The Monthly Insight of “Digital Quality” Oct. 2017

Organizational excellence is achieved by delivering qualified products or services and continuously improving business performance.

Quality is defined by a number of factors such as efficiency, effectiveness, flexibility, innovation, or maturity, as a degree of quality is in everything people do and experience.  

             

Understand Digital Quality via Different Lens

• Three Aspects of IT Management Quality Check? IT management quality directly impacts the entire business’s quality,  competency and resilience, surviving and thriving capability. Hence, CIOs should do the periodic IT management quality check which includes to make an objective assessment of IT effectiveness, efficiency, speed, scalability, flexibility, resilience, etc, to ensure its performance and maturity, and the overall digital fitness of IT organization.

• The Quality Gaps in Running a High-Mature Digital Organization? Quality is defined by a number of factors, such as performance, manageability, operability, reusability, reliability, availability, etc. Many say quality attracts quality, and to effectively lead an organization into good practices to focus on quality attributes takes work and a level of credibility within the organization. In reality, many organizations still operate and get stuck at the lower level of maturity due to the quality management gaps. Quality is not just the specific task of one single business department or function, it is one of the management disciplines which needs to be taken in a systematic way. The quality gaps are varying, how to identify and close them and improve the overall business effectiveness and maturity?
• The Insight about Quality Management: Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service is consistent. It has four main components: quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality but also the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality.

• IT Management Quality Check in Digital Transformation Quality is defined by a number of factors such as innovation, effectiveness, flexibility, or maturity, etc., and to effectively lead an organization into good practices to focus on quality attributes takes work and a level of credibility within the organization. IT plays a significant role in digital transformation, as more often than not, technology is a major digital disruptor today, the purpose of digital transformation is to embed digital technology into key business processes, to improve business capability and competency to compete for the future.

• Five Questions to Evaluate The QUALITY of Thinking? Thinking, in general, is more about discovery for either understanding things or creating new things. The thought does not precede the thinker; the thinker precedes the thought and the consciousness of the thinker precedes the fact of his/her being a thinker.  Digital professionals today need to learn how to explore and evaluate the variety of thinking in their mind. Here are five questions to assess the QUALITY of your thinking.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2+million page views with about #4200+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The Promises and Perils of IT-Driven Digital Transformation

The purpose of digitization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of achieving high performing business results.

In today's world, information & technology is driving the digital paradigm shift. Unlike previous eras during which business transformation was driven by business ideas. This is a golden opportunity for CIOs to lead the way by enabling change, optimizing business processes, catalyzing digital transformation, and governing risk management that's going viral in the enterprise. The journey will not be so smooth, there are many curves and bumps on the road, and here are the promises and perils of IT-driven digital transformation.

Change, innovation, and speed as promises: Digitization is all about CHANGE. IT has a great opportunity here to lead the business transformation due to the changing nature of technology and the overwhelming growth of information. Rather than wait for the business to tell IT what they want, IT needs to proactively work with the business and partners on how great digital technologies can change the business, innovate products/services, and speed up. The promise of IT-driven digital transformation is, therefore, about change, innovation, and speed. In fact, in many forward-looking organizations, CIOs are empowered by the business to go beyond Information Technology and encompass all knowledge and business insight across the entire company scope, to run a real-time, highly intelligent, and high-performance digital business. People tend to have a high expectation of digital flow, very little patience with technology issues. Businesses love to see IT getting deeply immersed in new apps, devices, and solutions and make business more productive, collaborative, and smart. IT today has many roles to play, as a change agent, innovation engine, digital driver; integrator, customer advocate, or governance champion. Further, the promise of IT-led digital transformation means speed. Organizations rely more and more on technology and the IT department has more and more to overcome for running at digital speed. Only through mutual understanding and cross-functional collaboration, business and IT can work as a whole to make the promise come true and manage a smooth digital transformation.

