The Monthly “Performance Master’ Book Tuning: The Multi-faceted IT Performance Measurement July 2019

 IT performance has to be clearly linked with business performance and IT should work with stakeholders to develop the right set of measurements. 

Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy to the shop floor. "If you can't measure, you can't manage," legendary management guru Peter Drucker once asserted. Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions to ensure it happens. It takes multifaceted approaches from multidimensional perspectives to unlock digital performance and catalyze change.

  

                     

The Multi-faceted IT Performance Measurement 

Three Levels of IT Performance Management IT is an enabler of current and future business capability for both the organization and its ecosystem, It should be framed in respect of the organizational activities and practices, contribute both strategically and operationally to capture both short-term gain and long-term win of the business. As there are different target audiences who are interested in IT value presentation such as IT staff, business leaders or customers, and each has a different focus. It is a very good idea to make IT metrics transparent to the varying departments. It’s also important to develop a systematic measurement approach to assess its multi-dimensional value beyond just monetary benefit. Here are three levels of IT performance management.

Taking a Logical Scenario for Measuring IT Performance Organizations rely more and more on information and technology. IT is a key enabler to build almost all differentiated business digital capabilities nowadays. IT needs to be run as a business in the business. IT performance has to be clearly linked with business performance and IT should work with stakeholders to develop the right set of measurements that shows how IT is improving business execution and enforcing business capabilities. It’s important to take a logical scenario for managing IT performance by measuring right, adjusting plans, understanding results dynamic, and making business decisions to ensure the strategic goals are on the right track to achieve.

CIOs as “Chief Improvement Office”: IT Performance Quadrants Forward-looking IT organizations are transforming from a cost center to a value creator, from a support desk to the “digital brain” of the business, and from a back office function to an innovation engine. IT should also shift from inside-out IT lens to measure performance to an outside-in business and customer lens to manage the stakeholders’ expectation which is the key to the success of IT. So, depending on which stakeholder and what the role of the CIO is to your organization, metrics can be created that show effectiveness, efficiency, and maturity of IT. Plus, IT measurement should be focused on what is relevant to the target audience with a clear purpose as to what is being measured and why. Here are the IT performance Quadrants which help IT move up its maturity and demonstrate multidimensional business values.

Measure Things Matter to Drive IT Digital Transformation Forward-thinking IT organizations reach the inflection point of digital transformation. A strategic inflection point is a time when the business fundamentals such as people, process, technology, or cultures are about to change with accelerated speed. A measurement system is a necessary foundation for continuous improvement. CIOs need to understand how to measure IT performance with the right reasons, identify the right measurement and measure them in the right way to drive IT transformation smoothly.

CIOs as "Chief Investment Officer": Three Aspects of IT Performance Measurement IT organizations today intend to reinvent the tarnished image since traditional IT is still being labeled as a cost center and support desk only. Because its business value hasn’t been conveyed in a structured or quantified way yet. And it only focuses on measuring internal value (cost efficiency, internal customer satisfaction), or the things only internal IT is interested in. The measures often do not reflect the full set of value IT can bring to accelerate business growth or delight end customers. If we can only manage what we measure, the issue here is how to measure IT performance effectively?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with about #5800 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating 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.

The "Performance Master" Book Amazon Order Link

The "Performance Master" Book B&N Order Link 

The "Performance Master" Book Introduction Slideshare

The "Performance Master" Book Preview

The "Performance Master" Book Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 1 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 2 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 3 Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 4 Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 5 Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Conclusion

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection I

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection II

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection III

Read More

The Best “Observation” Quotes of “Digital Master” July 2019

To practice deep observation, Systems Thinking as a purposeful tool provides a paradigm to observe meta levels by leveraging contexts and multiple viewpoints.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Observation” quotes in “Digital Master.’

1 The best observations come from staying still and trying to understand what you're observing is all about.

2 Stay a novice of some sort, keep fresh eyes, with the beginner's mind. Then try to do the very things you've been observing because it will bring much more insights when you try to fiddle with it.

