Is IT Leadership like Bicycling: All About Balance

The pervasive digitalization or IT consumerism require the balance of the “old experience” and the “new way to do things.”

Many IT organizations are on the way to the digital paradigm shift, from running a maintenance center for keeping the business light on to reinvent IT as an innovation engine and value creator. There is a mixed bag of legacy technologies and emergent digital tools and apps to run an IT organization today. Therefore, IT leaders need to bridge the chasm between “the old’ way to do things and the new way to think and prioritize how to run a high-performing IT, as well as how to measure IT value via the business perspective. Is today’s IT leadership just like bicycling, all about balance?

IT has to strike the right balance between supporting business and leading changes: Often there is a huge gap between IT-Business mutual understanding and trust. On one side, most of the business managers still perceive IT organizations as support functions only, not inviting IT to brainstorm strategy; and IT leaders also say that they can't put together a strategic plan because the business doesn't have one. You need to see this as an opportunity - not a roadblock. So while the other areas of the business need to change, IT should ask itself how it can influence - and help them do that. After all, business and IT are all on the same team to ensure the organization as a whole can achieve an optimal business result for long-term growth. Due to abundant information and more mature digital technologies, IT is actually in a unique position to grasp business opportunities, also predict risks for businesses growth and expansion. Thus, it needs to put more focus on innovation and standardize the applications and devices customers use to keep support cost down and manage risks effectively.

From IT organizational structure perspective, it needs to balance of the centralized IT vs. decentralized IT organization: What's the best organizational structure to run an effective IT or a digital organization under the cloud? As the border of functional silos is blurred and creating meaningful differentiation requires capabilities that are almost always cross-functional. The same concerns can be lifted for other functions as well. Often, centralized or decentralized IT capabilities are the perpetual dilemma as paradoxically, centralizing and standardizing what makes sense enables flexibility without chaos.  And a centralized IT also has the advantage in purchasing power when negotiating with vendors, practicing governance discipline and sharing best practices with speed. The speed of change is creating a solutions environment that is more specialized and complex, thus more expensive to successfully manage. And the certain level of decentralization enables IT to get in-depth understanding businesses and deliver tailored business solutions, not just IT services. A hybrid approach to deliver IT capabilities may work best to fit most of IT organizations. And it’s not a black or white decision. It always depends on several factors like firm’s culture, strategy, IT budget, IT maturity and so on. It relates much to who makes IT decisions and If done right, that you can get the best of both worlds is the best approach.

From IT management perspective, the balance of DevOp -Agile vs. Waterfall helps to run a project portfolio with continuous delivery: Agile is more as a management philosophy, a set of principles and a proven methodology to manage projects and run IT. DevOps brings in a cultural shift to an organization to not only develop but also to maintain the application with continuous changes in place. Devops as a natural consequence of applying agile thinking not only to development but to the whole lifecycle of a service that has IT-components as central assets. Many established IT organization also accumulate enriched experience to using Waterfall as a management practice for years. Thus, suitability is important to select the right methods in managing project portfolio effectively. There are multiple approaches, frameworks available to help teams identify the agile suitability for particular projects. Organizations can use "all agile some of the time" and "some agile all of the time" on projects delivery journey to ensure the project success and customer satisfaction.

The technique for riding a bicycle is to look forward, keep your body balanced and steer in the right direction. So does today’s IT leadership. We have more computing power, greater connectivity, more data, greater potential empowerment of the worker, etc. But more of something isn't always necessarily good, the management challenge is to BALANCE them well. The pervasive digitalization or IT consumerism require the balance of the “old experience” and the “new way to do things,” the “learning and doing.” Whether one believes that the current experience is a transformation or just an extension of the past, what are the things that you can do as IT and non-IT leaders to leverage the experiences of the past, and what are some new lessons for you to consider through applying digital technologies? The ultimate goal is to build a high-performing, high-innovative and customer-centric IT organization.

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Three Big “WHY”s in Change Management

Asking big WHY question is to dig through the root cause of changes, how to manage it and achieve more tangible results.