Silo, shallowness, risk, and fear as perils: Digital transformation is a thorny and long journey. There are many roadblocks and pitfalls on the way. Digital means flow, hyperconnectivity, and interdependence. Thus, the silo is the very obstacle to overcome in managing a seamless digital transformation. Silos happen when the "Why?" in business is not properly communicated from the senior level management down through business units. To keep business dynamic and change as a new normal, the "why" must be answered throughout the business chain, otherwise, the employee does not have the correct purpose and lack of motivation to change. Silo also happens when the business operates from a fear standpoint: Fear of rejection, fear of invisibility, fear that other peoples' accomplishments will somehow diminish your own, etc. Silo does build the wall in people’s minds and tie the knots in their hearts. The other pitfalls for transformation, either for business improvement or innovation is sometimes getting the 'right answer' to the 'wrong question,' or "fixing the symptom without curing the root cause." Doing the wrong things differently isn't a digital transformation. Shallowness ruling the way can stifle change and decelerate speed. Especially with “VUCA” digital new normal, digital leaders must have a clear vision and a comprehensive roadmap to steer the organization across the blurred territories and uncharted water in the right direction. It is important to first do the right things to improve digital effectiveness before doing things right for achieving efficiency. Organizations also should make an objective assessment of their risk appetite and risk management ability. Because digital brings both significant opportunities and risks, organizations should manage a balanced portfolio with both incremental and radical innovation. Organizations could miss the opportunity if they only focus on operations in low-risk territories and incremental enhancements only, or they solely focus on quantifiable benefits or short-term business results. On the other side, if organizations take the risk bigger than they could handle, their businesses would be in the bigger danger to fail as well. Many disruptive opportunities are brought to life with new thinking on how to monetize them. A disruptive product or innovations is a breakthrough in the existing solutions, something that has the potential to disruptively challenge all existing solutions. Most companies fail at innovation execution because they have no clear process, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally across departments, or a holistic approach to managing innovation as a process.

The purpose of digitization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of achieving high performing business results. By understanding varying promises and perils on the journey of digital transformation, the business can make a leap of such radical changes via a clear vision, strong focus, distinctive change capabilities, and solid management disciplines.

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The Monthly Insight of How to Reach High Level of Digital Maturity Oct. 2017

The journey of improving business maturity is more evolutionary than revolutionary. 

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. At the high maturity level, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation.

          How to Reach the High Level of “Digital Maturity”

• Building Digital Competency to Improve Business Maturity? Organizational maturity is assessed based on the overall business effectiveness, efficiency, operational excellence. agility, innovation, intelligence, resilience, and people-centricity. Many organizations are on the journey of digital transformation which represents the next stage of business maturity and will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its digital ecosystem, with people at the center of its focus. But more specifically, what are further aspects in building digital competency and logical steps for improving business maturity

• Three Digital Effects to Catalyze Business Maturity? Digital transformation represents the next stage of business maturity which will improve how the enterprise works and interact with its ecosystem, with the customer at the center of its focus. Digital becomes the very fabric of the modern business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking digital organizations today. So how can businesses amplify positive digital effects and grow into the high-performing Digital Master?

• Five Aspects of Digital Maturity Organizations are transforming from doing digital to being digital. There are systemic consequences and impacts of thinking and actions in terms of digital interconnections and interdependency. At the higher maturity level, companies need to embed digital into the very fabric of the business, explore digital in a structural way. It is critical to build a comprehensive transformation roadmap and do the routine checkup in the journey of digital transformation to ensure they are moving in the right direction with steadfast speed.

• Five Stages from “Doing Digital” to “Being Digital”: Organizational digitalization is not just about using the latest technology gadgets or applying the fancy tools. At the high maturity level, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation. There are a couple of evolutional ecosystems stages businesses have to experience in order to ride above the learning curve and move up the business maturity from “Doing Digital,” to “Being Digital.”

• Three Aspects to Measure Organizational Maturity? Organizations today are over-complex and hyper-competitive, management continues to keep the business running, but the lack of insight on how well their organization is doing for the long term. Is it functioning well or dysfunctional? Which management metrics shall you apply to measure organizational overall health and maturity? Who and what tools are being applied to measure if an organization is healthy or sick? Proactive or reactive? Intelligent or dumb? Customer-centric or operational driven?  