3 The "observation" phase is, all about the 'sensors' that you can deploy. Clearly these are very dependent on what you want to observe!

4 What you see depends very much on what you are familiar with and on the parading - there is no such thing as pure data.

5 Cognitive science confirms that what you see depends very much on your goals and on what you concentrate on given the limited amount of working memory available.

6 To practice deep observation, Systems Thinking as a purposeful tool provides a paradigm to observe meta levels by leveraging contexts and multiple viewpoints.

7 Observe, observe, observe more, through your cool head, open mind, and sharp eyes, and don’t forget to leverage Systems Thinking.

8 Observation should always be the first, and one of the most critical steps in any change, innovation, and business transformation management scenario.

9 The progressive enterprise needs to learn and grow through observation; by observation, you recognize the pattern, by observation, you connect the things; by observation, you associate the best services cross the industrial or geographic boundary.

Read More

Five Characteristics of Digital IT Maturity

 The highly complex and dynamic business needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort for shaping a high mature digital organization.

Nowadays information is growing exponentially and technology is permeating into every aspect of the business. Organizations rely more and more on Information Technology; the IT department has more and more to overcome. IT faces unprecedented opportunities to refine its reputation, also needs to take more responsibilities as a true business partner. IT-driven digital transformation is the journey of improving business consciousness and making continuous deliveries. Here are five characteristics of digital IT maturity.

Credibility: Either individually or at the business setting, positive attitude and professional competency are important factors to build credibility. To improve organizational maturity, IT has to work towards building good credibility, making deep influence, and gaining respect from business peers. From a leadership perspective, credibility is one of the main factors of building collaborative working relationship and it requires competence that encourages where credibility emerges. Thus, CIOs must be the strategic partners of the business as they can demonstrate the strong leadership qualities such as vision, integrity, expertise, sound judgment, empathy, and discipline. IT needs to set the right priority, manage limited resources scientifically, and solve critical business problems that really matter to the business and customers, with the goal to build the great credibility as a trustworthy business partner for the long term. CIOs should push the limits of available technology, practice “under-promise” and "over-delivery," pull resources and talent to figure out the premium solution to the problem on hand, and make continuous improvement in a prioritized order as long as it creates the long term business advantage.

Relevance: With fast-paced changes and emerging on-demand IT service model, many IT organizations face the challenge of becoming irrelevant if they can’t provide the differentiated business value to the business. IT does not define the value of the services it offers, the “buyer” of the service defines that value. Often, there are discrepancies between how IT perceives itself and how the business perceives IT. Therefore, to keep IT relevant, IT and business should always be on the same page. IT must engage with the business proactively by clearly defining the features of the services it offers and the costs associated with the various features. IT leaders and staff needs to re-learn and re-skill all the time due to the exponential growth of information and shortened knowledge cycle. Ask leaders and managers about the vision and business problems they are trying to solve and provide solutions tailor their need. Keeping IT relevant is not just about technical excellence or process efficiency, but also about digital fit, adaptability, innovativeness, intelligence, and customer-centricity. Keep track of performance at the strategic level is important to evaluate the digital relevance of IT.

Simplicity: Although the nature of IT is complex, the art of IT management is not to complicate things, but to eliminate unnecessary complication and fine tune desired complexity such as design or other core capability building. Simplicity means or is related to too many things such as manageability, availability, scalability, flexibility, reliability, robustness, comprehensiveness, and responsiveness, etc. Logically, simplifying the complicated thing is an optimal and smart choice either for running the business or solving a problem. But how do you know that simplicity is "just right"? How do you know you have the minimum required complexity for supporting flexibility without hurting the support/maintenance costs? To achieve simplicity, you would have to address the complexities of the subject matter. Keep the end in mind - the purpose of simplification is about improving the business responsiveness for adapting to rapid changes. It means less structure, fewer rules, and regulations, but demonstrating high changeability and maturity.