Change is the most significant characteristics of the digital age, and it’s multifaceted. The change also becomes an important business capability, not just an ongoing project or a one-time business initiative. “Change Management” is an overarching term that encompasses extensive planning, communication, discovery, creativity, measurement, etc. But the first step first, you need to figure out what are the very reasons and what are the ultimate goals for changes? What are the big WHY questions you should ponder in order to manage change more seamlessly?

More fundamentally, WHY do you need to CHANGE?  Many organizations focus so heavily on the "doing" (the "how"), they lose sight of the "purpose," the "WHY" part of changes. It is the key to present the WHY first. Primarily, it provides a way to inject enthusiasm, which is infectious and spurs the concept forward. Once people agree with the “WHY” part of the reasoning, they can develop their own level or means of participating, maybe even offering what you didn't think to ask for, expanding the efficiency of the concept itself, thereby re-injecting further excitement in their being part of it. Because change can not be completely manipulated from top-down, it starts from the mindset. "Why" should not only precede "How," but should be reaffirmed at each step in the "How." Every process, every expenditure of time, money, or energy, and every assignment of resources should directly relate back to the "Why." The enemy is not changing per se, it's the change without focus or purpose. One of the change mottoes is "never mistake motion for action." The successful businesses are the ones that have learned WHY should change, WHEN change is called for and how to decide WHAT to change." Let's not let all these problems inherent in any change initiative, to get in the way of accepting the business facts that change is inevitable and needed in every business.

WHY is Change so Difficult? Statistically, more than two-thirds of Change Management effort fail to achieve the expected result. Change becomes fundamentally difficult in most organizations because it is treated as something distinct from running the business, evolving performance and increasing results over time. Leaders and employees are stressed enough in getting done what is right in front of them that change is layered upon becomes disruptive. In addition, resistance to change is part of human nature. For many people, "sameness" is psychological security, change leads to psychological insecurity. Most people like security. Even though it is difficult to change human nature, there is still value in understanding that resistance is normal and must be considered and managed. The other reason why is change so difficult could be the leadership factor. Leaders do not set a good example to be change agents. Even the people who are advocating change are resistant to change. It is common for people to propose changes that impact others while exempting themselves. This type of approach is guaranteed to be resisted.

WHY is measuring change so hard? Perhaps the difficulty in measuring Change Management is that the very thing you are measuring is changing. Some change is very difficult to quantify and measure. There is an inherent oxymoron in the term Change Management. We want people to change and manage/control at the same time. That's like trying to drive with your foot on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. The other consideration is that the part we are measuring is only a snapshot of the entire organizational picture. Each change effort is so different. Even two simultaneous changes going on in a firm are so varied, so there are no cookie cutter metrics or methodologies exist that gives the answer. Employee morale can be measured in terms of retention and by surveying job satisfaction. Improved customer service can be measured as well. Not all elements of change are easily quantifiable, whereas some are in terms of hours, and dollars saved. It's probably better and more accessible to measure change-readiness rather than change progress. The change needs to be defined in its base elements and associated benefits to be achieved. (financial, market share, productivity.) The change deliverables success value is then tied to the success of the elements dependent upon the amount of adoption, utilization, and proficiency of the people involved. The higher the adoption, utilization, and proficiency of the people in the new normal, the more successful the deliverable will be. It can be argued that if you have good change-readiness, then you will probably be better at change, measure the input - not the output - it's too late to do anything about it by then.

Asking big WHY question is to dig through the root cause of changes, how to manage it and achieve more tangible results. Real change and improvement are deprogramming old mindsets, letting go of the outdated tradition or the voices from the past, and reprogram collective minds with new mentalities, norms, and behaviors and successful changes are often linked to the DNA of the organization itself. From management perspectives, it’s how to build multi-faceted change capabilities to adapt to the ever-evolving business dynamic and improve organizational maturity steadily.

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CIO’s Digital Agenda XXXV: The CIO’s Cloud Journey Part I

Cloud is the nature phenomenon and a technology advancement to draw a lot of contemplations. 

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about 2500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom.
More and more organizations are pushing their cloud envelope and migrate IT applications, platform, or even infrastructure to the cloud, CIOs as IT leaders, what are the holistic cloud strategy you make, the logic steps you should follow, and what’re the pitfalls you need to avoid?

