IT Transformation: How to Build a Solid PMO Roadmap

PMO Throughput is Ultimate Measure of PMO Effectiveness.

Enterprise project/program management office (PMO) plays a significant role in executing business strategy via implementing the portfolio of projects effectively & efficiently. However, most of the PMOs get stuck at the lower level of management maturity. Therefore, more than half of IT projects fail to meet customers’ expectation. In order to improve project success rate, building a solid PMO is perhaps the right step in the transformational journey.

Set milestones via identifying key business problems, low hanging fruits and pain points. It depends upon if your PMO is focused on Project, Program or Portfolio management, or some combination of the three, as well as what business problems you're trying to solve with it. first, start off with the low hanging fruit and pain points that projects were experiencing, then, take those pain points and identified solutions and standards around them, after that, work to identify those activities and deliverables and compiled a list of standard milestones, and next, take that list of milestones and developed a project schedule around those milestones with the basic tasks need to achieve the milestones and put it into schedule. This gives a project team a basis when starting a new project. It also includes creating standards or best practices in helping to develop corporate level processes and guidelines

Re-evaluating and re-establishing a set of PMO groups. if there are multiple PMOs, and the important thing on the roadmap is to be very explicit about the charters for each team so that there are no gaps and no overlaps. Aim to have each one serving the other appropriately and effectively with a free-flowing pipeline of information and 'next steps' or handoffs between them that aspire to be relatively seamless. Following that is to figuring out the end-to-end lifecycles in both product management and software application / systems management and identifying where the intersections are between the IT and the business, and determining which group owns which processes or activities and for that, There are discussions about the business decision support needs and the questions that must be asked and answered at each stage of the lifecycle

The PMO has good departmental metrics to pass to the leadership team. The roadmap can back up a few steps in order to rapidly move forward. The managers know who is doing what, know what utilization and availability looked like, know what relative priorities are, and in general, get with the program, schedule deliverable dates to give to the customers. The goal is to be of service, and not just focus on reporting and managerial communications

PMO 'throughput”-the volume of work PMO could get through the department, in terms of requests in, and deliverables back out. That is the ultimate measure of PMO effectiveness since the PMO is there to enable others to be more efficient and work more effectively.  If you aren't improving throughput, then you aren't meeting a core part of your mission 

 

Try to move up the PMO Maturity Scale. The PMO owns the project process, its metrics and process improvement goals; it generates best practices; it owns the project manager role and consequently has a responsibility to ensure all projects has a trained project manager who knew how to do the job. Identification of some project milestones and compile them into a standard framework, time tracking to build the experience for estimating.

Level 1: Ad-hoc - Discipline has few, if any, formal definitions and is performed on an ad-hoc basis.

Level 2: Defined - Discipline is defined, executed and repeatable.

Level 3: Controlled - Discipline objectives are aligned with business goals and defined with greater details. Results are qualitatively predictable.

Level 4: Measured - Quantitative goals are clearly set and measured.

Level 5: Optimized - There is a focus on continually improving the discipline performance.

PMO has a crucial short-term role in the cross-departmental execution of projects, and a hybrid role in the long-term planning around the organizational strategic goal, a comprehensive PMO roadmap with well set of milestones can surely help the organization achieve high-performance result in a systematic way.

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Real Time Analytics

Real-time analytics could be useful in scenarios where you have to take immediate decisions.

Real-time business intelligence (RTBI) is the process of delivering information about business operations as they occur. Real time means near to zero latency and access to information whenever it is required.

Real-time data denotes information that is delivered immediately after collection. There is no delay in the timeliness of the information provided. Real-time data is often used for navigation or tracking. Some uses of this term confuse it with the term dynamic data. In reality, the presence of real-time data is irrelevant to whether it is dynamic or static. But the data collection mechanism at grass root level is mechanical that there are delays in the time line of the information provided. This is because of absence of internet connection and other electronic data collection instruments.

Weather to run real time data analytics or not depends on the need and purpose; you consider whether you require real-time analytics or just real time action. The reason for making the distinction is that a lot of value can be created from acting in real time off the calculations performed on a periodic basis. The reason you'd rather perform such calculations on a periodic basis rather than in real time is that doing so is a lot less complicated as well as less expensive. 

Real-time analytics could be useful in scenarios where you have to take immediate decisions. If you are at consumer business in setting prices, or running a call center trying to determine whether or not you have the right coverage on a calling campaign, then you probably do need real time or real enough time analytics for "availability" or "profits". Real time is going to be useful where the volume that can vary dependent on things you can control, for example, product price/availability or SLA in e-commerce or brick and mortar environment. In each of these instances real time access may deliver a considerable portion of the value that could be delivered through real-time analytics. So, you may wish to take a careful look at what you're trying to accomplish in order not to invest more time and resources than necessary.

Real Time analytics can be a hard thing to implement. It should only be made a priority if it leads to actionable insights almost immediately. A nightly or weekly run of each customer's purchase history would allow the company to prepare for each customer's next visit by pre-populating a table with the right items. There's no need to do all these calculations in real time. Similarly, determining the correlations between the purchases of various items does not have to be calculated in real time either. It’s actually better in many cases for users not to have real time data, simply because their ability to react to it in a useful way is constrained by the speed with which real time data accumulates. There are at least two challenges in running real time analytics:
-Having a system that can support quick changes and implement them throughout the entire business process
-Having enough data to draw statistical significance

So weather to run real-time analytics or not depends on the situation and how rapidly things change, do it with clear business purpose, proven methodology and cost effective discipline. 