Interdisciplinarity: Digital organizations are hyper-connected and interdependent. The silos of business units are at a need to reach across the aisle and work with each other respectively in order to understand complex business problems holistically and solve them systematically. The linear business system perception needs to be replaced by the adaptive digital system and the technical organizational behavior is replaced by the socio-technical business behavior. The digital paradigm has many dimensions. it is like solving a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces, easy to get lost when trying to capture the big picture. Therefore, it’s important for applying interdisciplinary management approach to taking a holistic view, dynamic planning and responsible actions. It is important to involve not only putting the pieces of business management together but also blending them in such a way that the emergent whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts.

Inclusion: Inclusion shouldn’t be just an exercise in compliance mandated by the organization. Inclusion needs to be part of the digital strategy involving everyone in the organization that when successful, leads to cultural changes that improve all these key success factors for running a high mature digital business. Inclusion strategy is all about engagement, retention, productivity, loyalty, friendly bondage, truthfulness, ethical and justifiable environment with a view to all partners being a brand ambassador. Make inclusion part of the performance measurement. When people fail to include, it should be clear as to what the penalty would be. It is an overall strategy involving everyone in the organization; when successful, leads to cultural changes that improve all these key success factors for business.

To gain the respect from the business and build a good credibility as a trustworthy business partner for the long term, the CIO must be a partner in every aspect of the business. The highly complex and dynamic business needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort. It’s crucial for business management to follow a set of well-defined digital principles, not letting things “falling apart” but building an “integral whole” and shaping a high mature digital organization which can function holistically and coherently in order to achieve high-performance business results.

Read More

The Monthly Best Practice Summary: A Set of Practices to Improve Digital Maturity July 2019

Generally speaking, the best practice is a recommended way of doing things. Whatever the activity, there is one best way of performing it; the way that uses the least resources or takes the least time and still meets quality standards. That method is the best practice. Here is a set of best practice to improve digital maturity.

        

 A Set of Practices to Improve Digital Maturity 

Five Practices to Bridge Digital Maturity Chasm Digital is the new paradigm associated with deep ecology. The digital organization is more like living things with self-adaptable and self-renewal capability. Doing digital is perhaps about taking a few actions, but going digital and running an intensive, effective, and cohesive digital organization takes dynamic planning, dedicated execution, and holistic digital management disciplines. Here are five practices to bridge multiple chasms and improve organizational effectiveness and maturity.

Three “Neutralizing Practices” to Improve Organizational Maturity With rapid changes and continuous disruptions, today’s organizations are a mixed bag of old and new, the virtual platform and the physical working structure, different functions within an organization perhaps hit different learning curves and run at different speeds. The business becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "non-linear" interaction, the multilayered diversification, and interdependent relationships. How to neutralizing differences to improve organizational maturity?

Three Visualization Practices Improve IT Organizational Maturity The emerging digital technologies, the exponential growth of information, and IT consumerization trend bring up both challenges and opportunities for IT organization to move up its maturity level from a support center to a trusted business partner. IT management per se is mainly science from the best practices perspective. However, designing intuitive products or services requires creativity and artistic touch; improving IT organizational maturity from a reactive support function to a proactive change agent requires being able to lead courageously, with the ability to visualize, engage, communicate, and take a common sense approach. It is possibly more of an art than a science.

Three Digital Balance Practices for Leading to the Future? The digital era upon us means fast-paced changes, continuous disruptions, overwhelming information, and shortened knowledge life cycle. Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity. Leading evolutionary changes and driving business growth is the never-ending journey which takes planning, methodologies, and practices. It’s important to understand that digital management is multifaceted and holistic. Balance, growth, and harmony are not fixed, they are flowing. Here are three digital balance practices for leading to the future.

Three Practices to Drive Digital Transformation Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way the business is conducted and expand business transformation to multiple directions. There is no one size fits all formula to pursue it. Understanding that digital business development is multifaceted. It has to permeate into business vision, strategy, functions, communication, processes, and culture. etc. It is the transformation that is reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, the systems of which we are part of the environment in which we live, and the way we think, work and solve problems. Here are three practices to adapt to the new normal of the business world, make change proactively and drive digitalization effortlessly.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5800th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the businesses and society. 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 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.