   

The CIO’s Cloud Journey Part I

• CIO’s “Cloud Philosophy”: The Preparation and Pitfalls of Cloudification: Moving up to the cloud is neither for cost saving only nor about catching the IT fashion, it is a journey to reinvent IT via modernization, classification, integration, and optimization, it is an opportunity to improve IT agility and increase IT maturity, make well preparation, and avoid potential pitfalls, it is not only the technology advancement, more crucially about management methodology and philosophy.

• CIO’s Cloud Navigation: Three Big Whys to Deploy Cloudification: Though “Cloud” has been proven to bring visible benefits such as faster delivery or CapEx-OpEx transformation, etc, and many organizations have already reaped the benefit from the SAAS model. Still, as an emerging IT trend, most of organizations lack of well-defined cloud strategy to run an agile IT, especially, Cloud itself takes some time to get matured, from vendor maturity to technology and methodology maturity, as a CIO, how should you navigate the Cloud journey via fundamental questioning: WHY, WHY and WHY you should go on Cloud?

• What is the Critical Role of IT in the Cloud Era? For so long, IT has been perceived by businesses as an inhibitor to productivity, because it is slow to change and acts as a gatekeeper for businesses to adopt the emerging IT consumerization. With the dawn of the cloud era, the best bet of IT is to understand the various Cloud options (including SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, private, public, hybrid) that deliver self-service, instant productivity to the developers and business units - probably in a DevOps model - so that the business units can get product to market in an expedient fashion.
• The Inflection Point to Cloud?  The transition to cloud solutions is inevitable. We're hitting an inflection point where businesses are moving from traditional industrial IT environments to digital cloud-based environments. But how can IT leaders embrace the opportunity and prepare for such challenges?

• CapEx  vs. OpEx More and more IT organizations are pushing up their Cloud envelope though Cloud Computing still takes the time to get matured and it doesn't necessarily equate to faster software development or better quality of software. Still, there are some significant advantages such as the ability to scale up or down as demand waxes and wanes, global availability and transforming from CapEx. To Opex., etc.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way to human progression.

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Three Questions to Assess an Employee’s Authenticity

Authenticity is not only a leadership quality but a digital professional trait.

Most of the employees at pyramidal organizations in the industrial age are like cogs in the huge mechanical business wheel, keep working, but lack the big picture about the strategic goals of their organizations as well as lack the imagination about their own potential. Now the new digital paradigm that is emerging is one of a living organization, one that is organic, alive, energetic, fluid, connected and holistic. Every staff is also like a living “cell,” can continue to discover and grow, creative and influential. So an important perspective for either talent managers or employees themselves is to ask tough questions and discover authenticity and purpose of the work, to unleash the collective human potential and business potential as well.

Who are you, as an individual, a digital professional or a leader?  There are many good talent theories around from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to Belbin’s team role, or the motivation scenario of “autonomy, mastery, and purpose,” the very goal is to discover human’s potential and keep our energy flow toward the positive direction. When digital workers are inspired to discover who they are, their inner genius, and empowered to grow into who they want to be, the negative emotions and unhealthy competitions are discouraged and every member can bring some wisdom to the workplace. Therefore, the members of an organization reflect its culture, meaning you select team members who are nature fit. Culture is determined by behaviors - how do you act/react to everything at all times. It is a reflection of the mindset. Successful culture change helps people become who they are. By encouraging people to focus on who they are, and pursue the purpose and master the expertises, the great culture catalyzes positive mind, attitude, and behaviors; but discourage negativity and unprofessionalism.

Originality - Are you an original thinker?  From the dictionary, originality means creative and independent thinking. The word, Original, comes from 'origin.' What we probably mean when we say original thinker is to be the origin of our thoughts. In other words, make our own mind up, or formulate our own conclusions, or ideas, or expressions. Original thinking is independent, creative, original, special or different. Being original is one of the important characteristics of authenticity because you don’t just blindly follow other people’s opinions or conventional wisdom. This world needs more of an original thinker than ever to handle the ever increasing complexities, and organizations need to be able to recognize them not least in order to innovate and adapt. Originality is valuable as Authenticity. It is not easy to recognize "original thinker," though, and it becomes more difficult as most of the modern people are too busy to even think and observe. Original thinking is a tough job and recognizes original thinking is equally tough if not less. The points like motivation, character, creativity, personality and confidence can be the indicator of original thinking which is also a trait of being authentic.