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2+million page views with about #4200+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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How to Manage Digital Balance Cycles Effectively

Digital businesses and their people learn through their interactions with the environment, to keep knowledge flow as well as business flow, and strike a delicate digital balance.

Digital transformation is inevitable, it means the increasing pace of change and fierce competition. Organizations must keep the lights on and also make strategic movements all the time. Like running up to the string, keeping digital balance is critical in reaching digital aptitude. But how to manage the following digital balance cycles effectively?

The balance of chaos and order: Compared to changes, the transformation is more radical, with all sorts of ups & downs, bumps and curves. It brings both opportunities for business growth and chaos as pitfalls. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern or exponential speed. Therefore, it is important to strike the right balance between chaos and order. On one side, digital leaders today must shape digital mindsets and have the right dose of risk appetite to prepare such a paradigm shift and accept that influence is attainable, but control is not. The hyper-connecting nature of digital offers particularly fertile ground for developing cross-industry ecosystems and innovation opportunities, it might create a certain level of chaos and radical change because the digital ways of doing business and customer expectation both tend to be more convenient and flexible than siloed industrial age. Organizations today need to constantly improve the business and seeing change as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business are the core messages of the text. The job for management is to bring the order from chaos, via optimizing the underlying functions, processes and tuning soft business elements and expanding changes to all business directions. Digital dynamic enables companies to leverage varying business elements to chase innovation and accelerate business performance via cross-functional collaboration. Digital organizations also have to balance growth and stability, innovation and standardization accordingly.

The balance of learning and doing: The majority of people nowadays work in an organization that is somewhere between old and new; at both industrial speed and digital speed. At static industrial age with knowledge scarcity, learning and doing are perhaps linear steps. For many people, after their formal education years, they are perhaps done with learning, with a graduate attitude (know it all mentality). In the digital age, the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, learning and doing are an iterative continuum. The digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations. The pervasive digitalization requires the balance of “old experience” and “new ways to do things.” Digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment,  they apply their learning, act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future action. Digital leaders need to practice expert power besides position power in order to make the profound influence and improve leadership effectiveness. Because “command & control” type of leadership style is becoming out-of-date. People want to grow, develop and learn, in effect, they want to change but they don’t want to be changed. Now the business and the whole world are so hyperconnected and interdependent, people all over the world can share knowledge and digital workforce are pursuing autonomy and mastery. You need to not only assimilate the existing knowledge, more importantly, you have to create new knowledge, more frequently to replace the out of dated knowledge, in order to do things in the better way for solving either existing or emergent problems.

The balance of collaboration and competition: Digital does mean the unprecedented level of mass collaboration, also means fierce competition at the global level. Competition is part of the natural dynamics of life. It is part of the genetic bias of every living thing in nature as a survival-seeking mindset. Still, in an advanced digital organization or society, the goal of positive competition with fair rules should stimulate innovation and accelerate progress. Otherwise, the negative competition via negative intention or approach can make the bad effect and the competitive arena can produce a myriad of negative externalities. Many times, “Coopetition” is a hybrid word to describe the digital new normal, businesses collaborate to achieve common goals in one area but compete in the other area. The point is that competition shouldn’t mean we want to be the same, fight for the same things. it means to be authentic and self-aware, either at the individual or organizational level, to become the best you can be, to define your own success formula, or put simply, compete for uniqueness and build your own competitive advantage. Variety, complexity, diversification, and collaboration are the characteristics of the digital innovation ecosystem. From innovation management perspective, businesses need competitions for spurring great ideas. However, organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. This is largely due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. Innovation needs to involve the different type of mindset, structures, and organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative and advantageous ways. Ultimately, competition or cooperation can be used for a greater purpose to life us digital maturity.

To stay competitive, forward-looking organizations have to manage these digital balance cycles well. Digital businesses and their people learn through their interactions with the environment, to keep knowledge flow as well as business flow. From the economic and organizational point of view, people are able to adapt themselves and their organization through a collaborative approach to understanding, learning, accelerating performance, and innovating.

