Future of CIO

Monday, February 18, 2013

5W+1H Strategy Navigation

9:37 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The vision without strategy is empty; the strategy without vision is blind.

There are three essential elements of good strategy: 1) A diagnosis of the situation, 2) The choice of an overall guiding policy; 3) The design of coherent action. Without properly identifying the real problem, a company cannot determine an effective strategic direction. However, most companies don't get to the root cause and attempt to "solve" the symptoms, or don’t have clear destiny, but “run” ahead blindly,

One of big mistakes in strategy could be the wrong sequence of strategic planning, without digging through 'Why', just walk through 'What'; or without clear direction of 'What," just jump into 'How,’ the following 5W+1H strategy navigation will help.

1. WHY are you Doing What you are Doing

Diagnosis of a challenge is always the first step of good strategy. Without a root causes identified, what are you fixing? And yet, it sounds like the analogy we always hear about whacking at the fruit instead of the root! WHY is reason behind strategy:

"Five Whys Theory": By the time you've reached the 5th "why", you've determined the root cause. The Five Whys is not gospel, but five iterations of asking why is generally sufficient to get to a root cause. The key is to encourage the trouble-shooter to avoid assumptions and logic traps. That the last answer points to a process. This is one of the most important aspects in the 5 Why approach - the real root cause should point toward a process that is not working well or does not exist.

Example: The Customer satisfaction is low (the problem)

Why? – The purchasing experience is not delightful (first why)

Why – It takes too long for them to shop online (second why)

Why –Lack of integrated digital platform & analytics capabilities to enforce digital touch point (3rd why)

Why – there are siloed data, broken processes (fourth Why)

Why- legacy infrastructure, application haven’t been modernized (root cause)

2. What business should you be in and what problems you need solve

WHAT is known & WHATs are things you want to do to implement strategy. The environment which the company is in changes over time, new competitors in the market or changed customer demand - as such the root causes can change. A strategy is based on what is known or can be predicted at a point in time. Part of the strategy could well contain research into finding root causes.

WHAT are potential opportunities: Another important input to develop a strategic direction also comes from converting an opportunity to business, which is very different that problem solving or root cause analysis.

3. WHO are the Target Customers, Partners, Competitors

External WHOs: The fundamental of business is to create a customer. Well defining perspective customers helps strategy find a purpose. Besides customers, who are partner, competitors, how to orchestrate customer & partner ecosystem to co-create ideas for innovation

Internal WHOs: Is there the right talent (Who) at the right position to serve the targeted customers. Those who do can create better strategy via taking feedback and effective communication and show the right direction to the team which gets enlightened

4. Where is Value Position, Where are Roadblocks

Hunt for value position: What are the specific programs, what are the commitments, what are the resources, what are the processes in play that need to go implement the vision, to turn it into a working model, where is value position, and which capabilities are essential to adding value to achieve businesses strategy?

WHERE are Roadblocks: If the strategic planning is not identifying the potential roadblocks to achieving goals, and figuring out what is required to overcome them, then you are not doing strategic planning. But you need to identify the goals to understand what the problems are

5. WHEN to Review Strategy & Implementation

When to Revisit strategy: Not only does the development of a good strategy depend upon identifying the core problem, problem(s) usually change over time. Most great strategies are designed to address an issue in the foreseeable future. Reexamination needs to take place fairly regularly.
When is also about the timeline, schedule in every phase of strategy implementation, key milestone in achieve strategic goal.

6. HOW to Identify Core Problems & Make Analysis

HOW is an analysis, to establish a selected implementation path. This goes into each and every business functional area that has a factor in delivering the strategy. It may be more obvious on running activities until the root cause has been identified and fixed, the problem will occur again and again. Even if this is clear, it needs quite a lot of management attention to make sure a proper analysis has been performed. Often, priority is given to restart without fully understand the root cause leading to recurring problems.
HOW is fact-based: Until an organization understands the core problem it is facing, an appropriate strategic direction can't be arrived upon. That planning has to be fact based, not just picking goals out the air. As in front of a design issue, people tend to look only at symptoms or scratch only the surface without diving into the problem.

A real strategy is neither a document nor a forecast but rather an overall approach based on a diagnosis of a challenge. 5W +1H will well navigate the strategy journey.

CIO in Board Room: Are you at the Table, or Are you on the Menu

9:32 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

IT has to become a key ingredient of business growth, and the CIO also has to become a key contributor to the corporate board.

A good CIO naturally sees the organization as one integrated system and is positioned to identify organizational inefficiencies, threats, and opportunities. It would be a mistake not to include his/her input in strategic discussions and planning. But with more and more CIOs have been invited into the boardroom, are they well prepared for business governance, and should effective CIOs master the corporate board-level politics? How can CIOs exercise effective IT leadership without being involved in “negative” politics? The CIO’s tough choice for leadership: Be a CIO who masters organizational culture and leadership - or be a technologist who simply provides the "IT plumbing" and catches the flack when it breaks?