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Three Perceptions of Talent Management Risks

Talent Risk is Strategic Risk of Modern Businesses.

Organizational risks include talent-related risks and are frequently identified by organizations as some of the most critical issues they face. More specifically, what are the crucial challenges in managing today’s digital workforce? 

1. Lack of holistic talent strategy 

It may include lack of succession planning; lack of return on leadership investment and fail to attract, develop and retain the talent. For many organizations, it lacks close links to connect short-term recruitment strategies with long-term workforce planning. To effectively manage talent, companies must have both a short and long-term approach via holistic talent strategy.

·       Talent Analytics: Information is the lifeblood of digital business, data-based analytics is the scientific approach to help HR see the big picture from a systematic view, addressing questions like Where does organization have talent gaps, how might they change based on predicted changes in customer demand or geographic regions? What're the alternative talent pipelines at digital era? etc. How to make a tough choice such as build vs. buy vs. borrow talent to close these gaps?  It is strategic imperative in designing a holistic talent management system that addresses wider concerns such as employee engagement, escalating costs, performance management, connecting employees to the enterprise and diversity.

·       Key Driver for managing global talent strategically: 

(1) Shortage of global leaders, or personnel with necessary skills

(2) Lack of organizational focus on managing talent

(3) Lack of development in talent management processes

(4) Increased global competition for talent

2.    Lack of capability and capacity in managing human capital

 Instead of treating employees as human resources, human capital is the better term to perceive human potential as a strategic business investment. Human capital assets include such as recruitment, retention, leadership training or other skills development. More specifically, talent management risks include:

-Capability Risks is associated with building the collective skills a high performing organization needs to compete now and in the future—the breadth and depth of sets of skills and competitive capabilities present within a workforce

-Capacity Risk is upon how an organization is able to create and maintain the size, scale and shape of the digital workforce needed to execute its business strategy seamlessly. It is always important to monitor the talent pipeline and discover the new digital channels to recruit, and develop talent.

-Cost Risk is also critical for managing talent with efficiency. What will it cost an organization to recruit and retain the talent it needs, the industry surveys consistently finds that many businesses do not even track the real cost of the workforce as a key metric

3. Reputation & Regulatory risk 

Organizations today are facing many digital new normal, as social media will spread the word quickly. Reputation is part of the business brand, and the business brand usually also reflects the enterprise culture. Some say reputation risk is not a risk but a consequence of the public and media reacting to all the other risks. When someone talks about managing reputation risk, they are most likely talking about the post-risk processes of damage control and remedial steps involving corporate communication and public relations programs. And generic risk management includes how organizations manage economic, legal, political, social and human risks, how to build up its resilience muscle.   

• Reputation risk affects talent management effectiveness: Current and former employees freely exchange opinions about their workplaces, which can affect the ability of the organization to retain existing talent or recruit top talent. On the other side, it’s important for organizations to building an employment brand;  building talent communities/pools and leveraging social media accordingly 

• Regulatory risk: is relating to employee behavior, regulations, and laws; or the negative impacts of law or regulation on organization’s ability to attract talent. This category covers both the need to ensure talent processes comply with local regulations, as well as whether talent management is seen as a key business capability or just an administrative process simply to ‘be complied with'. 

To look forward, today’s talent managers must isolate and address a much broader array of talent risks, taking into account a critical need to craft a solid talent strategy that supports business objectives and capital investments, to identify the talent bench strength and weakness; forecast the talent management capability & capacity, manage costs, build the resilience muscle for potential reputation or regulatory risks, and manage talent KPIs to well reflect its business values.

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Ideal Agile Scrum Sprint Length

Never "hard code" any sprint length:

Agile-Scrum is a popular combination of project management methodology; to practice it with confidence, it is important for mastering project management techniques and the mechanical levels of Agile. To some extend that is also why experience is so valuable in project management. Here is collective sharing upon Agile Scrum Sprint Length.  

• As short as you can, but no shorter. Well communicate the Sprint goal with all your stakeholders prior to the sprint commencing. As long as everyone is aware of what you have to achieve then the timeframe can be decided upon. Obviously it is important to build a "rhythm" for the team as much as possible but this should become obvious as you progress. Things to consider:
  -Are you able to complete entire stories within a Sprint?
  -Are you delivering value in a Sprint?
  -Is the PO happy with the time frame for priority changes? 

• Never "hard code" any sprint length: The biggest factor is how expensive it is in terms of team effort to "complete" the sprint. For instance, if the team's definition of done includes tested software deployed to production, the amount of time it takes to perform the testing and deploy the release into production is going to be a critical factor. If you are unable to finish entire stories within a sprint, perhaps the stories are too big. Shortening the sprint forced smaller stories and allowed completion within the sprint. Seems counter-intuitive, but it worked. If the Product Owner feels that they aren't getting to re-prioritize often enough then it's too long. 

