Future of CIO

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Is Strategic Planning Actually Part of Corporate Governance?

9:21 PM Pearl Zhu 4 comments

Generally speaking, four key dimensions of corporate governance are accountability, strategy, policy, and monitoring.

From Wikipedia: Governance System - Listen to people involved, identify suspected key indicators, measure, attempt improvement, track, analyze, learn, and repeat; while strategic planning is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or—more typically—3 to 5 years (long term).

So is strategic planning actually part of corporate governance or governance is also a component in strategic planning? What is the "reflection" of board governance that occurs in the form of executive management in their role in creating, planning and executing strategic direction?

1. How should business strategy development be governed? How should EA be governed? & how should EA be used in governance effort? Also, how should IT be governed?

Corporate governance operates by the Boards of Directors delegating authority downward to a series of governance committees and boards with responsibility for investment, risk, compliance, finance, compensation, architecture, policy, etc. The "Policy Committee" is generally the senior governance group below the Board of Directors. These governance groups will oversee and monitor alignment and progress against Strategy, Plan, and Policy. They do not participate in the day-to-day operation of the organization. That is the responsibility of management. No manager should govern their own function. Each function should have a governance group. The board of directors is the governance group for the CEO, and so on down the management hierarchy.

-Corporate governance could be part of strategic planning because if it isn't, strategic planning becomes a synonym for wishful thinking - corporate governance is where resources are allocated to turning the strategy into a reality. Though there are other dimensions to corporate governance that aren't associated with strategy, just as there are dimensions of strategy that never have anything to do with corporate governance.

- Project, Program, Portfolio management are management activities, not governance activities. They are overseen by a governance group. An example of this being an enterprise architecture review board (EARB) having oversight for all enterprise architecture-related programs, projects, and the entire EA portfolio.

- EA plays a big part in the bridge from corporate-level governance to the governance of individual domains like IT. This is because the EA provides the top-level guidance and functional requirements that drive the domain architectures. As a result, the EA serves as a very good tool in translating corporate priorities into specific initiatives that can be used to tie in governance efforts.

- There are no IT projects, only business change projects (98% anyhow), that business change is part of the executive responsibility for implementation of the business strategy (created/approved by corporate governance), and that business change exceeding financial delegation thresholds must receive corporate governance approval.

- There are situations - process and information governance - that are genuinely needed - because different parts of the business are making shared use of a process or information. Equally, there are many aspects that can be adequately addressed through the normal delegation of controls approach of the managerial structure within an enterprise. That is how finance operates. That is what an org structure and job specs do. The problem is that they create information and process silos and governance is needed to create a more effective process and information-enabled enterprises.

2. What are the possible governance structures and mechanisms for these things?

The governance structure of an enterprise is as important as the business function structure or organizational structure and often misunderstood to be settled. This creates a lot of confusion (political infighting) in larger organizations.

a. Governance, for example, does senior management committees make informed proactive and timely decisions to achieve desired results?

b. Strategic Planning and Plans, for example: To what extent and how does the corporate planning align corporate priorities, sector business plans, and resource allocations?

c. Portfolio Coordination, for example: How does the organization ensure policy coherence across the portfolio?

Management Activity vs. Governance Activity: Implementing policy is a management activity, and monitoring policy compliance is a governance activity. The distinction between these activities is essential to understanding the difference between management structures & processes and governance structures & processes.

Separation of concerns (separation of powers) is the fundamental requirement for effective corporate governance. Being responsible for making decisions is not the same as ensuring that the decisions were made according to policy, plan, or strategy.

The Board of Directors is only a part of corporate governance. It would be more helpful if EA were to explore the full spectrum of corporate governance rather than focus on a single, albeit important, governance entity.

The program and project management processes that are in use include the setup and operation of Boards. Their purpose is steering (review, decision making, actions, prioritization, etc). Managers participate on these boards and are taking their roles seriously. ... These processes become real in an organization when programs and projects are canceled if necessary for the right reasons. An effective process will also help distinguish between situations where governance is truly required versus those situations where governance is being used as an excuse for not doing the job of management!

Where would one expect IT to come into Board conversation? In the following places at least:
a) business strategy - since the disruptive nature of IT is highly likely to have implications for business strategy and some elements of strategy may require IT-enabled business capabilities
b) risk management - IT risks exceeding the threshold for Board should come to Board
c) business change investment - initiatives exceeding the threshold for Board approval of investment should come to Board;
d) board performance – are there appropriate skills and competence around the Board table to deal with these and related issues giving their increasing prominence?

3. Does the mental model of executive leadership consider the creation of a strategy to be part of corporate governance?

Among executives in the company, if using the word "governance" in conversation, would the mental model that they refer include the process for developing a strategy and creating the plans to execute on it?

The challenge in this discussion includes:
a) Varying degrees of understanding of the concept of governance and the distinction between governance and management.
b) Varying degrees of understanding of the scope of corporate governance and the distinction between corporate governance responsibilities and management responsibilities; such as governance structure, governance process, governance mechanism, governance practice & governance metrics, etc;
c) Varying ways in which governance operates, depending on whether the corporate governance entity is explicit or implicit (as it is often in a government entity), and whether it is fulfilled by all executive directors, or non-executive directors, or a mix.