1. Understand Three “Powers” & “Power Brokers” in Business

When the Greeks defined politics was about governance (govern on behalf of the people), it was in a democratic background. Today’s politics and corporate politics diverge somewhat from this concept, making the whole thing quite confusing. So...if this is about the CIO contributing to the success of the company (increasing strategic stance in the marketplace) and the welfare of the employees, then definitely he/she should be involved.

“It often comes down to who you know and not what you know”: In many organizations, the CIO still plays an inferior role to other C-level positions. For this reason, he or she should definitely become active and effective in senior level politics. As this level of communication and leadership is essential to walk the talk. "What you know" may not as "matter" as what you can contribute via your knowledge to those who you know, to win trust and power of connection.

There are three powers either as visible or invisible hands in an organization: Structural power ( the position with the organizational hierarchy), expert power (business and technical knowledge), and prestige power (connections) impact the business-IT relationship. Structural and prestige power were positively related to the business-IT relationship while expert power is controversial. Does “what you know” really matter? The key point is communication, business and technical knowledge would help a CIO understand business priorities, opportunities, and the strategic need for IT; but more importantly, the CIO should more effectively communicate the strategic importance of IT to the executive team.

To wield political power, one has to be able to influence others: To influence others, one has to build as many productive relationships as possible with others who have power in order to create coalitions. Are the expert and structural power important? Yes - but they will never be sufficient on their own, because the "smartest guy in the room" needs to be able to influence and lead others to make a difference, and that's about people and relationships. Drivers of organizational performance lie with the right alignment of decision-making power, information flow, employee motivation, and boxes and lines of the organizational structure.

It is important to understand the power brokers and how to influence them. CIOs need to be able to manage politics at any level; however, the underlying approach should be more related to proper board-level communications. Keeping in mind that the purpose of the Board of Directors is to review and recommend the company strategy, as well as protecting the value of the organization, they will/should be very interested in the contributions of IT in driving the corporate strategy and goals. CIOs need to know those formal or informal “power brokers,” make an influence on them in order to do the job more effectively.

2. Are you at the Table or Are You on the Menu

The CIO needs to function effectively at the Board level (Corporate Board of Directors) and also with the other C-Level members of the team (Executive Committees, etc.). The CIO is positioned to identify organizational inefficiencies, threats, and opportunities. CIO’s active participation is essential, especially where there is a goal of organizational transformation.

At the Table or on the Menu: As CIOs are usually the only exec tasked with being a direct service provider to all of the business peers and to the board. A CIO that doesn't engage in the governing process (known on the street as politics), will miss many opportunities to match organizational needs with organizational resources - which is the core discipline to good governance. Most successful organizations know that IT has to be at the table. And the old saying is: "if you aren't at the table, then you are on the menu" is true.

Empower CIOs: Many firms are trying to give IT a more central role in their business strategies in an attempt to combat the economic downturn. As such, they want to empower CIOs to manage the process but don’t want to upset the existing power balance of the executive team. the CIO's formal position in the firm, the CIO's business and technical knowledge, and the important connections the CIO has established are attributes that may influence the shared understanding of the business and IT executive team members and, in turn, financial performance.

A CIO must take an active part in company and industry politics: They have to compete with other departments for resources within the company. They have to fight to win respect for the IT team from other departments. They have to fight competitors and suppliers to gain control of the technology standards used in their industry. But it doesn’t mean the CIO just becomes a reactive follower, they need become a change agent to really make a positive influence.

Oversee Business Governance: Who better than the CIO to engage, inform and influence the organizational business decisions. Most Boards do not have a technology background and need that presence to understand the value which technology delivers. As technology has become the central pillar of enterprises, IT has to become a key ingredient of business growth, and the CIO also has to become a key contributor to the corporate board. He/she shall be influencing the key decisions on all aspects of the business and therefore being required to understand the politics. That being said, IT is at the menu, but the CIO needs to sit at the big table.

3. How to Handle such Complex Level of Politics?

Perhaps politics is not so scary - it’s only about "how people interact." Managing board level politics is really just another name for managing relationships. The CIO must be a change agent which requires understanding the stakeholders and what motivates them.

Understand board members and their mindsets: The CIO should be able to sway the board to get his/her projects moving, for that he/she might need to understand the board members and their mindset. Call it politics or networking, it’s a must do for the CIO to work with them individually first and then collectively to move forward. So staying dedicated to the principle and learning your company's political avenues will provide the influence needed to improve IT of the organization.