Are you consistent with what you think, what you say and what you act: Nowadays, digital makes things so transparent, your professional life is converged with your personal life, not only your words, but even your thoughts can be amplified via the speed of the internet. Consistency doesn’t mean to keep static, change is only constant, consistency means you can do a lot of different things in your career or life, but keep consistent of having intellectual curiosity, a growth mindset, a learning attitude; and building a set of cohesive capabilities; or you can stick to one thing, but doing it damn well, show consistent progress and keep a beginner’s mindset, look around, beyond, and underneath to transcend interdisciplinary knowledge into wisdom. It means the digital professionals with consistency can make a better balance, capture the substance of digital professionalism and trace the root at the heart of change dynamic. They are consistent in the habit of learning, delearning and relearning, not only do they keep consistent on themselves, what they think, what they say, or what they act, but also, they look for consistency in their teams, in their organization as well as in the ecosystem, as consistency harmonizes humanities.

Authenticity is not only a leadership quality but a digital professional trait. An authentic leader has character and courage to decide and act; an authentic digital professional can release more positive energy to influence the surroundings, dare to ask tough questions, and challenge conventional settings. Be aware of your strengths and weaknesses, and be aware of how you impact others and your environment. It is crucial to getting to understand yourself and how others perceive you. "But change must always be balanced with some degree of consistency." - Ron D. Burton.

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Where are the Barriers and How to Run A Frictionless IT

A frictionless IT catalyzes information flow, cultivates cross-functional communication, and accelerates business mobility.

Due to the change and complex nature of technology and overloading information, the majority of IT organizations today still run at the lower level of maturity, they have been perceived as a silo function and support center, a controller only, or even the bottleneck to slow the business speed. So how can IT leaders reimagine IT, reinvent IT brand, overcome culture inertia and numerous digital barriers to run a frictionless IT and become top IT performers?

The seamless communication between IT and business, within IT and across business ecosystem: Language influences perception, without a clear strategy and a way to communicate it in the language of the business, CIOs will always have trouble getting even "aligned," not to mention of reaching higher IT maturity level of proactively enabling and engaging with business, Top IT performers have the ability to talk and walk on both sides of the fence. The best IT leaders are focused on success at all levels - from the success of their own team to the success of their boss, the organization, and even the business sector. Top IT performers don't think of themselves as IT guy/gal only, they understand the business as well as the business people they work with and focus primarily on solving business problems and creating business capabilities. Top IT performers "get" technology and are astute at the solution and implementing it. However, they also fully understand how the business operates and how technology helps/supports obtain business objectives. The seamless two-way communication is based on trust, the trust means IT and business work closely to deliver the business solution with optimal speed. Business gets frustrated about the speed of IT because they can see the ease of delivery and use of easily accessible solutions that fit to some of their business needs, they see how far technology has advanced, they see the ease with which new sites and services are deployed on demand, and then they sit around a table with their internal IT service providers and suddenly everything is impossible because business is being too demanding; IT may also need to educate business upon the complexity of IT integration, governance, risk, and compliance management issues, to not allow ‘shadow IT’ put their organizations at risk for the long period of time. The key challenge is to find a way so that both sides, even though they speak different 'languages' in some cases can communicate effectively.

Keep data and information flow across functional boundary: In the organization with lower level of maturity, the business is struggling with overly restrictive hierarchy and bureaucratic mentality, even IT organization is usually the data steward of the organization, it still has to overcome the functional barriers or office politics to keep information flow and manage data lifecycle effectively. Information and technology catalyze today's digital businesses. Information brings about business ideas; business ideas generate lots of information. Information Systems are the backbone and provide valuable information for key decision making. Information comes from the analysis of that data, technology allows for the capture, manipulation, and presentation of data. Fundamentally, Information Management is to make sure that the right information is at the right place at the right time and shared to the right persons. It means that the business has the information, that the information has the right quality, that the information is used properly and manage holistically to maximize its business values.