Generally speaking, four key dimensions of corporate governance are accountability, strategy, policy, and monitoring - understand accountabilities of environment - regulatory, shareholder, etc; develop business strategy, develop business policies offering further constraint/guidance to implementation of strategy, monitor performance and implementation of strategy, manage risks across all domains of interest. Thus, strategic planning is one of a high number of activities within an enterprise that is part of one or more corporate governance structures.

Paradoxes are very hard to reconcile with corporate governance. The complementary point is: Strategic planning is part of the strategy development process that starts with strategic thinking, then goes to strategy formation and ends with strategic planning. In that process, you often meet many paradoxes, such as logic vs. creativity in strategic thinking or revolution vs. evolution in strategic planning. Paradoxes are very hard to reconcile with corporate governance. So that is why the strategic planning is usually left out of corporate governance, as you would not like to either have your future strategy constrained by the current corporate governance or the corporate governance weakened by too much creativity

A useful mental habit: Keep front-of-mind that categorization schemes are never right or wrong. Some are more useful than others; some have less ambiguity than others; some might even be less arbitrary than others.

The board needs to be more than a rubber stamp: The question for a BoD, even one which only authorizes the business strategy, as to whether the business strategy will lead to success - the concept of successful business strategy is only evident after the fact, but the Board needs to determine suitability, adequacy, viability, etc in advance. If a Board is to fulfill its fiduciary responsibilities to its stakeholders, it needs to be more than a rubber stamp. It might not be developing a business strategy, but it needs to do more than a rubber stamp it.

Some old school of management thinks governance is only for the bottom line, statistically, the organizations with better governance discipline will outperform competitors by 20% more revenue growth. EA can play a significant role in designing governance structure and process; governance structure is independent of management structure, but governance process/mechanism can be embedded into business process seamlessly, and governance practice should be shared cross-enterprise collaboratively as well.

A strategy planning is part of governance structure, and governance mechanism can be embedded in strategic planning. A function which governs itself has no governance. The art of the purpose of corporate governance is to ensure that all business functions are on track and following the policies, strategy, plan, and architecture defined by executive management, verified and approved by the Board of Directors.

Three “T”s in Transformational Leaders

9:53 PM Pearl Zhu 3 comments

“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.” --Charles Dickens

Fundamentally there are two basic categories of leadership: transactional and transformational. Transactional (some call ordinary) managers keep their organizations on the historical track, and exchange tangible rewards for the work and loyalty of follower; but transformational leaders (or some call extraordinary) who inspire with vision, engage with teams, focus on higher order intrinsic needs and raised consciousness about the significance of specific outcomes and new ways in which those outcomes might be achieved.

As many businesses are at a crossroad, facing unprecedented change and uncertainty, the significant transformation is needed to digitalization, globalization, radical management as well as innovation pursuing, transformational leaders are in higher demand, as transformational leadership is all about change. Here are three “T” substances in transformational leaders:

1. THOUGHT Leadership

"TRANS" is derived from Latin and as a prefix means "across, on the far side, and beyond." "trans" connotes a bridging characteristic, thus, transformational leaders practice forward-looking, future-connecting thought leadership. Transformational leaders also facilitate a redefinition of a people’s mission and vision, a renewal of their commitment and the restructuring of their systems for goal accomplishment.

Develop the Vision: The transformational leaders must transform the organizations and head them down the new tracks. What is required of this kind of leader is an ability to help the organization develop a vision of what it can be, to mobilize the organization to accept and work toward achieving the new vision, and to institutionalize the changes that must last over time.

Grow more leaders. Transformational leaders develop a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents. Hence, transformational leadership must be grounded in moral foundations. It takes a leader to grow leaders.

Promote Changes: Transformational leadership theory is all about change. Transformational leaders inspire others to follow a vision. They create opportunities for people to show flair and to take responsibility for new ideas.

Build Trust: Transformational leaders are said to engender trust, admiration, loyalty and respect among their followers. The transformational leader has to be very careful in creating trust, and their personal integrity is a critical part of the package that they are selling. In effect, they are selling themselves as well as the vision.

Self-reflective changing of values and beliefs: Transformational leadership requires that leaders engage with followers as ‘whole’ people, rather than simply as an ‘employee’. In effect, transformational leaders emphasize the actualization of followers. Transformational leadership is also based on self-reflective changing of values and beliefs by the leader and their followers. From this, it emerges a key characteristic of transformational leadership.

2. Transcendence

Transformational leaders are transcendent, as they are finding an appeal that can transcend unique leadership difference:

Create Something New out of Old: Transformational leaders create something new out of something old: reach the new horizon out of an old vision, they must develop and communicate a new vision and get others not only to see the vision but also to commit themselves to it.

Take Leapfrog. Where transactional managers make only minor adjustments in the organization’s mission, structure, and talent management, etc., transformational leaders not only make major changes in these areas but they also evoke fundamental changes in the basic political and cultural systems of the organization. The revamping of the political and cultural systems is what most distinguishes the transformational leader from the transactional one.

Four “I”s: Transformational leaders have four common 'I's: Idealized Influence upon building vision & goals, Inspirational motivation to attract more people to commit to the vision; Intellectual Stimulation to encourage innovation and creativity, and Individual Consideration through coaching to the specific needs of followers, also develop the structure to foster participation in decision (Leithwood’s Six), the leaders with such 4 “I”s can be transcendent.

Elevate People to Up-level of Maslow’s Pyramid: Transformational leaders elevate people from low levels of need, focused on survival, to higher levels of purpose and mastery. They may also motivate followers to transcend their own interests for some other collective purpose.