Doing “homework” before sitting there: Regarding communications with the Board, understand your time in front of the Board will be brief, focus on what they are interested in and be sure to devote the effort to prepare in advance. Provide a brief summary of the purpose, how you want this to conclude and what you are asking from the Board. Provide reference materials, don’t concentrate on technical minutia. As C-suite, the CIO must understand the business so that you can make appropriate strategic recommendations with respect to the use of technology to achieve business goals.

Perform the Dual Roles: The CIO faces the challenge of educating, mentoring and coaching peers and board level executives on what information technologies are and what they can and cannot really do in terms of delivering a measurable return on investment. At the same time, the CIO has to deliver the solutions that are promised and assure that the expected value is obtained from these solutions. To perform this dual role, the CIO has to be as effective at managing key relationships with peers and board members; effective at both formal and informal communication and more importantly, able to interact with and communicate with other members of the executive team in business terms.

“Politics” and IT have something in common: CIOs may often see politics as a 'necessary evil' or some sort of 'game' to play. While many C-level executives including the CEO believe that IT is still just a necessary evil, not as the game changer, and therefore discount the knowledge/expertise the CIO brings to the table. As much as the CIO may be respected for their technical or business knowledge, it is their ability to play politics that actually gets things done. Essential to know how to sell your ideas, who to get on your side in different instances etc. Unfortunately, it often comes down to who you know and not what you know. Just a fact of life in modern business. But don’t give up, with a positive attitude; CIOs may well master politics game, just like they can manage IT into the game changer.

Capture the business needs and direction and translate this into IT Strategy and plans: Whether you are at the top table or not, the most senior IT position within an organization needs to understand their stakeholders, what pushes their buttons, what drives them,.... understanding this is what allows you to influence the decisions/outcomes and that is what politics is in an organization.

Change the rules of the game: Any C-level position is about governance (politics). Lots of people are frightened by politics and think it's only a dirty business. Real leaders should be able to change the rules of the game they're playing (firstly, of course, understand them). Any CIO should influence on core politics of company (minimally as restriction factor).

In summary, governance is known as politics, on the positive side, board level politics takes a professional relationship, which will help enforce accountability and collaboration. Taking part in politics should be seen as leadership style and effective tactics to achieve positive results and not a way to spread negativity or to take an action of rubber stamping, effective governance practices require thinking, requiring asking questions, bringing unique viewpoint and shaping innovative business culture, the CIOs need first understand the rule, then change it for goodwill, the goal is to improve the board effectiveness and overall business maturity as well.

Three “E”s in Effective Leaders

9:24 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” –Peter Drucker

Perhaps “EFFECTIVENESS” is the most popular word to describe leadership in positive way, though it seems to be fundamental, doesn’t mean to be easier or tedious as an effective leader, because it takes character to do right things, it takes vision to pull up the future, it takes insight to understand deeper, it takes adaptability to learn, and it takes creativity to do things in better way. There are many “E” words in leadership, here are three key “E”s in the effective leadership.

1. Envision

“Envisioning the end is enough to put the means in motion” --Dorthea Brande

Leadership starts with having a vision, then developing a plan to achieve it. In all cases, a vision of the future is the key to getting started as a leader. An effective leader will first envision the future of business, also help other people to see themselves for not just who they are today, but who they want to be tomorrow

Leadership is forward-looking, to make progress. And progress is the realization of the “impossible,” vision is driving such progress in business, society, and the world. Effective leaders solve problems by creatively envisioning different ways the world could and should be. With their imagination, creativity, passion, and energy, they are the greatest creators of widespread change in the world. They are able to see new possibilities and enrich the lives of others by creating things that never existed before.

2. Empathy

It's got to do with putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting. -Christian Bale

Empathy is defined as - The power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person's feelings; or the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

At today’s multi-generational, multicultural working environment, an effective leader need understand how people behave, what they desire and what their fears are, you have to not just see through the eyes of someone who is different, but you have to think through that person's brain. It's a mindset shift. Just because you disagree with someone doesn’t mean that person has an enormous ignorance of history and lack of knowledge of the difference between good and evil. Therefore, the heterogeneous leadership team is needed at today’s dynamic working environment and workforces:

Engagement: Leadership is to focus the Power of teams towards COMMON PURPOSE, elevating their SPIRIT AND ENGAGEMENT.

Enablement: Leadership means creating enabling mechanisms to encourage the right kind of action. Serendipity or chaos is not usually enablers, except for the briefest moment.

Empowerment. Leadership means empowering people to achieve the vision. Leaders Energize. Leadership means energizing people to act.

3. Execution

“Execution is everything.” –Jeff Bridges

An effective leader has to execute well, however, execution doesn’t mean “just do it” blindly. Execution is part of the good business strategy, execution first starts with strategic focus and leverage paradox. An effective leader measures the activities most connected to achieving the goal or break down big goals into smaller, measurable goals.