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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 10/27/2017

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking, brainstorming, innovating and sharing.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with 4200+ 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. Here is the weekly insight about digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

• CIOs as “Digital Master” How to Define, Refine, and Scale IT Digital Transformation Due to fast-paced changes and exponential growth of information. IT becomes more critical in leading business innovation and transformation. IT has to reinvent itself to exemplify proficiency in planning, designing, innovating, and building the new business model, as well as refining or scaling IT digital transformation. At today’s information-driven business dynamic, there’s no shortage of problems to tackle, it’s all about to be able to get all the way around the task, to see it from all interests. CIOs need to be bold and innovative, define and refine IT to get digital ready.

• Three Questions to Assess the Board’s Digital Readiness? The corporate board plays a crucial role in business advising and monitoring, setting key digital tones, and making good policies. To drive changes and advocate innovations, the board needs to digitize and innovate itself, to exemplify leadership influence, and walk the talk in leading digital transformation.

• The Popular Innovation Quotes Collection V of “Digital Master” Book Series “Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (19+ books) is to perceive the multifaceted impact digital is making to the business and our society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the digital journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” Here is the set of popular quotes for conveying the digital vision and sharing the unique insight about the digital transformation.

• Three “DO”s and “DON’T” in IT Digital Transformation? Digitalization is about the rapid changes and continuous business flow, The purpose of such radical digitalization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of customer delight and achieve high performing business result and build a people-centric organization. IT has to not only transform itself but become a changing organization to drive business transformation. Here are three “DOs and “Don’ts” in IT digital transformation.

• Digital Thinking Manifesto? The race of human against the machine is ongoing. The knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, and the pace of information technology is so rapid that no one can rest on a static mindset, past accomplishments, or the wishful thought that everything is perfect the way it is.

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

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Setting Digital Rules to Guide Digital Transformation

Digital principles and rules are statements of belief that reflect the values, culture and real-world concerns of the organization.

Digital transformation is rarely a straight line. It is all about interaction, incrementalism, and innovation. The journey is far more important than the destination. Digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes and are able to follow digital principles, revise business rules, reconfigure organizational structures and change their own behaviors for its adaptation to environmental changes and business dynamic, to get digital ready.

Establish digital rules and practices for building business competency: There needs to establish digital principles and set updated digital rules for guiding the digital transformation. Generally speaking, a business rule is a statement to set the policy or procedure. A business rule is simply a rule that is under business jurisdiction. It means that the business can enact, revise, and discontinue their business rules as they see fit. The digital rules are not some out-of-date cliche or rigid processes to stifle innovation. Instead, they are based on the set of digital principles and philosophy behind the methodologies, and they help to shape the mindsets behind behaviors and actions. You will need a cascade of statements that link the overall vision/philosophy of the organization, to monitor overall performance and how the vision is achieved. It’s not easy for defining the "perfect rules" that can be applied holistically to drive digital transformation systematically.

Digital rules encourage autonomy and innovation: It could mean the less restrictive process or bureaucracy, break down silo thinking and keep information and knowledge flow seamlessly across functional, organizational, and geographical borders in the business ecosystem. The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating cross-ecosystem which is dynamic, continuous and interactive. The digital ecosystem is complex, it becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of nonlinear interaction, you can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. There are unknown interactions and very high inner dynamics in complexity. Overcoming complication and managing complexity become one of the biggest challenges in business today. By following the digital principles and rules, the business lifecycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of reorganizing, refocusing, rebalancing resources, and redirecting people to understand the whole, in terms of its inner processes, its interactions with external systems, its components, the specific interaction among them, etc., to ultimately achieve the seamless digital flow and high-level digital maturity.

Quality is a digital rule and a holistic management discipline: Every business system is like three sides of a con, this side, that side and the integrative relationship between them. Imagine the complexity that comes in due to digital characteristics such as structure, rules and regulations, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, lack of linearity and increased flux working and impacting together. Quality should be the digital rule and holistic management discipline. High-quality enterprise is comprised of high-quality people, high-quality products/services, and high-quality business capabilities/processes, etc. People quality often decides the quality of the other part of the business. The most important thing is that you need to define quality as the digital rule. Quality is not just the specific task of one single business department or function, it is one of the management disciplines which needs to be taken in a systematic way. How quality is defined and measured is crucial. It’s about putting profound knowledge, processes, and tools actually used into actions and delivered it.  Because digital transformation cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished, it has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the digital organization. The matter of fact is that, setting digital rule is not to manipulate (HOW), but to make the right policy, build the quality standard, and shape a quality organization.