Timing is everything: “Observe due measure, for right timing, is in all things the most important factor.” Hesiod . Transcendent leaders have timely characteristics to handle ambiguity, deal with complexity, uncertainty and identify themselves as a change agent.

3. Transdisciplinarity

“The fluttering of a butterfly’s wings can effect climate changes on the other side of the planet.” -Paul Erlich

Transdisciplinarity is the ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines to connect and effectively move between divergent knowledge disciplines

Solve high-complex problems: In the next ten years, we will be confronting a number of high-complex problems in the hyper-connected world, the solutions will require integration of different sets of knowledge and fluency across multiple disciplines. Thus, transdisciplinarity—ability to work across disciplines—will emerge as a key skill for the future of leaders and workforce.

Holistic thinking to perceive “wholeness” of the business ecosystem: Transdisciplinary leaders will breakdown business functional silos, synthesize cross-disciplinary information to bridge the gap and enforce creativity. Transdisciplinarity will also be valued as a key driver of innovation.

“T-shaped” quality: Transdisciplinary leaders also are T-shaped talent, who have both depth and breadth in their skill set. The vertical bar of the “T” represents depth in one field, the horizontal bar represents the ability to collaborate across other disciplines and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own. Leaders with T-shaped quality are specialized generalists, will respect others viewpoint, also as effective communicators to understand multiple dialects of knowledge disciplines.

Transformational leadership is like a butterfly, graceful and enchanting, built to change, and make a sunny impact on humanity.

Good, Fast, Cheap: Can CIOs Have them All

9:18 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The CIO’s set of criteria should balance a multitude of viewpoint above, to make an effective choice on "built-to-last or build-to-change."

Holiday season actually stimulates creativity, and spurs optimism; from one of IT performance debates: “good cheap, fast for enterprise application development, which two should CIO pick?” Many commentators set positive tunes and think it possible to have them all.

1. Well-defined business goal and project scope make it possible

Broadly speaking, it completely depends on the company you work for, their goals, long term strategy, and the drivers for why you are doing the project, it also depends on what good and fast means for the organization

Good- what really solves a business problem? The user defines it;
Speed- iterative process, cycle time to process the scope of work. PM and user jointly define this.
Cheap- most important as it defines ROI. Let vendors compete hard to get the contract. Having good linkage to sourcing function will get the lower price

From old experience, sometimes Good and Fast doesn't always go together. For enterprise application development, it is best to make sure you have the best solution that meets the organization's needs, budgeting time and finances accordingly to avoid costly headaches usually associated with "quickie' development projects.

The main issue is the ability to clearly define and agree on the scope and IT / Business working together to deliver success. As long as a due diligence process is done with what good or fast is going to do for the organization, then the rest depends on the execution strategy. Some times, good is best for the organization in the long term as far as the ROI is concerned. At other times, fast turn around may be the best alternative for better returns. In executing the strategy, the CIO must weigh in on scope, time, cost, resources, quality, and risk mitigation before settling on the right path. If you follow the philosophy right and manage it well, all three parameters are available to you.

In addition, the key to success is managing deployment into operational service while following the concept of things being "useful but incomplete". Generally, applications are tools for people to use in their daily work, so it's necessary for all to have a clear understanding of what a tool is for and, even more important, what it isn't for.

2. Agile methodology and Cloud envelop makes it possible

It's a myth that you have to sacrifice any of the three. Most traditional software projects fail because the business requirements change before the project is completed. Agile/ SCRUM approaches help to overcome these issues by breaking requirements and work into discrete sprints. But this approach can fail too if stakeholders lose patience with progress towards long-term development goals.

Hopefully, the "pick any two" approach is becoming obsolete... It is becoming increasingly possible to achieve all three with different/creative SDLC methodologies, cloud technologies (IaaS, PaaS), and appropriate leveraging of global solutions...

Though there’re positives on Agile development methodology as a silver bullet to solve the “Good, Fast, Cheap” dilemma. More often than not it is the loose ends that stop a development project from being successful, In essence, and as almost always, it is a question of discipline and leadership, not so much of method. Further, the fourth dimension needs to be added to the equation: Complete. While it is true that agile methodologies can deliver functional components of a larger solution to the business in pretty short order and do it with a high degree of quality, in the end, you are still only getting part of the picture until every piece is completed.

3. Oversight/process governance helps to maximize business value

It has always been possible to achieve all three (relatively speaking) and it is easier now than ever before. From a business governance perspective, it requires organizations to hire well, communicate well, plan well, trust their IT staff when they are unable to completely understand the intricacies of every single technology, and fund appropriately. This is not an impossibility, but a measure of the maturity of a leadership team. Impossible IT projects are more a reflection of overall lack of leadership not only from the CIO but from the organization that as a whole lacks the commitment to see the "bigger picture."

The problem, therefore, isn't just in the SDLC, but rather in business oversight and process governance.

At the strategic level, the executive team shall make well-informed choices which include considering the business impact of different approaches, the pattern of benefit delivery, the risks involved and what else is going on in the portfolio. The key point is, value is multi-dimensional and perception-based, leverage upon asking

-Does the faster operation at daily base help to achieve the good or worst strategic business
result for the long term?

-Does a strategic governance discipline help to streamline operation and make it more
effective, but slightly slower?