• It depends on team and project size, it also depends upon the nature of project, two week sprint is more suitable most of the time. In true agile spirit, that during the early stages of a project do three week sprints to cater for investigative tasks which will impact development and testing further down the line. Then tune back to two weeks once your project is gathering momentum. It more often than not 2 weeks is the best interval for a medium sized team (5-10 team members) as longer tends in introduce more chance for unexpected events which can disrupt the sprint. In addition it provides a more regular feedback from clients. The exception to this is when running a team with larger user stories which are well defined but for what ever reason can not be sliced into smaller chunks. In such case a longer sprint makes sense as it takes more than 2 weeks to deliver.

Hence, the Spring length needs to be elastic to well reflect the Agile principle for continuous improvement and collaborative interaction

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Digital 'EQ'

Digital EQ has three dimensions: Emotional Intelligence; Execution Excellence; Employee Engagement. 

Most organizations today operate in a dynamic, unpredictable digital environment; under those conditions, change must be part of normal day-to-day operations. And organization level EQ with such three dimensions –Emotional Intelligence, Execution Excellence, and Employee Engagement will become key success factor in the digital transformation.

Emotional Intelligence: People change each day, they grow, learn, and develop. Even businesses do. However, change is emotional, as it will disrupt the old way or the old habit to do the things, thus, high business EQ means to have an ability to respond to emotions, and cultivate a culture of innovation and learning, translate emotion into values-driven goals & purposes, and achieve high-performance result. Indeed, organizational EQ, as well as organizational IQ, are two important aspects of change managements. Here are five rings of effective change management. 

1). Meaning and Purpose - connected to personal and career meaning and purpose
2). Org IQ - the business policies, practices, processes, KPIs and Analytics-based decision making.
3). Org EQ - ability to respond to emotions, culture of learning, these are the skills to respond so that emotions are translated into Values-Driven goals and Purpose
4). Recognition and reward with "Performance Fact back"
5). Story and Myth; Change Management Symphony.

Execution Excellence:  Execution is another dimension of corporate digital EQ.  Execution is invisible; it has been taken for granted. It has been collectively decided that "execution just happens" so that all lights and eyes are taken off of the process to focus on another process, idea, product, etc. Meanwhile, most of the executions are in the dark, the haphazard execution happens and no one is there to see it, Organizations must have the strong EQ-as strategic agility to achieve execution excellence. Very few businesses have such agility, that's why execution excellence is so hard to achieve. The challenge is that the digital environment changes so fast nowadays that your strategy must be very flexible. Execution is difficult, also because all the key ingredients in it have mixed flavors. Most research to date has pointed to key aspects of successful strategy execution: being leadership, culture, and performance management systems / rewards, they all well mix the art and science of management disciplines and special ingredients of digital EQ. 

Employee Engagement: The third dimension of corporate digital ‘EQ’ is employee engagement; statistically around 80% of employees in the US are disengaged. High performance and satisfaction at work is most strongly related to the feeling that we can direct our own lives, learn and create new things, and do better by ourselves and our world; from talent management perspective, having an intense, passionate sense of ownership - fueled by empowerment, trust of management, HR systems of recognition and reward which all reinforce the other two dimensions of EQ–Emotional Intelligence and Execution Excellence As more often than not, the more engaged employees have high EQ and better capability to execute collaboratively.

Hence, the high business EQ with such three dimensions will encourage system thinking, enforce the culture of learning and innovation, inspire the high EQ leadership, and energize the people of the organization- making them "want to be there best and give their best", to enable the execution excellence.

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IT ‘Resolution’ –How to Set Goals Right

IT resolution shouldn’t be empty; setting metrics shouldn’t be too much inward focus.

It is the beginning of New Year, many IT leaders may start making ‘IT resolution’-It is very important for the IT leadership to be communicative, savvy and forward-thinking enough to tie IT goals into business strategies, and essentially, the technological footprint upon which most organizations are dependent. Regardless of your industry, if IT leaders look closer within, they will find that technology has progressed as the critical business driver and not the standard simple avenue of support. Think about what IT needs to do to support the growth of the business, improvements in product quality, speeding time to market for new products, improvement in profitability, etc.

IT needs to create and measure the annual goals with the direction of the enterprise's initiatives. However, the second front is that technology drives the majority of digital business processes today. Therefore, IT is already on the front lines and has molded the identity for the institution which inherently, already exists within the framework from which being measured. Goals may or may not be tested for success via metrics, but there should always be deliverables associated with each goal, of course. Metrics may give you an indication or support your progress on the deliverables. 1) How can the IT department bring business to your organization, This would be a more "proactive" exercise from bottom-line support to top-line business growth. 2) How can the IT department support the business? This is more reactive as you will have to listen to the board to understand where, what, and why to improve. 

A goal must have a timeline, resources, benefit, and beneficiary: A bad goal lacks one of these. The resource allocation is most contentious at the onset, while the time issue gets magnified at the end of the initiative. To address the resource competition issue, the 'benefit' must often be articulated in user-specific currency. In general, a goal is hard to articulate, as the exercise of goal setting is messy, a goal must comport a vision for a better state. For the CIO, Business Architecture is the practice that roadmaps getting from ‘as is’ to the desired state.

Goal messages are tailored for a different audience. IT leaders should first start thinking about who the real audience for your organizations' goals is. This could mean
(1) the company you work for and all stakeholders.
(2) the leadership team/executive team
(3) the IT functional component of the organization. In all likelihood you probably mean all of the above; however, each of these entities understands vastly different degrees of detail when it comes to IT and would probably need to have messages developed specifically for each group.