The second is a discipline of leverage. effective leadership in the 21st century is about the management of paradox. For example:

Do we want visionary plans or pragmatic plans in business,? Yes.
Values or hard-edged business decisions? Yes.
Interdependence or independence? Yes.
Long-term goals or short-term goals? That would be yes.
Creative or disciplined organizations? Yes.
Do we want to build trust, or change everything?
Shatter bureaucracy, or standardize processes?
Better development of people, or boosting productivity?
Do we want excellent strategy or perfect execution?
Accelerate sales growth, or get costs down?
Build market share, or grow profit margins? Yes, yes, yes!

The only way a leader can answer "yes" to all is to become a first-class orchestrator and embrace the seemingly impossible, leadership is influence, an effective leadership’s influence is to ensure “doing right things”, besides efficiency-“doing things right”; Leadership is also a process, and effective leaders will align key business processes, talent and latest technology to deliver high-performance result and build high mature business for long term.

Is Dashboard Out of Date

5:17 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

“Can the same image prompt different stories and memories in different people? That’s a good test for a “super-graphic.” -- Edward Tufte

Dashboards can be extremely useful in a lot of areas, whether it’s a decision-making tool for executive, sharing information to an employee or supplier, or analyzing costs per sector. It’s a higher graphical representation that many people feel comfortable using. However, many of today’s dashboards are not very effective for various users to capture business insight, so is the dashboard out of date?

1. Causes of Ineffective Dashboard

BI and Data Analytics are hot deployments in businesses today; however, are the dashboards smarter than twenty years ago? Do they prioritize information enough? Are they action-based?

Ineffective dashboards are the result of developers’ failure to intimately understand the business model and decision-making process. Thus, it is not capturing the essence of the business in the graphical interactive interface.

An effective dashboard is harder to design than it looks. Design and Development are two distinct skills and you can't rely only upon programmers to make insightful dashboards and give them exclusive ownership. Everyone has to have skin in the game to make it work. A good developer is not necessarily a good dashboard designer who not only must invest some time to understand the business model and decision-making process but also have a good grasp of visualization, which implies a good understanding of human visual perception and cognition.

It could be data or quality issues or people are not trained to produce the results with the data so that any presentation visual or not wouldn't be effective, garbage in, garbage out. However, "low quality" speedometers gadgets could use a facelift, or perhaps they need more vertical market designs that capture the essence of the application.

Fancy doesn’t mean updated or effective: Many fancy dashboards, maps, or policy visualizations aren’t designed with the end-users in mind and won’t help executives answer the most basic questions. If you had a situation where the organizational response to some "dial movement" was obvious, then there's little point in presenting that information via a Dashboard and waiting for some bored executive to notice.

2. How would a Dashboard's Functionality and Performance be Assessed?

The Purpose of Dashboards is to provide visual, summarized presentations of whether "results" are being achieved/trending as expected, or not. Where deviations from expected seem material, then some level of analysis to discover the causes would generally be started, and then based on that analysis, some putative cure would be put into action. Depending on the complexity of the situation, that could take minutes, hours, or months.

Categorize the different types of reporting dashboards, but should classification be based on decision-time horizon since "actionable" is the debated word?
1) monitoring (real-time)
2) operational (tactical)
3) performance & financial (strategic)

Eight functional points to evaluate a dashboards:
1) interactivity
2) visualization/graphics
3) drill-down capability
4) simplicity
5) point of view analysis
6) navigation
7) actionable

8) User intuitive

3. Future Trends of Dashboard and Best Practices

Perhaps as dashboards presentation formats move from being mere generic BI tools with Big Data/dashboard functionality to vertical market Big Data solutions, they will start to capture "the essence of the business” in the graphical interactive interface to allow data blending and have fast in-memory data processing.

Mobile Trend: The dashboard data visualization format is all the more important as mobile devices "re-educate" business managers that there is a better way to consume information other than standard column/tabular Excel type of reports. It's a mind-shift. "Telling Stories with Data."

Climb Maslow Pyramid:

1) Start from basic: Before running, one needs to learn how to walk! Strange enough, most organizations still don't have easy, user-friendly access to fresh broad data so the first few dashboards required are not rocket science, and don't need to be!

2) Richer Dashboards: Later on, when the first layer of the pyramid is solid, then it is possible to start talking about richer Dashboards that help to go further.

Interesting and related to Dashboard "best-practices" or statistics:

1) Collect the KPI from the business and design them so that they are personally connected to it and draw some information out of it.

2) Cultivate designers’ capability to understand the business, dig into the business problems, and to propose great solutions based on his/her knowledge of the various type of analysis available.