From an Enterprise Architecture perspective: rapid engineering on a modular architecture is possible without a compromise on quality and performance. It all depends on which "Class of applications" one is building today, it may depend on nature of the project as well as the budget limit., etc An effective EA practice will improve business capabilities below:

            * Agility-Doing things better, faster.
            * Elasticity-Scale up/down more seamlessly
            * Resilience-From Risk Mitigation to Risk Intelligence
            * Flexibility -Multi-dimensional choices to optimize the customer experience.
            * Value Proposition-Economical value, quality value, utility value, social value

At tactical level: It's the age-old problem on balancing the need to get software done quickly (because there are business reasons to do so) with the desire to get it done with the feature depth that developers and users might wish for (because sometimes, if it doesn't do the whole job, it wasn't worth doing). Create a dev group without silos for teams doing requirements, software architecture, hardware architecture, development/engineering, Q/A testing, to implementations/training

How to manage stakeholders’ expectation? Go ahead and use the cloud, agile, and any other techniques to manage risk and increase productivity but please don't be surprised when your new level of performance is taken for granted and a senior stakeholder becomes convinced that someone else can do more in less time and for less money. The need to manage stakeholder expectations and help them make well-informed choices is not going away for very long.

Bonus question: If you are (or have been) an enterprise application developer, how does the CIO make the decision about balancing "get it done quickly" and "build it to last"? How do you wish they made the decision? How should CIO choose the schedule for a specific project? or how should CIO make a list of criteria that would help a new manager make the correct decision?

In summary, the CIO’s set of criteria should balance a multitude of viewpoint above, to make an effective choice on "built-to-last or build-to-change," the goal shall not just focus on the application itself, but the business vision & end goal, and how to cultivate a set of business capabilities not just fitting today, but for the future; Good, Fast, Cheap, CIO may have them all.

Application Rationalization & Modernization: Why is Sun Never Set?

8:39 PM Pearl Zhu 5 comments

At a time when successful organizations are characterized by how “dynamic” and “agile” they are, applications have become the integral component of an enterprise’s flexibility.

Most information technology (IT) departments split their time between implementing new and maintaining existing technology. On the software side, most of the focus are on applications supporting business processes. A new application is usually intended to replace an outdated (legacy) application. However, both will typically run in production until the new application is proven, after which the legacy application is obsolesced (no longer used) and sunset (no longer maintained, usually removed). At least, in theory, that is how it is all supposed to work. However, in practice, legacy applications are rarely sunset. Why?

1. Why Legacy Applications never Retire?

There're quite many reasons for applications to become legacy, but never retire, such as:

1) It's not so fitting in the purpose of the organization now, or not so prioritized in current market condition

2) Technology out of date, but some users continue using some of the functionality provided by the legacy application to support daily business activities.

3) Organizations have a "set it and forget it" mentality. One of the challenges of application modernization is the (perceived) embarrassment factor;

4) For some legacy (applications reach their life cycle), it could be too costly to modernize, especially for some struggling organizations and industries.

5) Some of these older applications often require other legacy applications that are used for management and maintenance purposes.

6) Any application that includes information that the business needs and uses is legacy and necessary to be continued and/or transformed, which requires another IT project to make that happen. More restrict, any application that goes into production...is now legacy

7) Organizations continue to add new applications, and application vendors continue to upgrade to keep in step with the newest operating systems, IT departments faced with serious application sprawl and a growing backlog of out-of-date and often unsupported applications. Too many applications overlap functionality, too old applications;

8) A lot of new systems are being built on top of legacy systems. This dependency makes it almost impossible to retire old systems. And there are a lot of business processes and services that would have been designed around the legacy systems over the years...trying to change those would have some impact on the operations.

Therefore, although legacy applications are used less and less since they continue to support some business needs, they are never sunset. This is a huge headache for support teams trying to reduce the amount of tools and the number of skills needed to maintain their portfolios. The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) shows how IT should be caring for and nurturing applications from cradle to grave. Unfortunately, people tend to keep systems on life support longer than necessary to squeeze the last little bit of productivity out of it...while wasting boatloads of cash in the process

In large corporations, business executives fail to see technology costs clearly by each of the business functions. One of the problems that some CIOs will face in convincing business application owners to move to a newer application is cost. Faced with restrictive budgets and perceived risks of unplanned downtime, the application owners can be reluctant to commit to modernizing or consolidating their applications. Unfortunately, the longer people wait to maintain or modernize their apps, the larger the problems and costs faced when they are actually forced to make these moves.

2. IT Application Rationalization Driven by Business Initiatives

Application rationalization effort is a consequence of a more fundamental issue - Business is not understanding IT and irrational proliferation of technology, Business is not making decisions based on the cost of doing business. What to do about a legacy beast, that continues consume some resources while still satisfying needs, is not a simple evaluation/decision; Even "application modernization" seems to remain an elusive, fuzzy concept which can mean a host of things. Therefore, the way to do it is through some careful, painstaking business analysis (involving the business processes, costs, system lifecycles, benchmarking, impact assessments etc), the end to end enterprise architecture that will look at the business, application, technology, data and information architectures. Not easy and it comes at a price.

In many cases application rationalization doesn't work, although many organizations run rationalization projects and many suppliers promote their track record, many don't actually rationalize their applications. Instead, they consolidate contracts, licenses, and infrastructure or re-organize resources. In one extreme case, an organization claimed great success for their rationalization program but actually they had simply changed how they counted their apps!