The other key here is to divide your goals into two parts.
(1) Issues which IT can address with little or no investment, but create remarkable value for the business.
(2). Business initiatives in stakeholder’s language and tentative system solutions for them along with the laid down process. 

The good alignment between strategy and execution, and clear mapping between business objectives and individual goals. You want to align IT goals with the strategic goals of the company and from there determine the individual unit goals to meet the strategic goals of your division. Metrics can then be determined to meet the goals and used as a report card. The specific steps are
(1) starting communicating with business executives to ensure IT is working on the right things and producing real value,
(2) understanding how to communicate this to the organization at large, and
( 3) how to communicate this to the IT organization to operationalize the objectives. Once the message is clear, you can begin thinking about how to measure success, which will be much easier if everyone understands what you are trying to achieve.

KPIs are set in the context of the organization's ability to meet customer demanded performance. The key is understanding primary metrics for IT that comprise the fundamental building blocks for the services required by your business. The metrics should be a reflection of business capabilities.
- Availability metrics are not really business goals.
- Implement X, Y, Z, key projects within the defined time frame, and budget allocation and how they underpin business capabilities.
- Improve human capital and capacity
- Raise customer satisfaction rating
- Simplify the solution landscape and be able to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness
- Improve adoption and utilization of key business solutions

IT resolution shouldn’t be empty; setting metrics shouldn’t be too much inward focus. It’s all about determining what actionable information your executive team needs in order to make decisions in real-time, in each instance, accretive to their respective business objectives. You start with the individual, in-depth discussions with each of the division heads to determine the key events and the related information that will provide insightful context so that business responses to those events (threats or opportunities) influence desired outcomes. Then work with your IT team leaders to create metrics related to the enterprise architecture necessary to drive appropriate decision support mechanisms.

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Can Agile Thrive in the Large Enterprise

There’s no one size fits all, or one management recipe for every company

Large organizations are usually more complex, with variety of culture or sub-cultural elements, therefore, it is more like to be managed via rigid processes, so can Agile succeed in such a large company environment, or to rephrase it, can Agile values and philosophies succeed in a big company?'

Agile can work in a big organization, but it may require some adjustments and flexibility on the part of the practitioner. It requires an understanding of the values and principles, with both top-down & bottom-up agreement, appreciation and acceptance as in living of those values and principles. How many big companies are prepared to do that? Probably not many, especially long-established, mature, big companies - some things are too ingrained and some people will feel they have too much to lose to ever truly embrace an agile approach to their business.

Practicing Agile needs top management commitment both from business & IT in order to support the organizational change. Agile will work in any company/market but might need some specific adjustments/ tuning without compromising the Agile-Core Values.The success of Agile hinges on its acceptance by teams who may not be directly emerged in it but are dependent on its output. If management, executives, planning, etc are not fully on-board with Agile, then more likely than not, you'll face challenges that could limit if not completely derail the level of success you're going to achieve.

There is a huge gap between having agile teams (succeeding in agile on team level) and being agile as a company. Agile and Scrum are tools which enable a product manager to be successful in managing the development of products. Using an agile approach, the PM can focus on iteratively and empirically working towards products that fulfill the needs of the customers. Agile teams are usually the focus, but getting an entire company to be agiler is still a work in progress. Adopting Agile values and principles can be very helpful in the volatile and changing digital dynamic, not only in projects but business and life itself, however, in big companies with a large tradition of doing things in a certain way, adopting a different and innovative approach is not an easy task and it will take time until it really gets the benefits expected, and sometimes companies cannot afford the time needed or the cost that may require to change abruptly. 

Is 'Common Sense' not so common?  Certain principles and values that are now marketed as "agile,"  have always been part of the "soft" skills any successful PM must have to succeed, but which have always been so hard to put a finger on - trust in colleagues, open communication, facilitation, relationship building, and understanding people. Therefore, in today’s environment, the first thing any PM must do is to get an understanding from his / her team and stakeholders on when they say ‘we are agile’ is what does being agile actually mean to them. It is important to get everyone on the same page before getting into the challenges of the project.

Basically, success depends on management, leadership, culture or in another word: PEOPLE; not processes or frameworks, where those are the means and tools to help you get there. The key should be selecting the right tool at the right time and situation to try to take the best decisions, without blaming Agile or Waterfall for one’s own mistakes. So you may find the successful implementation of Agile in a company, not that successful and the other way around too. There are lots of organizations that have adopted Agile in various areas in their organization getting high benefits from it over a traditional management approach, without forgetting some of the traditional management tools and techniques that help complement the approach. 

There’s no one size fits all, one recipe for every company, since we not only need to take into consideration the size of the company but also the organizational culture, values, vision and administrative processes and context. In the field of project management, project management practices and tools will continue to evolve and develop because every project is different and there is not and NEVER will be any perfect way to manage a project. PMs will continue to strive to do things smarter and be better and wiser in their work. A company, especially the large ones should encourage and support a portfolio of methodologies and provide guidelines for what project types each is suited for. 

