchpin to run a contemporary organization, it's important to present IT as a value generator rather than a cost center, and scrutinize information technology investment via the business lens. 

The wise investment of advanced information technologies can be truly helpful to make information technology organizations indispensable, drive business demands such as improving business effectiveness, efficiency, increasing employee productivity, enforcing collaboration, and harnessing innovation.


An information technology investment can be validated only as the initial business case to solve certain business problems: Forward-thinking leaders empower and invest their IT boldly to be the strategic differentiator for pursuing business growth. Information technology leaders should convey a data-based presentation to the board and top executive teams in looking and appreciating the strategic value of information technology to the business. Return on investment tells the business management how well an investment repays the company.

The fact that most organizations are unable to put their head around return on investment and coherent metrics. IT is part of the business. Any investment on the business side would require a clear motivated business case. Doing detailed ROI analysis helps the management team know your organization and what you're getting for all your investments. Then you can make informed decisions moving forward. Without solid financial numbers, abstract things like business value are not very meaningful.

An return on investment analysis and a total cost ownership analysis can be done on a whole new initiative or just on enhancements:
Information technology ROI is always a controversial topic, with the difficulty of defining "value”; as there is the problem that IT spending never achieves anything in isolation and value is more than just ROI. To manage information technology as a business value creator, allocate funds and resources where they make the most sense. It's important to do in-depth ROI and TCO analysis. 

One needs to look at the models from a pure IT cost viewpoint as well as a business view. The latter determines whether or not the business should invest in the opportunity while the former determines what implementation approach to satisfy the business requirement is best and keep IT management transparent as part of solutionary. Within information technology financial management, total cost of ownership, consumption and chargeback needs to be clear to improve investment transparency. The wise investment of advanced information technologies can be truly helpful to drive business demands and build IT enabled business advantage.

Organizations have different strategies for IT investment, integrating IT investment to generate business value:
IT investment is often one of the most costly investments for running a contemporary business. The business management should decide whether or not a tech investment is worth making. The best scenario is to leverage information technology architecture, create a comprehensive capability map to bridge capability gaps and clarify business objectives for information technology investment.

One of the problems is that information technology organizations generally have a very difficult time coming to grips with the true cost of a service. To reinvent IT from a cost center to a strategic business partner, they need to start with a simple service catalog for financial management purposes and define a set of sub-services and cost elements, to clarify the IT value proposition. First understand the IT performance goal you try to achieve, make wise investment with clearly defined key performance indicators which can reflect the IT performance progress for the intermediate or long-term organizational goals.

When board directors or senior leaders have sufficient knowledge and understanding of IT, they can make a sound judgment about IT investment and know how to assess IT performance objectively. To reinvent IT from a cost center to a value generator and an innovation engine, IT leaders have to fine-tune the operational structures & functions and manage a balanced application portfolio to maximize IT return on investment and improve organizational long term competency.