Read More

Select Board Directors with Mixed Personality

Leadership is the combination of character and competencies. Anyone was drawing a correlation about leadership based on introversion/extroversion could only have "Irrational Thought."

There are many ways to be an effective leader. It all starts with ourselves and who we are, vision, skills, and personality, etc. The thoughts are communicated from one person to another, giving rise to a personality. From a leadership development perspective, who makes the better leader and why? What do introverts need to learn to advance? What problems do extroverts have? The Digital Board as one of the senior leadership pillars is responsible for ensuring an appropriate mix of skills, knowledge, experience, and personality are present or available for it to fulfill its fiduciary function and improve leadership maturity.

When we say personality we are talking about mindsets/ traits/emotions/attitudes/behavior: Personality is not about the overt, strictly speaking. The overt is, in reality, a mere manifestation of this covert aspect: everything from posture to clothes is determined by the internal personality. There are two common defined personalities: Introversion is turning inward toward the interior world of ideas. Extroverts, on the other hand, live almost exclusively in and for the exterior world, deriving fulfillment from regular interaction with outer reality. Ambiverts, the emergent concept to describe the personality in between, which has both introverted and extroverted traits, but neither trait is dominant, as a result, they have more balanced or adaptive personalities to fit in different circumstances. From leadership development perspective, you don't always have to be the most outgoing or have the strongest personality to be an awesome and effective leader. The high-effective and high mature leadership is based on vision, learning agility, and changeability, not just personality only. Good personality testing from leadership development perspective covers critical thinking, problem-solving, pressure handling, creativity, innovation, inventiveness, and communication skills, assess the psychological preferences in how leaders would perceive the digital ecosystem, their thought processes and mental strength to make decisions.

Personality can change over a period of time depending on the consistency of practices: Personality comes from one's convictions and value systems not only preferred but also personally practiced. Given these parameters, personality can change over a period of time depending on the consistency of practice. When identifying and selecting senior leadership candidates for positions such as corporate directors, a critic and basic fundamental core requirement which is often overlooked and compromised along the way is the individual's personal core values such as integrity, learning agility, or trustworthiness, etc. These are basic simple principles that you will find in strong digital leadership. Either for introverted leaders or extroverted leaders, leadership substance includes, but not limited to authenticity, character, vision, creativity, empathy, humility, and wisdom. An outgoing leaders can make constructive criticism and provide invaluable feedback. An introverted leader can spend more time on contemplation and observation carefully, to see around the corner, think profoundly and independently, share their thoughts, gain empathy, and empower those around them.

Thoughts shape our personalities and visa versa: Regardless of your personality traits, leaders should invest in individual communication within their team members, to achieve growth on a greater scale. Visionary and transformational leaders are in strong demand. It’s a significant hill to climb for those interested in the transformation of business and the planet. Great leaders empower others, make room for them to grow, set a tone and environment that creates more leaders, it is about giving direction, motivation, and purpose while improving the organizational maturity. Although it is difficult to measure transferable skills and cross-industry innovation ability, especially when there is a natural bias to select exactly what you need today (status quo) vs. skills needed to change for the better tomorrow. Too many "people at the top" are managing and not leading anywhere. Transformational leaders have the ability to help the organization develop a vision of what it can be, to mobilize the organization to accept and work toward achieving the new vision, and to institutionalize the changes that must last over time. Have a mixed or paradoxical personality traits allow them to lead change and drive digital transformation with a balanced mindset, behavior, activities.

Leadership is the combination of character and competencies. Anyone was drawing a correlation about leadership based on introversion/extroversion could only have "Irrational Thought." Leadership is about change (progress and advancement), it is about minding the gap and harnessing innovation, and leadership is about growing more leaders, not just producing followers. Also, senior leaders such as board directors have the power to change the rules, they will be under considerable pressure to make exceptions and end rules at times. So, they must have a strong personality, set a tone and environment that creates more leaders.

Read More

Five Insightful Questions to Overcome the Panic of Breakthrough Innovation

Innovation is not serendipity, it’s a mindset, a process, and a business competency. 