Hence, Agile can definitely thrive in large companies; however, to think that Agile or any approach will make an organization successful is not fair at the least, or even more likely an illusion. Organizations are social groups of different sizes full of people, and people’s decisions at any given time can make the organization, in a certain period of time, successful or not. Still, agile is a right philosophy, principle, and methodology to catalyze business’s digital transformation via adapting to the change with speed.

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Innovation & Information

Information dot connection is the foundation of innovation.

An information system is an abstract view of an activity system focusing on the gathering, processing, distribution, and use of information. It provides the information needed for the decisions that are part of the activity system. 

The Information Technology system supports the information system. It encapsulates hardware, software, data and communication technologies. It provides data to be used by people as information. Here is the insight of Information System vs. Information Technology.

Classic information technology strategy divides technology up into three areas: technology as product or artifact, technology as process or method and technology as knowledge. The key characteristics of the technology are that it is in some synthesized sense and that it is used for a goal-directed purpose. Interestingly,  the key defining characteristics of an enterprise are its purposes. 

Another way to connect these digital dots is to distinguish between data, information, content, context, connections, and usage. 'Data' is raw content, without context - 'a collection of zeroes and ones', in the classic computing sense, though there can be many other variants of this. Data starts to be 'information' when we add some context, such as through metadata. Metadata is often described as 'information about information', so there's obviously some recursion here. Information starts to be 'meaningful' when we add connections to other information items - in some cases including non-connections to things that aren't or don't seem to be connected. The end-point of all of this is when we put meaningful information to use

Information-systems incorporate both ends and means; information-technology is almost solely about means. The information system is about how to garner, gather, maintain and apply those items of data, information, meaning and use; Information-technology is a specific subset of that emphasizes the various tools, techniques and other means via which we achieve the aims of that 'information-system.' Systems are logically independent of technology - and in the context of information defined by information flows and stores, which are again logically independent of technology although commonly implemented with technology.

Philosophically, data is physical, and the information is ‘mental.’ if you accept that information is present in the physical world, there is a sense in which information from or about the world is incorporated into our very DNA over time by the processes of evolution. If you go along with this way of thinking, it means information systems are literally as old as life itself - because life is founded on an information system. There has to be some process by which information and possibly 'potential meaning' is 'inscribed' into what the philosophers call 'speech-acts' which we might call symbols or signals. Conversely, a process by which information is extracted from speech acts and into minds - which we generally loosely call 'interpretation'

Ideally, CIOs should take more responsibility for the entire information life cycle of the organization. In most organizations, the CIO is responsible for some of the systems and technologies that support business activities, and may be responsible for some of the quality attributes of the information (the efficiency and integrity of its transmission and storage), but is not responsible for the information itself, except of course information about his/her own domain. It would be useful if CIOs pay more attention to the entire information life cycle, from information gathering and interpretation through to decision-making and learning, especially with the growing interest in the business use of social media and variety of digital technology.

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'Top-Down' Strategy & 'Bottom-up' Innovation

It takes top-down’s systematic discipline and bottom-up’s agility to execute solidly and innovate boldly.

Digital organizations today face such a dilemma, on the one side; top-down strategy mapping is a logical step to ensuring smooth execution; on the other side, innovation takes freedom and flexibility, usually happens from bottom up. Consider a scenario, where an organization has performed the strategy mapping and made investment decisions for the budgetary period., and everyone knows this is what she/he needs to focus on and deliver and that's what his/her performance would be measured against. Now if someone sees an opportunity of innovation that doesn't directly map to his/her manager's objectives/scorecard for the year, chances are that the manager wouldn't cater to that idea; and the employee does not have the motivation to innovate. So does strict top-down strategy mapping strangle bottom-up innovation?

Both top-down strategy and bottom-up innovations can work together if there is an explicit linkage between all related artifacts such as strategy, business objectives, capabilities, projects, etc: The ‘micro-managed’ top-down as directing the specific outcomes will lead to a lack of innovation and in fact failure to adapt to changing market conditions. Let employees use their brains in helping solve for leaders intent. What is needed today is top-down to be more about the vision of the outcome; in broad terms of what is the intention of leadership; not how to get there. If leaders want to drive the train, then they have defined all the functions required for them and only need the functions to be filled by others.

Top down is OK if the enterprise intends to be what its strategy assumes it needs to be in the strategy time horizon, not in a strict way, but through a balanced approach: Top-down is beneficial when
- maintains coherence, while allowing autonomy
- maintains a balance between exploration and exploitation
- compensates short-term and short-range attention of daily operations, with long-term broad-range vision (and research, etc) that could steer the organization 

And if the top-down strategy cares about these three, the boundary-pushing at lower levels would be encouraged, a healthy amount of errors tolerated and the bottom-up innovation would not be strangled.

The top-down strategy should support incremental innovation. Disruptive innovations may be considered as drivers for emerging strategies. The strategy may be changed, as well as some capabilities which are implemented through innovation or process management. In some sense, improvements in the execution of the strategy will be carried out in "pinball" way. In dynamic environments, there must be a capacity to respond to new and emerging opportunities and to create new opportunities. This will inevitably lead to a bottom-up approach, leveraging existing strengths.