3) Advanced data visualization is based on the fact that 70% of the human sensory receptors are dedicated to vision while the other four senses share the remaining 30%.

4) Human brains are much more effective in recognizing shapes trends and

patterns than analyzing spreadsheets or tables full of numbers.
5) Visual data analysis principles are based on the work of Edward Tufte and other

visualization expert.

Seeing is believing! An effective dashboard is like a widow, helps capture business views and see-through business insight. “The best design gets out of the way between the viewer’s brain and the content” - Edward Tufte

The CIO’s Tough Choice II: Being a strategic leader or a Hands-on Manager?

11:09 AM Pearl Zhu No comments

The tough choice facing CIOs is not about only picking one identity as either being strategic or tactical, but about WHEN- should act as a strategic leader, when should play as a tactical manager.

Compared to other traditional executive positions, the CIO is a considerably new role with more than two decades of history; due to technology's change nature, IT and CIOs seem always to be in the hot seat, need to continue to be refreshed and adaptable; due to misunderstanding of IT, many organizations also unrealistically want their CIOs to be good at everything, so contemporary CIOs face another tough choice: being a strategic leader or hands-on manager?

The daily tasks of CIOs may depend on the nature of organizations and business agenda, but importantly, CIOs shouldn't just keep their hands full, they also need to keep the mind active/proactive, only CIOs with growing mentality can lead their organization's IT-catalyzed growth agenda.

1. CIOs need to Be Strategic about "WHY" & “WHAT”

For most of the enterprises, the true focus of a CIO is the strategic vision, not the day to day operation as this should be delegated. Being strategic or transformational means CIOs should always stay focus on the big picture of the business, ensure doing right things, leveraging and prioritizing, won't get lost or burned out in continuous IT overload.

Contribute to Strategic Planning: As such, CIOs must be the strategic leader as their peer executive officers must be - know the whole business model, understand the markets the business operates in, understand the competitive landscape, have a medium/long term investment and performance horizon in mind, contribute to the company's strategic planning and IT strategy, understand how IT can/will enable these strategic plans to be delivered. Strategic Planning by definition is translating the company vision into broadly defined goals or objectives. Then the value of the CIO becomes their ability to align. Making sure that the money being spent on IT is aligned with the long-term goals of the company and not just have fun with new technologies.

There's a clear understanding of what the priorities need to be: At these days, even being strategic doesn't mean you just get to know those strategy frameworks, then you turn to be a strategist automatically, more often than not, there's insight underneath, and there're a lot of things CIOs may already be familiar with, such as enterprise architecture, the latest technology trend, etc. and CIOs need set project priority, weave the clear picture of business by crafting IT capabilities and competitive differentiators to ensure business for long-term perspectives.

The CIO should know his/her roles and responsibilities very well: Taking leadership with full involvement in the strategy, the plan and performance measurement is the crucial function for the CIO. The "hands-on" piece needs to be executed through the CIO appointing the right leadership team who can deliver well, and commit time and attention to effective governance, performance checks, and balances. The CIO's ability to "pick the right team" probably tops everything - knowing what you need, why and then who. The CIO as a senior executive role in most of the organizations, being strategic is one of the senior leadership qualities

2. CIOs should be Hands-On “WHERE”

Most IT managers who progress through the ranks have a hard time letting go of what made them successful. But once they get passed that and learn to be strategic, they often have the ability to move back and forth effectively. CIOs do need be tactical when necessary, but being hands-on means CIOs shouldn't ignore key details or measure results, envisioning the future and seeing around the corner are both important -why, who, what, when, where, how., etc. all matter. ...

Where to“hands-on” means how to empower their people to make decisions and therefore execute what is required with a mentoring approach –they need to be hands for a finite period of time to teach, coach and lead their managers because there is a deficiency of skills that need to be developed or barriers that need to be overcome. Empowerment, empathy, and enablement are all crucial for executives to lead effectively, "hands-on," but "fingers-out," to well engage and motivate the team to take extra miles and encourage creativity. The dangers are getting too involved in the technologies and losing the sight of the real goals. Technology is not the goal, it is a tool to achieve the goal. CIOs must maintain vision on the goal.

The hands-on role goes a long way to keep one's skill set fresh and thinking grounded: Every few years it's probably necessary to dive into an important (strategic) technology and get the fingers dirty to some degree. That's not to say letting others do their job goes away or that one stops listening to their professional colleagues. You do pay them for that! It is okay to be a student some of the time to keep the dust off that other hat.