Business Mobility: Digital means flow, with emergent “SMAC” technologies, business mobility becomes a digital trend to harness agility and innovation. One of the CIO’s main responsibilities is to learn and keep themselves abreast of existing and future technologies available and see how they would be useful in their business environments. Adoption of these technologies has to be carefully considered in their particular business environments.  Cloud handles the optimization part while mobility provides the efficiency/ channel/segment alternatives, business is now always on, with multi-channel, multi-touch points. APIs have been around and will always be around and become more critical. They are the glue that sticks dissimilar tools together. By leveraging the latest digital technologies and tools, organizations can build IT-enabled competency and capabilities to achieve business mobility - always-on, hyperconnected and high-innovative.

From a monolithic IT to a mosaic IT, from a silo IT to a frictionless IT, from a controlling IT to an enabler IT, top IT performers are top business performers, they innovate organizational culture, streamline business processes, enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration. In addition, IT needs to measure its impact in the eyes of the business value being created - looking at ways to improve employee productivity, enable business growth, agility, and maturity.

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Three Aspects in Customer Centric Innovation

The customer is the center of innovation management and they are the major focus for innovation process and accomplishment.

One of the key characteristics of a digital business is customer centricity. The customer is absolutely a vital part of the overall innovation process. Customer-centric innovation can accomplish far more than incremental product/service improvement, it can also implement path breaking products or service, build evolutionary business models as well.

Outside - in Customer Viewpoint: When to look at the customer experience from the inside out, there is nothing wrong with that, because you are the one that can change the inside. However, the outside-in view is more important, because the customer's experience is about how they encounter, observe, or undergo a company's events or stages. Therefore, the proactive listening is very important and becomes a vital link in innovation management effort. Customers should always be involved, it is not a question of whether the customer is right or not, it is more of whether you are truly and proactively listening to their needs and gaining a deep understanding of the motivational construct of the customer through empathy, and figure out what they will likely want next. However, they are only one of the stakeholders in the innovation process, certainly they provide important feedback, but not the final decision maker. Because they don’t always know what they want and aren’t always best informed, and most especially when it comes to new technological innovation.

Crowdsourcing for problem-solving: At the heart of innovation is a life cycle of idea generation, interaction, selection, and learning.  The point of crowdsourcing  is to bring in new ideas from outside, the lead users or from the wider user community to drive features and understand the value in use of products and services. The goal isn’t just to be democratized or be cost-efficient, but to ensure that the abundance of good ideas to flow in. The more diversified people you invite in, the better result you could get, and the whole innovation scenario can improve idea generation, harness interaction and inspire learning and share.

Social innovation: It’s excellent to leverage the social platform and digital technologies to urge a sense of customer-centric innovation via online conversations. In other words, try to digitally connect key assets or context to the resource-rich innovation hubs and cluster across enterprise ecosystems. Setting agendas and starting new conversations that galvanize inspiration and gain traction on a powerful theme of renewal and growth. Thus, it’s important to take different propositions and approaches to a problem or a new interpretation. These innovative conversations may not directly provide you the solutions, but offer you a fresh insight into your goals, processes, and invaluable context.

The customer is the center of innovation management and they are the major focus for innovation process and accomplishment. Hence, it’s important to listen to customers and involve them in both idea generation and process implementation, to gain insight and empathy, to ultimately solve the innovation puzzles by differences between what is verbalized, what is prioritized and acted out and what is technically feasible.

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Silo Effect: How to Breakdown the Barriers

Silo mentality is fundamentally about keeping the mind static and keeping the people separate rather than keeping work separate.

There are different definitions of the silo, by nature, it’s about isolation. The segmenting or sectioning of work by skill/knowledge/type/etc is a necessary component of complex work or large workplaces. But silo mentality is fundamentally about keeping the mind static and keeping the people separate rather than keeping work separate. So what are different angles to understand silo effect, and how to break down the barriers to run a digital organization?

Silo Effect: How to Break down the Barriers

• Digital Master Tuning #73: Why does Silo Happen and How to Bridge It: Silos happen when the "Why?" in business is not properly communicated from the senior level management down through business units. The "why" must be answered throughout the business chain, otherwise, the employee does not have the correct purpose.