Neither top-down nor bottom-up will be successful in isolation - successful enterprises embrace top down and bottom up to best effect. Some best practices shared by industry leaders:
1) First, execution of Top-Down Strategy should consume no more than 70% of the companies resources; 20% supports Middle-Out Strategy, and 10% supports Continuous Improvement/ Local Optimization and Innovation.
2) Second: the Top-Down Strategy is developed from the outside-inward with a bias towards continuing the existing Purpose, Mission, and Vision and input from all levels. Middle-Out should challenge the current trajectory and condition.
3) Third: Strategy Execution should always be Bottom-Up where executives provide Vision and ask "How do we get there?"

There are digital shifts from the structural enterprise to the logical, then to the social and then onto those enterprises with demographic properties, the pyramid style of organizational structure is becoming flatter. Therefore, in order to solve today’s complex business issues, you have to make compromises that take you away from a strict top-down or bottom-up approach. And the pragmatic approach is well-mixed with top-down’s systematic discipline and bottom-up’s agility and flexibility. 

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An Architect’s Mindset

An Architect’s mind can discover solutions to complex problems via analyzing/synthesizing/formalizing/systematizing/harmonizing.

An architect’s mindset is not privileged for Enterprise Architects only, it’s the modern leadership mindset which is both good at analytics and synthesis; abstraction and visualization; imagination and practicality. As Enterprise Architecture discipline not only embraces models, methods, and theories of management and control; it also uses the same from systems engineering, linguistics, cognitive science, environmental science, biology, social science and artificial intelligence. Therefore, all ultra-modern leaders need to cultivate such a mindset for better communication and make multi-dimensional influences.

An Abstract Thinker with Imagination: An architect’s mindset is full of good imagination, with the capability to imagine Enterprise and turn certain stakeholder viewpoints into views and then take it forward to reality. An architect’s mindset has the capability of abstract or contemplative thinking, strong pattern-finding capability in order to design an effective Enterprise Architecture, which is a “Structure of its data and processes (both computerized and non-computerized) across the enterprise and within various silos providing an enterprise-wide view of various relationships. Enterprise view further enables a framework for refining and optimizing processes and data interactions and interpreting change in business capabilities at various levels of an enterprise influenced and informed by enterprise goals and objectives.” 

Visual Communicator: An architect’s mindset can also translate the abstract concept back into the real world example, thus, it also has the ‘visual’ ability to “see” an idea and express it in visual terms via interactive way. In addition, you need to have the ability to analyze problems and mentally iterate through possible solutions to find the best fit. As an architect, you need to take viewpoints of stakeholders and convert that into views and then enable the design of those views as per real-world requirements. An Architect’s mind can discover (analyze/synthesize / formalize / systematize/harmonize) solutions from different enterprise related disciplines to be able to solve complex and complicated enterprise problems. 

Empathic Persuader: An architect’s mindset has the ability to zoom in and out of the bigger picture. Architects build bridges between strategy and implementation by communicating to the groups responsible for these two widely different activities and giving clarity to both. Therefore, an Enterprise Architect has to be in touch with the business forces via listening, questioning, connecting, and coaching, with the capability to know when to bend and when to make a firm stand. An architect’s mindset is coherent and persuasive, has the ability to reading the "ripples on the surface of the water", aware of corporate politics and cultural pressure points; identifies tradeoffs and negotiates them with all stakeholder to collaborate skillfully with empathy.

Imagination, abstraction, creativity, and coherence, etc, are some inherent cognitive and mental elements of architect-wise thinking. It is a type of leadership mindset to focus on long term perspective with the outside of the box mentality.

Variety of Ultra-Modern Mindset
An Original Thinking Mind

An Architect's Mind

A C hangable Mind

A Cogitative Mind

"Out of Box" Mind

Design Mind

Multi-linguistic Mind

Intuitive Mind

Strategic Mind:

Agile Mind

Creative Mind

Complexity Mind

Flow Mind

Design Mind

Systematic Mind

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Digital Statistics

Digital Enriches the World with Speed.

The business and world is speeding up with digital speed, here are some interesting digital statistics:

1. Over 40% of the companies that were at the top of the Fortune 500 in 2000 were no longer there in 2010.    –Future Of Business 

2. The amount of data stored is doubling every 18 months.   – IDC 

3. By 2030, 5 billion people – nearly two thirds of global population – could be middle class.                  - OECD “An Emerging Middle Class.” 

4. Content on the Internet tripled between 2010 and 2013.   –GoGlobe &Qmee 

5. It takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.   –HelpScout 

6. The percentage of companies new to the Fortune 1000 has grown from 35% (1973-1983) to 45% (1984-1993) to 60% (1994 -2003) to over 70% (2004-2013) in each of the last 4 decades.  –Future of Business. 

7. There are 1.5 Billion smart-phone users vs. 5 Billion mobile users worldwide.      –Internet Trend 

8. Today, most goods and a growing share of services are “Made in the World”, not just produced in just one country.   –OECD “Interconnected Economies” 

9. In 2011, 3.6 billion people (50% of the global population) lived in urban areas, compared with 1.5 billion in 1990.     –World Bank 

10. $83 billion is estimated to be lost by U.S. businesses every year due to poor customer service.   –Genesys  

11. In 2012, only 37% of US companies earned a customer experience index rating of “excellent” or “good”.                –Forrester 

12. Just to keep employment rates constant, the worldwide number of jobs will have to increase by around 600 million over a 15-year period.                   -World Bank

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Culture of Knowledge-Sharing

Culture of Knowledge-Sharing is to Improve Organization's Learning Capability. 