Digital principles and rules are statements of belief that reflect the values, culture and real-world concerns of the organization. They normally have a longer shelf life than objectives, strategies, etc. Digital transformation is a long journey, and the path for digital transformation can be iterative, evolutionary, revolutionary, or disruptive. Organizations have to develop a comprehensive framework, set concise digital rules, take a stepwise approach, and continue assessing, fine-tune and adapt.

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Three CIO Debates to Assess IT Digital Maturity

When IT executives move beyond commodity management and begin to show a higher level of strategic value and dedicate more resources to innovation.

IT has become strategically important, it is imperative for IT and business leaders to work effectively and efficiently together to ensure that they are leveraging IT across their companies to attain enterprise-wide digital transformation; not just using IT as a digital extension, but running IT as a digital engine. Here are three CIO Debates to assess IT digital maturity.  

What is the IT role in the company? Is IT there to just keep the light on, or is IT expected to actively take part in strategic and tactical decisions? When board directors or executives ask the IT leader about these questions, rather than answer those questions mechanically, CIOs should take it as an invitation to a dialogue with other C-suite members to envision the business via a technological lens and convey a clear message of IT as a differentiated business advantage. Also, collect the business feedback regarding their expectation of IT. IT has to continue working together with businesses to find out what they need and develop tailored business solutions side by side to advance the company. Through cross-functional communication and collaboration, the business will come to have a better understanding of the contribution that IT function makes and empowers IT to take initiatives for leading changes and digital transformation. The gap between IT and business will enlarge when the business keeps changing its mind and is not happy with what they ordered and IT is overloaded, feel the business has not communicated effectively or lacked an in-depth understanding of IT complexity. The mistrust between business & IT is deepened while business thinks IT is too slow to adapt to the ever-changing business environment, and IT leaders thought that they don't get sufficient support from the business. The “lost in translation” syndromes will further cause silo thinking and decelerate business performance. To make IT as a trustful business partner, CIOs should be an insightful business leader and empathic communicator, they need to understand stakeholders' expectations and propose a service/solution portfolio that focuses on business priority and build unique business competency. CIOs won't set priorities in vacuums, rather, they'll use the enterprise's strategy and business objectives to determine which business capabilities are needed to enable it to achieve those objectives and then, execute to build or solidify business competency.

Is IT a low-cost internal service provider, or should you be looking for ways to spend a dollar to make three? IT leaders should make an objective assessment of IT performance and maturity, not just through the financial lens, but also bring a broader perspective on how IT creates the competitive advantage of the business. From an IT investment perspective, it’s about spending the money right and getting the right results for both short-term quick win and the long-term perspective. Depending on the industry, IT spending usually runs 3% to 5% of revenue. However, these numbers typically include all IT spending, not just what the IT department may spend. You should not spend to meet a quota, nor should you avoid spending to stay within a quota. IT leaders need to do a further quick check: What proportion of IT spending is used to run, grow or transform your business? It helps you prioritize with better resource and talent alignment, also cut out waste and shrink the gap between IT and business. Making IT a profit center is what the real challenge in most of the organizations because it requires some kind of rethinking and reinventing the corporate processes and creating that changed sense of maintenance and support to services provisionings, such as consolidation and optimization, putting on wheels a new profit center. IT can help the business grasp growth opportunities via information-based business insight, IT can also help business improve net by reducing the cost of doing business via various means such as right sourcing and sizing, keeping IT costs flat while at the same time maximizing its output.