• Is Silo Eating your Strategy for dinner: Many of us like the witty quote from Drucker: “culture eats strategy for lunch.” The strategy is indeed in the face of more risks than culture, could it be the SILO – the symptom of industrial management mindset will eat your strategy for dinner?

• The Silo Effect in IT Management: There are more than two-thirds of IT projects fail to achieve the expected result. IT organizations are suffering too much from the "siloed" effect to accurately define and deliver the promises of many IT projects. The "failure" of an IT project can be defined as (1) Completely behind schedule, (2) Beyond the budget, and (3) Fails to deliver the value or services which the project was promised to deliver. There are many reasons for these things to happen, silo thinking in decision making is one of the significant root causes project failures and low-level IT maturity.

• Is Hierarchy Good or Bad for Systems?  Systems Thinking is the ability to think the "whole," and understand the interconnectivity of its parts as well. As complexity is pushing the boundaries of the thinking and traditional systems, what we do know is "that larger and more complicated systems" do not have the requisite agility to adapt to more complex and adaptive environments. The more nonlinear, interconnected, and interdependent the environment, where uncertainty and emergence become more prevalent, hence accelerated rates of change, the less likely ordered hierarchical systems are to be the answer due to the rigidity. Hence, we need to adapt to the Systems Thinking and reimagine the digital organizational structure to break down the barriers.

• The Cause and Effect of Silos? Silo is perhaps one of the most paradoxical symptoms in running business in the industrial era, on one side, most of the organizations are still operating in the functional base to improve efficiency; on the other side, the digital nature of hyperconnectivity and interdependence makes it inevitable to break down the silo, because more often than not, the silo thinking becomes the root cause of ineffective leadership; the silo team fragment the strategy, stagnate execution, motivate the unhealthy internal competition and cause more problems than benefits. More specifically, what's the cause and effect of silos and silo thinking?

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way to human progression.

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Five Principles to Run a Digital IT

Setting guiding principles is not to manipulate (HOW), but to clarify (WHY).

Principles are statements of values. Things that define why one make a decision one way or another. These core decision values guide the behavior of individuals within an organization. Digital does flatten  the organizational hierarchy and blur the functional, organizational, and geographical borders in the business ecosystem, it could mean less restrict rules or bureaucracy, but it also means the guiding principles become more crucial  to be defined as core decision values and behavior guidelines. It is less about controls, but more about the clarity of  "why we make decisions the way we do” and what’re the expectations of employees' work performance.  From IT management perspectives, guiding principles let the organization know what to expect when dealing with IT, and serve as a yardstick by which to measure IT internally and externally, and can spur some great discussions with fellow C-suite members and business unit management. Here are five principles to run a digital IT organization.

One Size Does not Fit All: The CIO has to be able to navigate the business objectives and corporate strategy, and lead the creation and execution of the corresponding technical strategy for the company. A lot depends on the corporate structure and the culture of the company. Should IT be completely centralized, or embedded into business units to a certain degree? Should IT put more focus on internal users or end customers? Should CIOs act more as a Chief Innovation Officer or a Chief Intelligence Officer? When should IT take the orders, and when should IT be a game changer to drive changes?  There is no one size fits all solution, though. Thus, IT leaders need to have the ability to think analytically and synthetically to set IT principles right and manage business solution via high-performance IT team; build the strong business orientation & ability to bring the benefits of IT to solve business issues; cultivate the ability to align the business requirement with the IT capacity. It means that the CIO is able to constantly and dynamically lead an IT structure that will seamlessly support the business and well ahead of the business requirement; the ability to interact with business in their processes and pain areas, the ability to bring out a customer-tailored and technology driven solution, driving adoption of applications, be the spinal cord for the organization - integrating various departments, to simplify & unify processes across functional boundaries, and often across the entire enterprise.

“KISS” Principle: “Keep it Simple” is one of the most important principles and agile philosophy to run a digital IT, though by its nature, IT is complex, it doesn't mean IT should continue to complicate the matters or increase unnecessary complexity without disciplines. Simplicity is a behavioral attitude to see things as and what and where they are and be content and cool as it is. Complexity arises not from nothing. Humans create, though unintentionally in most cases their own problems. Therefore, they have to untie the knots they made themselves, how could you shoot the tangles to see from the different angle, how could you leverage creative thinking to discover the alternative way for problem-solving, and how could you apply Systems thinking to manage complexity via consolidation, optimization, integration, modernization, cloudification in IT management scenario? There are still layers of complexity in simplifying, but you know the elegant solution when you see it.