The key management needs to be in place for decision effectiveness and measurement: In order to fulfill their strategic and governance role, CIOs should have hands on the key management processes that feed them the facts upon which to make better strategic decisions and measure how well they are doing. For example, financial, demand and service portfolio management processes. CIOs who are wholly strategic and simply delegate is the increase in complexity of technologies. The technical decisions are left to the highly capable technical people who by their nature over-engineer everything. IT governance is only concerned with the alignment and prioritization so there is no safety net for over-engineering except cost which instead restricts optimization.

More Pros and Cons of Hands On: Ineffective “hands-on” means they are interfering, undermining their people and therefore inhibiting the decision-making processes and stifling execution of the required deliverables – inevitably being so far down in the weeds also means that vision and the real strategy is lost to the detriment, on the other side, as opposed to meddling, tinkering, interfering or being overbearing, since the majority of IT is deep in the weeds, it can be helpful for the leadership to throw some wisdom in the mix at all levels. Most CIOs have a vast amount of knowledge of how technology should be used for supporting the business.

Some of the consequences of a “hands-on” (micro-manager) CIO are:

Strategic decisions are influenced more by authority: That is, where you sit in proximity to the CIO, rather than a review and discussion of a structured analysis by your key business analysts.
The flow of information between groups will slow if not stop: Clashing alternatives between different functional viewpoints are difficult to resolve. All problems and issues are escalated to the CIO because managers are afraid to make decisions and are not empowered to make decisions, This translates into passive resistance with your managers, a lack of ownership with employees as well as a feeling of disenfranchisement and lower job dissatisfaction.
Decisions brought forward to the CIO are influenced by history or momentum rather than risk or governance: Fresh alternatives are not considered, managers are not encouraged to "think outside of the box."
All decisions are made in the C-Suite: But little happens or is visible outside of the CIOs office. The CIO becomes a choke point for decisions.
There is a general lack of clear priorities regarding investments and the strategic roadmap: if you ask managers what the strategic priorities are, you will get a different set of answers from each person.
Your project office will see a proliferation of projects and initiatives: A lot of projects get started, few get completed, and nobody knows which one is more important so they can prioritize the work. Many of the important projects will become “initiatives” and not go through the PMO and often go underground because they cannot wait for approval of the CIO.

3. Strike the Balance of Being a Strategic Leader and a Tactical Manager

CIOs have to balance both, the key is not whether a CIO CAN be effective as both a strategic leader and a hands-on manager, but WHEN a CIO should be a strategic leader and when she/he should be more hands-on.

A CIO who is wholly strategic should still know what is going on in his/her organization tactically: Being too strategic when hands-on support is what’s called for will make you look obtuse, cartoonish, and irrelevant. CIO should be a strategic leader with the ability to have hands-on control of situations and projects while governing the IT decisions and policy of the facility; On the other hand, a purely hands-on CIO will create a highly dis-functional organization and will bring little value to the business. Being too hands-on when strategic leadership is needed will make you look like an untrusting, micro-managing, bureaucrat

So how do you know which to be when?

A CIO who manages IT can effectively translate that vision and also execute it. A CIO who intimately understands the challenges and upheavals and provides guidance in key areas is in a better position to align his organization with the company vision. Every CIO does like to be a transformational leader as well as a strategic leader. However, it is also critically important to make sure business continuity. If CIOs foster and stabilize process-driven IT operation, it was relatively easy to switch over to the strategic role.

80/20 Rule: If IT management discipline can be categorized into strategic practices; tactical practices and operational practice, then in most IT organizations, CIOs' role should fit in 80% of strategic practices and 20% of tactical work, also well assign the right talent for operational level works. Always ask self: if something happens to me, how easy will it be for someone on the team to assume that task?

A transformational CIO has to first stop the pain, take care of chronic operational issues and deliver much-requested upgrades and tactical solutions: Establish credibility, demonstrate that you understand the business, and you can act, not just plan the future. When the transformation is over, a good CIO takes the business to an elevated level of the steady state: better business KPIs, stable and available applications.

In conclusion, CIOs as paradoxical business leaders, need to be strategic, but also should keep sharpening competencies to be tactical IT managers. The tough choice facing CIOs is not about only picking one identity as either being strategic or tactical, but about WHEN- should act as a strategic leader, when should play as a tactical manager and HOW to play each role effectively. The goal for effective CIOs is not to become micro-managers, but to be mature business leaders for leveraging and leading a high-performance IT organization.

More Tough Choices for Business to Make:

CIO's Tough Choice: Being Proactive or Reactive

Tough Choice for IT: Change Name or Reboot Mindset

Three Talent Debates: Tough Choice for the Future

Tough Choice II for the Future of Talent Management

Is “Love” an Ingredient in Leadership

9:38 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

“Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.” -- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Another Valentine’s Day to ponder love, and George Ferris Jr., whose 154th birthday is celebrated with a Valentine's Day-themed Google Doodle today, was an American engineer. He is mostly known for creating the original Ferris Wheel for the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition.