How is IT performance as an organization evaluated by the rest of the company? How will you measure success? IT leaders should both manage IT and measure IT performance effectively. Continually accelerating changes in IT consumption and production require faster responses and better performance metrics. IT leaders must keep in mind which KPIs best measure IT ability to deliver business value.  IT performance metrics need to evolve to something that matters to the varying business audience, at the same time that "business sentiment" needs to get put into something more tangible, such as optimize processes, or improve productivity or products/services innovation. In reality, it is true that the majority of IT organizations still cannot articulate their economic value to the board or shareholders in a language they understand and performance metrics alone will not solve the problem. Even if you choose the right KPIs, you must change them from time to time accordingly. Otherwise, your business is going to be driven by that specific set of KPIs: you are going to focus on them only. The business goal behind the IT measurement has to be about focusing on benefits generation, return on investment and contribution to innovation.

When IT executives move beyond commodity management and begin to show higher level strategic value and dedicate more resources to innovation, IT is on the right track to improve its performance and maturity. IT leaders need to brainstorm a lot, debate a lot, and make a comprehensive assessment of its manageability and strength, its differentiated competency including innovation ability, as well as its overall organizational maturity.

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The Monthly “Digital Gaps” Book Tuning: How to Bridge Digital Knowledge Gaps Oct. 2017

The gaps between knowledge and insight are about the depth of understanding.

“Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business” is a guidebook to help digital leaders and professionals today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps with multidisciplinary insight and holistic understanding. Today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still., bridging the 'gap of opportunity' between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge, it is important to bridge knowledge and insight gaps and take a stepwise approach to make a leap of digital transformation.

Closing the Gaps in Enterprise’s Learning Capability? Information abundance is one of the most important characteristics of the digital era. Being learning agile becomes one of the most important qualities for today’s digital leaders and professionals due to the abundance of information and shortened knowledge life cycle. In digital leading organizations, the division between 'working' and 'learning' is replaced by combining and integrating 'working, thinking and learning at the operational level, where people do the real work by unifying mind, heart, and hands. At the individual level, learning agility differentiates high potential from mediocre; at the organizational level, learning agility directly impacts on the top line business growth and the strategic capabilities such as change and innovation. So, how to close the gaps for improving the enterprise’s learning capability?  

How to Close Perception Gaps?  Perception is one's interpretation of the reality. It is as we see, observe and experience as defined by our mental "band-pass filters.”Perception is one's interpretation of the reality, so it is very subjective and varies from person to person.  When we are “mindful,” we not only see but also perceive; we not only live but also experience; this will have an effect on others and how we interact with the surrounding. But what are the gaps between perception and reality? How to overcome bias caused by prepositioned perceptions, how to close those perception based gaps and make the positive impact on your surrounding?.

The Gaps in Knowledge and Wisdom Intellectual transformation is the 'realization of 'knowledge to wisdom. Wisdom is not knowledge; one cannot have wisdom without knowledge, but one cannot substitute wisdom for knowledge as well. Knowing what you do not know is at the very least a large part of wisdom, and far too often sorely lacking in people. Wisdom is knowing the truth of it well enough as to be able to discern that from the choices, as to make the one choice that is seen as a wise choice. Then knowledge is the result of lessons we learned by exploitation of our wisdom! As wisdom encourages to keep on gathering facts and learning knowledge. Wisdom + Knowledge = Life Journey- a never-ending fact-discovery mission.

The gaps between knowledge and insight? Insight is perception through multi-dimensional cognizance. If knowledge is manpower, wisdom is nature power, then insight is perhaps the bridge between manpower and nature power. There are multilayer meanings upon insight. The gaps between knowledge and insight are existing, and how to dive into the depth of knowledge sea and climb the insight-wisdom pyramid??

Understanding Gap: Too Much Knowledge, Too little Knowledge, Which is more Dangerous? We are moving into the digital era in which information is only a click away, and knowledge is abundant. The old adage “Knowledge is the Power” is timelessly true, however, there is pitfall for either too much knowledge or too little knowledge, let’s dig through the BiG WHY

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with about #4200th 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. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

"Digital Gaps" B&N Order Link

"Digital Gaps" iBook Order Link

"Digital Gaps" Amazon Order Link

"Digital Gaps" Introduction, Slideshare

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 1 Cognitive Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 2  Leadership Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 3 Management Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 4 Capability Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 5 Professional Gaps

Conclusion: Bridging Gaps to Catalyze Digital Maturity

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