This is a painstaking process that requires detailed Business Analysis to find out the ground truth. You then have to model the same processes with the existing technology and applications to identify the functions that each application performs. From there you have a fighting chance to rationalize but there are many pitfalls and Bear Traps ahead so don't think it can be done in a short period.

Should we all give up? No. Application architecture rationalization makes good sense and is informed by understanding the current portfolio. Also, remember that your current management and governance practices generated your irrational applications and may need to be changed to avoid creating more of them.

But how to manage Application Rationalization (AR) more effectively?

To address a business pain point. Rationalization efforts must be incorporated in a business-led effort to address a business pain point. The result of this was convoluted business processes to mapping to this myriad of systems. The business wanted/needed a change and drove a project to develop more coherent business processes. These processes were deployed over a layer that abstracts the systems. In this process, components were pulled from various applications to provide needed functionality for business process activities. As a byproduct, a few (only a few) applications were retired. The bottom line, application rationalization projects rarely if ever stand on their own. They don't get out of the gate.

Successful application rationalization, like most things in IT, must be a business led initiative. If done to improve operational effectiveness, reduce costs or avoid business risk, the buy-in exists throughout the organization shall perform the required work. Otherwise, you have IT trying to push a rope uphill.

An AR project generally goes through 3 phases.
1) Phase 1/”Woo, a lot of applications there”: In this phase, IT and or Business are confronted with the limits of the complexity of their application portfolio: there are a lot of applications, applications provide overlapping functionalities, there is no 'official' list of the corporate applications, no clear ownership of the applications

2)Phase 2/ "You see we have reduced our portfolio by 20%". After making a list of all application, a number of applications are shut down. However, if you look at the wood, you will find that these initial successes are applications that people forgot to shut down in previous years, or never got done to convince the last 'stubborn' user, or an application was renamed to become a module of a larger application. Although the application list got shorter, the actual business benefits or cost reduction generated by this phase is close to zero.

3) Phase 3: in this phase, IT and Business start to realize that some of the functional overlaps of application are not exactly overlapping and that is never possible to simply shut down an app and migrate users to the other application. In reality, the application portfolio can only be simplified with significant upfront investment. And worst of all, there is rarely a business case to do so. On top of that, the organization now realizes that you cannot just rationalize the application portfolio without also looking at your technology, skills, and sourcing portfolio.

The reduction of the complexity of the application portfolio. Complexity is #of apps, #of vendors, supporting cost, development platforms. A better approach to tackling the application portfolio complexity (or business IT alignment in general) is a combination IT organizational and IT management process changes. Including implementation of concepts like Business Architecture, the creation of an EA function, EA board, Program/Project portfolio management, IT service portfolio management.

Application Rationalization can’t be successful unless when the short-term objectives and quick win nature of AR were transformed into the long-term strategic decision for the IT organization, supported with activities to increase the maturity of the IT governance process and skills of the organization as a whole.

3. Application Portfolio/Life Cycle Management

From Application consolidation, rationalization/ modernization, integration, optimization to now, cloudification, application lifecycle management is the critical part of IT strategy, which is an integral part of business strategy, and linked directly to business goals. The strategic corporate benefits of application modernization & overall ALCM are effectiveness, efficiency, differentiation, and agility.

Take more of an application portfolio & lifecycle management approach and trying to weave a few different practices from different areas together, including application rationalization. It will take more in-depth interviews and modeling to screen out false positives After recognizing and prioritizing the projects need be modernized, with the long-term perspective from the executive sponsorship, how to transform it successfully via the strategic/technologic partners, change management, culture, etc.

1) Application rationalization has been a holy grail in enterprise architecture. Big EA model and inventory effort are important for application portfolio management. Rationalization of that portfolio becomes possible only as/after there is a well-described inventory. It's tough and expensive to build that inventory from scratch, so begin with a strong, forward-looking process for capturing change in applications throughout the business; capture a bunch of facts and metrics for each application (business, tech, risk factors), but by far the most important, and the hardest to get, is the financials.. If you've gathered some convincing financial data and can demonstrate cost savings or increased efficiency or decreased complexity or whatever, EA will be well received.

2) Collect more Data and establish an IT baseline: don't even start on a rationalization project until you've got the right processes in place for allocating costs to applications, and some historical data that people actually believe. Input comes from systems management software, financial reporting, and instrumentation of apps, platforms, and servers. Reporting/analytics about what do you have, who uses it and how much, who pays for it, how much does it cost, etc. Two other parts are a decision-making framework (hopefully will prevent new redundancies or budget sinkholes) and a reporting/analysis suite (using existing tools we have in-house!).

3) Make a lean and mean approach where you assess all applications on maximum 10 criteria: business value, training cost, support cost (business & IT), technological alignment, availability of skills, vendor viability, ... Based on this first analysis, make some quick wins and use this to support other initiatives focusing more on governance and long-term benefits. For the actual process of rationalization, share some best practices about how to rate/rank/optimize.