The wheel is a symbol of progress, and progress is usually made through strong leadership, so does that mean love can push the human world forward and is love also an ingredient in leadership?

1. What is Love? What is Leadership anyway?

What is love? Love is a state in which one can put oneself, it is not action; there are 100% freedom and acceptance towards existence in the state of love. Love is the state of being superconscious, and this state is needed in everything. Whether it is leadership or pursuit of happiness. Here are three essentials of love.

While both the terms "Leadership" and "Love" appear to have a large variety of meanings, there is more differences and diversity in understanding the meaning of leadership.

-Is leadership a process or a trait?

-Is leadership neutral to good or evil?

-Is mass leadership different from corporate leadership?

-Do money, power, influence, etc. have any role in leadership?

And to the academic/engineering mind, leadership is a process.

- To those who reflect on it, it is a process.

- To those who strategize it, it is a process

- And to those who are just learning it, it is a process

But to others, it is the lifetime of experiences and responses to circumstances, decisions, and events that cannot be construed as a formal process. When you are dropped onto the battlefield, the process tends to go out the window and you have to think on your feet.

Is Love an ingredient of leadership? Leadership is about believing in a better world, having a VISION and sharing it with your team to make your dreams come true. That requires faith and love. Faith without love is fanaticism, love makes leadership influence deeper and broader.

2. True Love and Authentic Leadership come from the HEART

According to Seven principles of Hermes Trismegistus: "Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law; chance is but a name for law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law."

Was the universe created from love or noise? Certainly, it’s based on the laws. The ancient Greeks had, at least, four words for love: Agape (affection), eros (friendship), philía (romance), and storge (unconditional love). Both true love authentic leadership comes from the heart:

- H is the heart of feelings, the confidence, purpose, drive

- E is ego and empathy

- A is your attitude toward you, your prospects and profession

- R is for physical, mental, and spiritual reserve

- T is for toughness – and the toughest thing is love

What do leaders love? The vision? The promise? the belief, people or the ideology? For sure Leaders are driven by passion and love for something? True leadership's basis is freedom and liberty.

The ultimate magnetic and articulate leader is with an air of absolute confidence, drive. with a sense of purpose, peace, trust, empathy, and respect. Respect and Humility are core to respecting oneself, not meaning narcissism but a deeper understanding of oneself and how you, in turn, interact with the world, not just subordinates and peers. Know thyself intimately. Then love others with the same understanding.

3. What is Leadership in You

How 'leadership' is being defined. In a very broad sense, if we're referring to leaders as those who have followers, then the connection is based on why the followers are drawn to that leader in the first place... is the following based on love, or fear, or greed, for example?

Great Leadership Role Models: If we are interested in leaders defined as those whom most would call honorable, respectable, humble, empathic, ethical, deeply and genuinely loved and admired, such as Lincoln, Gandhi, Jesus, MLK, Mother Teresa, or Churchill and so forth, for that kind of leader, there is a strong connection to his or her leadership with love. They bring liberty, freedom, peace or humility.

What is Leadership in You: When talking about leadership, we have a lurking question at the back of our mind: "Could I also have or imbibe some of the qualities which make me a leader?”. In a way: there is a need for connections with followers, need to influence, need to fulfill a vision, need to push for progress, and how shall we prepare ourselves for it by trying to be or become leaders.

True Meaning of Being Leader: Becoming one doesn't mean "having the same views as everyone else". Neither does it mean "not creating noise.". "Becoming One," means peoples differences, whilst coming to the realization that we are all in fact sparks of the same flame.

Love is one of the key ingredients in leadership, only love-based leadership (being loved, and love others) through trust, empathy; respect, like Ferris wheel, is progressive and delightful, can harmonize the world and unify mankind. Leadership is forward-looking, to make progress. And progress is the realization of the “impossible.” Making dreams come true is both artistic and articulated definition of progress.

Maturity as Ingredient in Leadership

Balance is Ingredient in Effective Leadership

Love is Ingredient in Leadership

Seven Ingredients of Future of Leadership

Three Methodologies to Implement Cloud Strategy

9:41 PM Pearl Zhu 11 comments

The cloud migration will not be too bumpy, and should achieve expected business values and results.

Cloud strategy becomes a strategic piece of IT strategy, which is also integral part of business strategy, but how to implement it with confidence? Where can you find a true vendor-neutral methodology that allows business to understand how your current portfolio will move to the cloud and what delivery models optimize the portfolio delivery?