“SMART” Measurement Principles: Simplicity is surely important, but at times there is a need for complexity in the right place to incorporate the right elements in the calculation, to make the KPI a true indicator of performance. Fortunately, that's what computers are for, to take the grind out of complex calculations. If you follow the SMART principle then you won't go far wrong - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. First, measure the right things, and then measure them right. From a business management perspective, IT is business, thus, IT measurement needs to have a strong business focus, not only via the metrics to keep systems on but also via the lenses of business growth and innovation. Irrespective of whether the KPI is simple or complex, the selection of KPIs should be done regarding these three criteria: relevant, clearly defined, and balanced (‘RDB’ Criteria),  KPIs need to be specific and measurable and, therefore, logical. It very much depends on how much data you already have. KPIs are normally set based on historical data, benchmarking with other companies either internally or externally or through time and motion studies to determine a baseline. Do not just measure the cost of IT but all the return that it provides.

Doing More with Innovation: The popular IT mantra in the industrial era is “Doing more with less.” But digital is the era of innovation, “doing more with innovation” needs to be one of an important IT management principles to improve the organizational competency and maturity.  Why innovations happen and who is the strategic partners to drive innovation? Innovations happen because of specific business needs. Unique challenges become more appear as we push the limits of the available technology, which pushes us to find a solution to the problem on hand.  Either disrupt or being disrupted. IT is at an inflection point to lead organizational level digital transformation because it is in the unique position to oversight business processes and processes underpin business capabilities. IT is the key element of business innovation capability, either for catching customer delight or achieving business optimization. IT innovation capabilities directly impact how it helps the business gain competitive advantage and capture upcoming trend to compete for the future. Information technology should be seen by any business as a “digital transformer and focus on VALUE proposition to run a digital IT.

DO NOT let “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”: There are many different perspectives of culture are presented along with diverse ways and means of dealing with it. Smarter hiring practices and attendance to daily and measurable healthy workplace culture dramatically decreases the need for control and excessive or restrictive policies. Experience between positive performing cultures and mediocre or negative cultures is that they evolve from the platform of trust and respect that cascades from the top. IT plays a critical role in fine-tuning business culture because IT enabled digital processes and platforms can help to bridge silo thinking, keep information flow, and harness cross-functional communication and collaboration. Regardless who is setting the principles, to maintain the positive environment, a set of guiding principles can be written on a page. It will be supported by the bulk of employees in defining the boundaries they also wish to maintain.

So setting guiding principles helps IT leaders provide greater clarification of mission / vision / strategy at a more detailed level. Setting guiding principles is not to manipulate (HOW), but to clarify (WHY);  the guiding principles frame the right questions to ask, not just about searching answers only. There needs to be a pragmatic way of applying whatever principles to the problem in a consistent manner, otherwise, it is a waste of effort to even state them. Principles, Processes, People, Practices, Performance, etc are all critical factors to run a high-performance digital IT.

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CIOs as Chief Influence Officer: How does a CIO Make a Digital Influence

There is now a greater need for a CIO to understand business drivers and equip with digital mindsets.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology and capability. IT plays a pivotal role in digital transformation. Given the power of SMAC technologies and abundance of information to fuel business innovations, how does a CIO make the multitude of digital influence, like a Pro?

Innovation Focus: IT is an important element in building innovation capabilities in any organization today. IT leaders need to identify the issues associated with innovation in an enterprise and actually have developed a unique model and platform for managing innovation portfolio in a systematic way. IT leaders are often at the right position to oversee business processes and identify the critical business issues by working closely with a business partner from a long-term perspective, and leverage technology to manage innovation across the enterprise boundary. Innovation as the creation and development of new ideas causes meaningful change for customers and the company. This isn't always a new product or service but can also be an improvement in processes, employee satisfaction or the environmental impact. If it makes your customers happier, your employees more creative and productive, and the firm will eventually also benefit from that! So IT leaders are in a unique position to orchestrate business innovation symphony.