Knowledge is Power”, in the organization domain, knowledge is the context to make work well done, thus, if the success of others is the value and cooperation is the expectation, then "Knowledge-Sharing" culture needs to be cultivated, as people need a common goal to be willing to share knowledge. What’s a more systematic understanding upon building a culture of knowledge sharing?

"Knowledge sharing culture" as a goal for leadership is to encourage & recognize talent, and make it practical for the members to help them do their work. Perhaps the thing to focus on is the three-step knowledge-sharing behaviors: Learning before each event, and sharing learning after each event, and then co-creating the new knowledge and insight. it is often easier to have people sharing what they know, but more difficult to see people reusing what others have developed. To promote the "knowledge sharing culture" in any enterprise organization, a reward motivation program shall be applied along with KPI measurements exercise. 

Knowledge management is very related to the culture of organization: It's important to create the right culture that fits both the organization and the employees is hence important. There are several elements that make the process faster, such as; trust, mutual respect, sense of unity, and mutual gain. Employees should think of knowledge sharing as something they gain, rather than lose. Knowledge is more like a commodity, only a couple of clicks away at today’s information abundance, only through sharing and updating, it can be refreshed and refined into insight and wisdom.

 "Knowledge is power" could be seen as a part of "Intrinsic Motivation": Knowledge workers with intrinsic motivation like to share their knowledge to learn more by themselves. Most of the times knowledge workers are perfectly able to find a balance between sharing knowledge and ensuring sharing knowledge will not become a goal in itself. One’s knowledge is the other one’s information only, the ultimate business goal is to improve productivity and encourage innovation.

What about cognitive, psychomotor, and affective knowledge? Knowledge is dynamic and multidimensional it’s not just spoken or transferred in hard-copy, it’s also transferred visually and through emotions /feelings. There’s a very wide range of knowledge to be considered. Traditionally you have look at knowledge transfer in three formats listed as follows:
• Cognitive; intellectual outcomes
• Psychomotor; new physical skills
• Affective; attitudes, values, beliefs

The success of KM is mainly tied to Culture. KM-Knowledge Management is the overarching umbrella, which can include culture as soft, but key success factor –it’s a management domain upon how information flows in the organization ... People's beliefs and values are normally distilled through a long process of cultural cumulating, socio-culturally and organizationally. If knowledge is not flowing smoothly in the organization, figuring out the causes is a significant contribution to KM. Knowledge sharing is embedded in the work styles, and well-placed KM systems, KM methodologies/tools do play a major role. Knowledge sharing becomes an effortless activity, it is not a separate exercise- one does it because every bit of information in the organization is tagged and flows through KM channels

Take holistic KM approaches. An effective KM platform or tools are efficient, however, many other aspects of knowledge management cannot be solved by technology only. KM needs to look at all the present collaborative processes already being used to evaluate them for improvements to enhance knowledge sharing, decision making, and follow on actions based on the decisions made. Innovation and knowledge creation, access and knowledge usage appear to be linked. And now at the age of information explosion, it is about managing knowledge to create new knowledge with vast knowledge repositories available for talent to work with. The knowledge sharing culture is strongly influenced by both corporate/organizational and social structures, KM  is not only about sharing knowledge. It is better to talk about the knowledge you need to do your job. Then you can determine what you need to do to get the right information or experience at the right time.

Keep the end-the ultimate business goals in mind, If everyone already agrees that it is good to satisfy the customer, and they come to understand that by sharing knowledge, you help coworkers to succeed and so better satisfy the customer, then the culture will begin to value sharing knowledge and the organizatons move towards an "Knowledge-Sharing culture.

Digital Culture Tuning:

Culture of Knowledge Sharing

The Risk-Intelligent Culture

The Agile Culture

Culture of Execution

Culture of Risk-Tolerance

A Measurable Culture

A High Performance Culture

An Analytic Culture

A Culture of Competency

A Culture of Innovation

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Digital Dawn

The Digital Cognizance Enables Business to Strike the Right Digital Balance at the Transformation Journey with Focus. 

We are at the age of digital dawn; companies that can proactively and effectively build core digital capabilities based on digital cognizance to adapt to digital normality, will gain unique competitive advantage and execute with speed. Here are a few concepts to improve your digital cognizance.

Digital literacy: Wikipedia defines digital literacy as the ability to effectively and critically navigate, evaluate and create information using a range of digital technologies. It requires one "to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms". Digital literacy does not replace traditional forms of literacy. It builds upon the foundation of traditional forms of literacy. it is much more than a combination of the two terms. Digital information is a symbolic representation of data, and literacy refers to the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently, and think critically about the written word.

At an enterprise level, digital literacy requires cross-functional collaboration and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing. It requires information management capabilities, innovation capabilities, and business learning & growth capabilities., etc. Just like digital consumers, Enterprise can also be classified into digital natives and digital immigrants. Digital native business is the one which is founded in the digital age, such as many technology startups; while a digital immigrant organization refers to the businesses which adopt technology later in the business life-cycle. Though simply being a digitally native company does not make business digital literate or digital mature. And many legacy businesses and industries are leveraging the two speeds-both industrial speed and digital speed in navigating digital transformation.