1. Ask WHY, WHAT Before HOW via Navigation Methodology

Start with WHY? Why do you need step into the cloud? This is strategic process to objectively analyze the biggest challenges facing in IT, for example, statistically many IT organizations spent 70%+of their resources on legacy infrastructure maintenance & operational projects, worrying about upgrades to hardware and software, IT has the reputation as cost center to play the role as firefighter or controller, with lower level of customer satisfaction and employees' productivities. The cloud presents a different delivery model, it's ubiquitous, it can achieve high levels of availability, if that's taken into account in application design, and it's also about OpEx rather than CapEx, generally speaking: Better access and delivery of the app are tipping points for moving to the cloud.

Then ask “WHAT” can and should move: This is a thoughtful planning process where one examines the age, operational costs, complexities and support limitations of applications in the current portfolio and makes priority decisions about which ones need to be modernized. That may mean in place upgrades or replacement with some other type of offering which may or may not be cloud- based. The next step is, of course, evaluating the options and making decisions based on what is available and meets your needs. As some of the most compelling cloud-based applications today are those that address core business processes that are common across industries such as HR, collaboration, even e-mail.

2. Step-Smart via Application Portfolio Management Methodology

The tried and true method includes: To adapt the Application Portfolio Management methodology with a pragmatic Enterprise (Service Oriented) Architecture approach.

Taking an application centric approach is the right way to approach cloud migration. It is applications that directly support a business, not the gear in the datacenter. Too often when planning and executing cloud migrations, people only look at current state infrastructure usage for decision. This assumes that an application is 100% fulfilling the demands of the business and there is no opportunity for improvement. Also, taking an infrastructure-centric approach does little to address the risk of “breaking” application dependencies and potentially impacting the business.

Top-down (business driven) and bottoms-up (current state application deployment) Approaches, here are a few highlighted steps from top down methodology:

1) Document your key business functions and activities, then quantify what’s important to them and what demand they place on your portfolio: Reduced risk? Agility? CapEx cost savings? High level of global availability? Strictly regulatory requirements?

2) Inventory your application portfolio and align it to business activities: This should include collecting information about the applications such as demographics, implementation and business relevance. The goal here is to understand which applications support what business activities and to have the information necessary to make fact-based informed decisions.

3) Understand the applications key workload performance characteristics: Low-latency? Intense Numerical Processing? This can be difficult but important. ALL CLOUDS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL. For example: getting two virtual machines from two different cloud providers with the same configuration does not mean they will perform the same. They will absolutely have different characteristics so it is important to quantify what the required performance characteristics will need to be for an application to be supported properly. This is critical when choosing a cloud provider.

4) If you have applications that are complex, not well documented, or business critical you may want to consider, building out a current state deployment blueprints that highlight application inter-dependencies and shows infrastructure dependencies. This will help mitigate unnecessary risk as you migrate those applications.

5) One of the key elements that most methodologies ignore is the visible and hidden costs of training and enablement. Besides the visible cost of re-educating you users in the new services and processes, you should confirm is you are also liable for a salary/award bump triggered by employees gaining new skills

So, after completing these steps you should have collected enough information to intelligently decide on what application you would like to move, and have the basis of the performance capabilities required by the future state cloud platform.

3. Vendor Evaluation & Migration Methodology with PM Principle

Look at the business capabilities the IT portfolio is supporting and at their non functional requirements. They might suggest that cloud would be the better delivery platform to orchestrate business capabilities. It's probably hard to find a totally cloud neutral provider or for that matter an ‘anything neutral’ in this business. Even if a provider is not branding their own products per se, they still have very tight, interlocking relationships with a variety of secondary providers that do. When it comes to the cloud, CIOs have to be very wary of not getting bogged down dealing with a myriad of providers to be sure the third parties are reliable and you don't get caught up managing too many providers. And migration to a cloud-based application as first and foremost a project that needs to be planned and executed using good project management principles:

1) The first step, deciding where to put what application is fundamentally a strategy discussion. It is related to the nature of the application and the data. And where do ROI and TCO calculations fit in?

2) The second step, reviewing if the application can be migrated to where it is supposed to be (private, managed or public cloud), the discussion becomes technical. Is the application consists in a series of loosely coupled "services" tied together through data sources? Again, none of this is vendor specific.

3) The third step, performing the appropriate transformation (re-host, re-architect, re-place, encapsulate) is vendor specific as you have to take into account the technology provided. But that's the last step and it has more to do with implementation than with the actual doing.

4) Most vendors have a basic migration plan that, if properly managed, will work well. Rigorous testing is critical of course. So, use the vendor's migration tools and process but manage the project yourself using sound project management methods.

The big "gotcha" in these migrations are usually, in no particular order, data migration, performance, compatibility and interoperability with your environment (no, everything isn't always "plug and play" regardless of what the vendor tells you). Follow the effective project management principle/practice, the cloud migration will not be too bumpy, and should achieve expected business values and results.