4) IT orchestrates the transformation: the two most important components are an agreed upon cross mapping of data, processes, rules & operational procedures between all current applications (this is a type of virtual multi-dimensional Cartesian product), and a means of automation. It takes a lot of patience, sense of humor and deep pockets. To move forward with portfolio rationalization and modernization, some CIOs are actually funding a portion of these projects in order to provide the incentive to app owners to make this commitment. It's kind of a win-win, as the app owner has less of a cost burden than if they did it on their own, and the CIO has a newer, more agile application portfolio that is most likely going to be easier to manage, reducing their costs in the long run

In summary: At a time when successful organizations are characterized by how “dynamic” and “agile” they are, applications have become the integral component of an enterprise’s flexibility. Also, IT is no longer for build-to-last, but for build-to-change, focus on the value chain of your business and only deal with the key functions that your business has effective distinctive competitiveness to overcome the competition.

Initiate Governance Insights in One Sentence

8:34 PM Pearl Zhu 1 comment

Governance is like steer-wheel (governance is "steer" in Greece), to ensure enterprise running in the right direction, and well head to the destination.

From Wikipedia: Governance is the act of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power or verify performance. It consists of either a separate process or part of decision-making or leadership processes.

1 Governance System - Listen to people involved, identify suspected key indicators, measure, attempt improvement, track, analyze, learn, and repeat.

2 A governance system ensures individual decisions and behaviors comply with collective values and objectives.

3 Governance is like steer-wheel (governance is "steer" in Greece), to ensure enterprise running in the right direction, and well head to the destination.

4 Governance is to establish a consensus of what is normal for your organization. Manage exceptions as they arise. Update your consensus of normal as the organization changes. Everything else is the detail.

5 Governance System defines how decisions are made: when, by whom, and how. A short definition but implies a lot... many times governance fails is because the wrong people were making decisions in the wrong way.

6 Corporate governance is not only about governing operations and tactical efforts. It is or should be equally about governing the evolution of the company. Otherwise the company, no matter how good the governance is, will fail because of a lack of vision and strategic direction.

7 Governance System is an activity that is hierarchically defined by a purpose, and it pilots a hierarchy of other activities up to the process.

8 Four key dimensions of corporate governance are accountability, strategy, policy, and monitoring - understand accountabilities of the environment - regulatory, shareholder, etc; develop business strategy, develop business policies offering further constraint/guidance to the implementation of strategy, monitor performance and implementation of the strategy, manage risks across all domains of interest.

9 A Governance system:
Plan. Always be aware of what needs to change.
Do. Execute well.
Check. Evaluate if we're still on target.
Act. Make necessary course corrections along the way.
Repeat!

Top 15 Advices for New Leaders

9:40 PM Pearl Zhu 2 comments

“Believe half of what you see, nothing that you hear, and everything you feel." - Nick C. Ciccone

Understand yourself! Your values, beliefs, fears, strengths, weaknesses, preferences, styles, habits. Remember who you are; what you are; and what you are there for; Have confidence in yourself, the decisions you make, and the actions you do.

Respect the people you have power on and people will have respect for the power you were given on them. Respect the opinion of others on your team, do not have any hidden agendas and know that you don't have all the answers. You have to 'walk the talk'.

Have big ears and a small mouth. Listen first, advice afterward. It is listening and learning how you can best help the people you lead. After you have listened and have input, Create dialogues. be transparent, describe the value of what you have learned and demonstrate how you USE their input by taking ACTIONS that achieve value for the team.

The key to successful leadership is an influence, not authority! Don't let the position go to your head; rank and position in most cases are artificial.... Lead like a leader, but also lead to understanding, compromise, creativity, and kindness.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood. -Stephen Covey: Believe in but also manifest in your actions with a passion for the organization’s mission, vision, and values.

Build a vision, share it with inspiration: Listen and understand the mechanism of change, be fair and honest, work with your people, identify the earlier adopters and opinion leaders.

Be the ultimate communicator! Communicate your expectations, vision, ideas, progress, reporting, your appreciation, etc., the true essence of leadership is the trust, honesty, integrity and consistency to followers.

Focus on getting the team together first: Learn to value your opposite type, because those viewpoints also are inside you. Be humble. Be discerning. Learn to set boundaries in a positive way. And seek balance, because therein lies the power to increase the effectiveness of your strengths.

Make fair judgment: Leverage information, analyze and synthesize accordingly. “Believe half of what you see, nothing that you hear, and everything you feel." - Nick C. Ciccone

Don't try to fix everything at once: Often new leaders rush in to fix things or introduce new ideas or concepts without investing time to understand how and why things work as they do. You have the job to lead, so demonstrate it by being a good listener.

Learn to delegate responsibilities and push for the progress:. When you delegate, delegate authority and responsibility. Put trust in your team in the way that you would want to be trusted. They won't always do things the way you would have done them, but that's ok - there are multiple right answers.

A great leader takes more than his share of the blame and less than his share of the credit. “The best of leaders when the job is done, when the task is accomplished, the people will say we have done it ourselves." -- Lao Tzu

Be ready to accept that you will make a lot of mistakes: This is normal, but the important thing is to learn from them. you can learn a lot also from your people and try to put yourself in the others shoes when you make decisions

It's not about timescale but rather a frame of mind. Not being afraid to fail is a liberating experience for new leaders. Be confident and humble at the same time; be optimistic and cautious at the same time. Believe in yourself, believe in others, live it, and enjoy it.