 Digital Mind Shift: Digital Transformation requires a mind shift. In addition to the set point changing, transformation requires first shifting mindsets, then building new skills, reinforcing and embedding new practices/reflexes, skills and situations have become more subtle, more multi-layered and, therefore, complex, what's needed every now and then to any individual, team, organization, society, and on up to the entire planet's population, is a little or a lot of energy to re-focus, kick start or 'game-changeing' With evolutionary digital technologies, the scientific breakthroughs connected to human communication dynamics regarding, for instance, mirror neurons, the social brain, the nature of consciousness are all wonderful, useful and interesting in driving transformation.

Digital Transformation: The terms "transformation" and "change" truly overlap in the literal definition; people tend, though, to carry their own associations with each. Transformation is definitely the more ambitious sounding term -- and thus, we attempt to characterize the differences. Organizations’ digitalization is surely a transformation journey, as it has to permeate into business vision, strategy, culture, and communication, processes. etc. Daily business change may be mechanical, but the transformation is more radical. "Change" can be a somewhat mechanical implementation of new or different ways to doing something while the digital transformation is more likely to be a sweeping approach to altering a culture, or parts of it, possibly even to parts of its value system, to embrace such as change and help it become self-perpetuating. That said, it is referring to modification and internalization of new values, behaviors, and culture. When the need for significant change is identified, it's generally naive to think it will succeed without transformation as well. Going digital is a transformation journey, as it takes holistic strategy, the culture of innovation & learning, solid business capabilities, and productive digital workforces., etc.

Digital Inflection Points 

More organizations are also at the strategic inflection point of digital transformation. A strategic inflection point is a time in the life cycle of a business when its fundamentals (Talent skills, process, and technologies) are about to change. Inflection is a bend, a fold, a curve, a turn, a twist; such change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights, or a risk to hit the uncertainty. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.

Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that simply adopting new digital technology may be insufficient. You have to transform the company's underlying functions and organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed. Otherwise, companies may begin a decline from its previous good performance. But inflection point is the moment when the way business is being conducted changes more radically, it creates new opportunities for businesses that adept at executing and operation. It is the moment to be ‘paranoid’-as it’s the act of inflecting or the state of being inflected. By gaining more digital cognizance, the business can build solid understanding upon digital transformation and strike the right digital balance on the digital journey.

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Three Traits of Innovative Team

Innovation journey is like taking a hiking trip at the trail very few or even no people ever went before, it takes courage and emotional maturity.

Due to the complexity of today’s business dynamic, more often than not, innovation is a teamwork, rather than just an individual’s effort, what are the successful traits of an innovative team, and how to improve  the team’s innovation fluency?

1.    Innovation Leadership 

Innovation leadership is crucial, as leaders must have a clear vision and be strong in communicating it. An innovation leader must walk the tight rope between diplomat and maverick. An innovation manager is like an entrepreneur, but even has a more challenging job: an Entrepreneur is a decision maker who always depends on his/her thought; decides what, how, and how much of a good work or service will be produced. He or she supplies risk capital as a risk taker, monitors and controls the business’ activities as a manager. The success of innovation depends on proper management. Through proper management, the business is able to overcome the obstacles to successful innovation.

An innovation leader may have his/her own constitutional innovation leadership behaviors across the innovation Creator, Translator, Stabilizer; Navigator, etc, with the pattern of required behaviors to face the emerging situation and succeed. The leaders in innovation today are problem-solvers, who have to create, manage, and orchestrate the innovation symphony not completely written yet, it takes practice, practice, practice.

2. Mutual Trust  

If innovation starts with a vision, it's primarily a journey through which the innovator has to interact with others upon how to innovate; if you don't trust inputs from others, how do you innovate. Many good ideas get buried simply because the innovator fails in interesting others or in adapting to their input. 

Mutual trust present openly to others and don't worry too much about hidden agendas, if you get enough feedback, unfair input should be easily identified; or it’s not as simple as the case that once you phrase your vision, others will simply take it and transform it. Mutual trust is the prerequisite for creating innovation team harmony: In most cases of disagreement, it is ideological, such as the confused definitions, or how the individuals process information that causes disharmony, through trusting with each other, team can create synergy by understanding problem more profoundly and solving innovation puzzles more collaboratively.  

3.    Emotional Maturity 

Innovation journey is like taking a hiking trip at the trail very few or even no people ever went before, it takes courage and emotional maturity.

No matter if one is managing or participating in a collaborative environment, one’s emotional maturity enables the suspension of judgment. The self-actualized individual proposed by Maslow’s law was able to clearly understand their perspective and try to understand and incorporate the understanding of others without feeling the egos cry for attention. It is both trusts as well as an emotional maturity (a highly self-actualized nature) that allows one to collaborate and easily integrate the ideas of others. Having clear constraints also improves the innovative environment.

Innovators are the round pit, doesn’t fit the square hole, they are disruptive to the status quo. But working with individuals who have a strong sense of self has many benefits as well. One tends to trust them because they say what they mean and mean what they say.  Indeed, innovation is all about how to disrupt the old thinking and old way to do the things, sometimes it is emotional, but it’s also a progressive and mature way to move forward.

Organizations need to invest in the cultivation of capacity for innovation. Mutual trust, innovation leadership, and emotional maturity are all critical in building a highly effective innovation team and achieve an exceptional result.

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