Software Eats the World: “Software is eating the world.” The digital mantra for CIOs is to run IT as a software business. Software Engineering is no longer just an isolated discipline only a few geeks work on it, but a common practice everyone has the chance to play around it, it has permeated into every business in every location, and it underpins the business capability and brand of every digital organization. IT is shifting from “T” technology-heavy to “I” information savvy; CIOs need to deliver value to the organization. Many IT organizations are also doing more with App development to keep IT in a continuous delivery mode, to delight customers, and adapt to changes seamlessly. Application development projects need to bring up the most business value. The performance and innovation provided by Applications Development reflect not just on the CIO, but the whole IT sector. Many predict that the applications will:

-Be more user-centric, the user will do the programming and the programmers will build the systems and infrastructure to enable this.

-Applications will become more interrelated as we move to a world of systems-of-systems where constraints govern how and what we develop.

-Machines, tools, and environments that programmers use will become more powerful, easy-to-use and knowledge-base.

Customer Analysis: IT as an information steward of the business plays a critical role in customer analysis. Customers including prospects should be studied and observed and gain insight upon. Deep understanding of the user through empathy and observation with the innovator using a more inductive approach such as predictive analytics to what the customer wants to accomplish "next." This involves gaining a deep understanding of the motivational construct of the customer, in order that the innovator can become "anticipatory" of what the customer will likely "want next." There is still quite a bit of work to do in turning analytical results and connecting to customer satisfaction and business achievement. More often, the analytics team in the company correctly recognizes the customer value, but that knowledge is still only within the analytics team. There are plenty of organizations doing the analytics, but not yet have matured the process enough to drive the front end systems. Some customer analytics focuses on alluring new customers, with the ignorance of long-term loyal customers. There're analytics gaps need to be filled out by both developing new customers and delighting the current customers as well.

IT Modernization: In many well established IT organizations, legacy IT systems, and processes are critical for business’s survival, but also drag down the business speed of changes, and make their IT organization as a cost center, not a value creator.  IT system complexity arises from the interaction of dynamic components and can be layered and intricate. Even simple interactions can create amazing complex systems. But IT needs to overcome complication. The complication is a better antonym for simplicity. Complicated systems will no doubt have layers of complexity as well, but can be simplified by reducing the number of components or changing the way they interact. Therefore, IT consolidation, integration, modernization, cloudification, and innovation are the necessary steps in IT management life cycle. The CIOs have to master at conducting such a hybrid digital orchestra. The "conductor" has to lead the in-house musicians and has to take into account the time lag (a fraction of a second) of the orchestras on another continent. They have to keep the in-house order, and must, simultaneously, coordinate with distant contributors; otherwise, the "music" will jar the ears.

Digital Talent Pipeline: IT skill/capability gaps do exist, and people are always the most important asset, especially in IT organization. IT knowledge life cycle has been shortened due to the changing nature of technology, thus, when assessing talent, more dynamic and balanced approaches are needed, instead of just searching for keywords. Every organization must address their common and unique IT skills requirements and map that out through some sort of skills/competency matrix within their organization. Too often, leaders are allowed to complain generically about what they mean by skill and competency gaps and often they pick the symptom, not digging through the root causes. Digital IT needs to leverage the emerging talent pipelines and shift mindset for understanding talent with empathy, recognize raw intelligence through wise eyes. Forward-looking IT organizations need to discover and develop talent for tomorrow, rather than just hire for yesterday. Data-driven talent management can leverage different variables and evaluate talent and manage performance in a more transparent and systematic way. And talent management needs to be well integrated with culture management, knowledge management, and performance management more cohesively.  In addition, whether IT can attract the brightest talent or not also depends on how effective the CIO is marketing his/her organization as a contributor to the corporation and society as a whole,

Today, there is now a greater need for a CIO to understand business drivers and equip with digital mindsets, apply digital technology to speed up IT and build business competitive capabilities, make digital influences which touch every aspect of the business, from customer delight to employee satisfaction, from operation excellence to innovation blossom, to practice digital disciplines and improve organizational agility and maturity.

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