Ensure a clear direction: communicate, act and measure:
1). Establish your objectives for the organization, department, or group
2). Communicate those objectives and ensure they are understood by everyone
3). Measure results against those objectives

Summary:

The new leaders should have ten qualities below:

Vision: Larger than themselves, and than the moment
Passion: Able to inspire people. Leaders get people to set a new standard for themselves
Trustworthiness: They keep their word;
Empathy: Perceive things via multiple angles;
Flexibility: change on a dime to deal with problems
Exemplarity: They hold themselves to a higher standard than anyone else
Insight: They go deeper. They attract and drive: they don’t push, they pull,
Self-awareness: they step outside of themselves, can modulate, and become stronger and can lead more effectively
Presence: they are not in their head, living somewhere else

New Leader’s Seven-Step Scenario:
1) - Be who you are and what you are
2) - Listen to what your team has to say, value what your team does.
3) - Foster an open communication channel
4) - Focus on the objectives and facilitate changes that bring improvements
5) - Make S.M.A.R.T decisions
6) - Coach, develop and empower your team
7) - If one method does not work, try something new!

Three “C’s in Charismatic Leaders

10:09 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Charisma, you can’t buy it, you can’t make it. And you sure can’t fake it

If a leader’s character is still easy to identify - tangible like diamond or soft as Tofu; then the charisma of leaders could be harder to smell—is it like the fragrance of one’s soul, the magnet of personality, simply a flash from one’s mind, or just a flashy outlook? What Is Charisma? From one of leadership articles: “Charisma is rooted in values and feelings. It’s an influence born of the alchemy that Aristotle called the logos, the ethos, and the pathos; that is, to persuade others, you must use powerful and reasoned rhetoric, establish personal and moral credibility, and then evoke followers’ emotions and passions. If a leader can do those three things well, he or she can then tap into the hopes and ideals of followers, give them a sense of purpose, and inspire them to achieve great things. “

There are at least three “C”s in Charismatic leaders.

1. Convincing

“How can you have charisma? Be more concerned about making others feel good about themselves than you are making them feel good about you." — Dan Reiland

Charismatic leaders have strength to persuade others, not always be oratory or rhetoric, but make influence on others’ heart; Charismatic leaders are not always expressive extrovert, the power of introvert can like lightning, to strike people’s mind; And the true charisma also goes beyond style, it well mixes the leadership substance such as vision & purpose with effective leadership styles such as participation and coaching.

Compared to another type of leaders, charismatic leaders may also face more pitfalls or bear traps as most people still confuse charisma with flamboyance or myth, so the charismatic leaders need have:

Leadership Gravity: Charisma isn't devoid of substance, in fact, leadership gravity can help leaders down to the earth or reach higher level maturity, be confident but feel humble at the same time; inspiring, also be cautiously optimistic. And charisma comes from vision, not just the fashion; charisma accompanies with purpose, not pure acting.

2. Captivation

In general, shorter is better. If you can encapsulate your idea into a single captivating sentence, you're halfway home. Len Wein

The other “C” element in Charisma is captivation, it’s about communication effectiveness as well as the power of influence.

Captivate followers with vision & confidence:

"I am captivated more by dreams of the future than by the history of the past" --Thomas Jefferson

Charisma is intra-ward, diplomatic, comes from vision and purpose, though tactically, the creative communication style can make the conversation more captivated, such as stories and anecdotes; contrasts; rhetorical questions or analogizing description.,etc.

80/20 Leadership Principle

“Charisma is the fragrance of soul.” ― Toba Beta

No matters how captivate the leader is, always remembering: leadership also follows the 80/20 principles: 80% of substance and 20% style; captivate style won’t last longer without leadership essentials; the future trend is more captive than the fading fashion, and audacity & authenticity are more captive than myth or buzz.

3. Capability

"Charisma is the result of effective leadership, not the other way around."

— Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus

Leadership is a set of capabilities; charismatic leaders have their own unique capability to achieve leadership effectiveness;

Capability Comes from “FOCUS”:

“Everyone has the ability and capability of reaching their goal if you put your mind and energy into. The answer is to focus, to determine and positive. –Kemmy Nola

Leaders with strong focus can harmonize the team, and the positive charisma will soften the hardness and fluid the stickiness; can melt the icy ocean or fire up the glacier; Charisma is a colorful ribbon to decorate leaders’ capability boxes.

Capability is the Beliefs about Who We are

“What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.” ― Albert Camus

Either character-based leaders or charismatic leaders, or any type of effective leaders, capabilities underpins leadership effectiveness; it’s the true trust to yourselves, also gain trust from others; it’s the innate driver to empower you to achieve more; at this point, charisma goes beyond the charm, it’s the attitude and aptitude to pursue sense of purpose. Still, charisma is like an aura, soothing surroundings, it's more natural than artificial; charismatic leaders are acting themselves than imitating others; the charm of such leaders is positive and delightful.

More blogs about Leadership:
Character-based Leadership

Five Elements of Authentic Leadership

Global Leaders

Leadership Style

Three Trends of Future of Leadership
Five Nature View of Thought Leadership

Three Perspectives for 2013 & Beyond: “SMAC”K the Old Business Mindset

8:55 PM Pearl Zhu 1 comment

Shape the accelerated mindset and culture of innovation.

It’s almost the end of year again, many business and technology predictions popped up, it seems 2013 is too close to read tea leaves again as we did last year, to evoke full picture of imagination, a few forward-looking organizations start to contemplate what will be happening in 2020: How big is big Data; how “mega” the city would be, will talent mobility continue to dance across the globe or the cloud keeps flow through the digital universe., etc….

Still, every journey starts with the first step, each step comes with mindset shift, 2013 can be such a new year, to smack the old business mindset, to make progress from technology innovation to management innovation, to renew the fresh energy of our earth, and open the new chapter for humanity.

1. From “See Trees Only” Silo Mind to “See Through the Forest” Holistic Thinking

SMAC –The four forces of technology wind –Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud will continue to blow, According to multiple estimates, by 2020:

The SMAC stack will represent $5 trillion in spending.
As many as 100 billion computing devices will be connected to the Web.
Corporations will be managing 50 times the data currently managed.

“SMAC”K the Silos: The old IT with industry speed will continue to be accelerated into digital speed, the aging technology, and complex process is under siege; the business functional silos will also start break down via enterprise social platform, and the most important thing is still about people: the silo mindset need be shifted to use whole-brain. The old riddle asked whether the tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is there to hear it. Leaders know the answer is no, listen into the forest.

· Business Wholeness: Digital technology will continue to blur the functional and organizational borders, and help business climb up the new level of organizational maturity: Business as a whole is more effective than the sum of pieces. Business is not just working within the industry, but also permeating cross-ecosystem.

· “Delight” in Enterprise Architectural Design: With new wave of digitalization, both smart device and data generated has grown by an order of magnitude, the speed and scale of coming transformation will greatly outpace the prior shift, from EA perspective, business can not just stop at “functioning” stage, need to move up to “firm” as well as “delight’ level.

· Organizational Agility, Elasticity and Resilience: SMAC stack will continue to shape digital enterprise with agility—doing things better & faster; elasticity: scale up & down seamlessly and resilience: from risk mitigation to risk intelligence, organizations today are facing more opportunities, also more risks, as every opportunity has risks, and every risk has opportunities. If you see “trees” only, you may lose the chance or can not dig through the root cause of critical problems, the holistic mindset will help not only dispassionately analyze the business scenario, but also synthesize into optimal solutions.

See Through the Forest in 2013!

2. From “Inside-Out” Closed Mind to “Outside-In” Open View

Many organizations are still running with industrial speed via monolithic IT backbone, legacy infrastructure & applications turn to be an obstacle to elevate business performance, the inside-out driven processes stiffen innovation, add multiple layers of complexity, prevent the enterprise from cultivating the unique business capabilities to adapt to changes and adjust to the digital speed.

The Future of Cloud is not so Cloudy: The benefit of clouds such as the ability to move costs from Capex to Opex and increased speed-to-market, are now well understood – not just by the technology visionaries and marketing promoters, but by those in the lines of business with proven case studies. Based on emerging digital technology trend, IT deliveries will likewise be mosaics —mosaics linked by process management and integration technology.

Outside-in Open View: Business’s digital transformation takes fresh view, from inside-out single lens into outside-in multidimensional-vision: to perceive business value via different angles: quality value, utility value, economical value as well as perceptive values (not just about shareholders, but also include customers, employees, partners as well as society., etc)

Crowd-Sourcing Amplify Collective Business Mindset: Enterprise social platform will enforce culture of innovation, provides ideal set of tools to encourage employees sharing ideas and thinking differently, and mobility movement will further blur the line between work and life, make business hyper-connected and always on, Big Data analytics makes it easier to get a working feedback loop from the social world back to businesses, let business quickly processes the vast data streams, analyze them, understand customer deeper to capture the new insight on the future of business, and deliver ROI for social business.

3. From “Human Resource” Industrial Mind to “Human Capital” Digital Empowerment

People want autonomy (let me do it!), mastery (how to do it better with resources), and purpose (why & how: my work fits into the larger project, and how our project fits our corporate purpose, and why the corporate objectives add meaning to the world). These are actually both universal drivers, and deeply unique and personal. And the productivity & creativity need be improved via uniting people’s hand, mind and heart. So the old “Human Resource” mindset need be “SMAC” ed to the new concept of empowering talent to unleash full potentials.

Shape the Accelerated Mindset & Culture of Innovation: There’re three different types of groups in modern business : Organization structure (formal hierarchy); Work structures (tend to be horizontal interactions); and Social structures (tend to be either way), SMAC may not flatten the pyramid yet, however, it will help orchestrate these structures to discover the degree of “cultural coherence”, recognize the positive cultural or sub-cultural traits, to amplify and accelerate them in order to shape the culture of innovation.

Culture of Learning: One of best predictions for the new year so far is: “The future of illiterate is not the one who can’t read or write; it’s the one who can’t learn, unlearn and relearn”. While the tasks are no longer micro-managed, today’s knowledge workers face their own dilemma, knowledge and skills need be updated every couple of years, even shorter, globility –anyone can compete anything from anywhere is the by-product of internet and globalization. Continuous learning attitude is essential for many professions now. Through Big Data, talent manager can recognize thought leaders, social influencers or domain expert more easily; data analysis of employee and talent performances also allow experiments and feedbacks, make sure the right talent in the bus at the right time.

From Talent Controller to Talent Multiplier: Talent managers start using data analytics not just to monitor employees’ behavior, but to ask& answer some hard questions that are at the heart of how employees contribute to business performance, predict employee preferences and behaviors and tailor next practices to attract and retain talent. Develop predictive models and identify leading indicators to forecast business requirements and staffing requirements, track skills and performance, and maximize human capital investment.

The new year perspective is the state of mind: think positively & look forward: the business is continuous on; the world is continuous on and the progress of mankind is base on the advancement of mindset.