Innovation is to transform novel ideas for achieving its commercial value and truly meeting people’s needs. Breakthrough Innovation is disruptive and will change the business in many fields. It can achieve the higher ROI but with much greater risk. Often, there is no best practices to follow for managing breakthrough innovation as it is in the future with no necessary continuity with the past. It takes a kind of “out of the box” thinking and a lot of guts. It’s not something everyone can accomplish. Here are five insightful questions and answers to overcome the panic of breakthrough innovation.

What’s your comprehensive innovation strategy? Breakthrough innovation is powerful. It’s often disruptive and changes the competitive landscape, potentially making entire industries obsolete. If managed well, it can bring significant opportunities for the business to reach the next growth cycle and deliver the higher business value. To overcome the panic, asking the strategy related questions helps the organization clarify the very purpose of innovation, identify the critical issues facing the company, capture the emergent business opportunities to address the possibilities, and deploy a range of different management methodologies and technologies to tailor their own circumstances for managing innovations in a structural way. Breakthrough innovation is risky, but it brings the company great opportunities to reinvent itself by either creating the new business model, solving future issues with long-term perspectives. Therefore, a good innovation strategy as an effective constraint provides the guidelines for innovation management by providing anchors to explore from, evaluating what’s the altitude of innovation impact and the aptitude to manage innovation; the innovation processes efficiency, and measurement effectiveness, etc. It also helps the business laser focusing on the innovation efforts which can make a bigger impact for customers, partners and the marketplace, as well as become the disruptor rather than being disrupted.

Do you have the appropriate innovation climate? Innovation requires multidimensional thinking, analyzing, retrospection with less scripted behavior. Breakthrough Innovation is a radical new approach and takes out-of the-box thinking. It’s important to develop the proper innovation climate which encourages creativity, enforces trustful relationship, and has the right level of risk tolerance. Either individually or collectively, there is a full cycle of emotions behind innovation. Therefore, innovation managers should make an objective assessment by asking: What is triggering your emotions for doing innovation? What about trust? Or what about happiness? What about the right innovation climate? Your personal climate, your team climate or your organizational climate? Environment either encourages or discourages innovation, the ease or difficulties inherent in surviving. There are some key characteristics to build a culture of innovation. It’s important to keep a workforce open to innovation by cultivating a compelling future vision, the presence of transformational leadership, high organizational justice (trust); a participatory management style and multi-channel organizational communications. Only in an open trusting space, creativity can flow smoothly and innovation can be catalyzed effortlessly.

Who are your innovation catalyst? Innovation needs catalyst to spark up, spot and recognize the innovators who can rise above the status quo and catalyze the innovation climate. Creative people are in demand to catalyze a culture of innovation in the workplace and play as the “innovation agent” effortlessly. Put more C-suite people for innovation even when the company performs well, that make innovation more naturally become part of the strategy. Creativity relates to intelligence, empathy, inquisitiveness, idealism, learning agility, and process understanding. Having a fair recognition system with well-defined innovation performance measures and high visibility for all positive contributions will help in creating a culture of innovation. Perfecting the art of innovation is about shaping a bigger box of thinking either individually or collectively. Engage with futurists because they can often inform you of what is coming, what customers need and perhaps the future trend of products and services. Invite outliers to innovation dialogues because they can bring up interdisciplinary knowledge and fresh insight to boost creativity by inspiring people to step out of their comfort zone, overcoming panic. So the organization can become creatively disruptive and explore the "art of the possibility.

Which gaps shall you fill to build innovation capabilities? Breakthrough innovations are not something everyone can accomplish. You have to systematically develop the capability to execute them successfully, and that is something you do not accomplish overnight. Innovation competency is the key differentiator between the leader and the follower. Innovation involves many steps: the generation of an idea, the demonstration of its feasibility, its implementation, its commercialization, and its diffusion. It’s important to identify innovation capacity gaps or bottlenecks, such as resource limitation, process ineffectiveness, skills deficiency, or culture inertia, etc. Bridging innovation execution gap to achieving the business objectives requires a logical execution scenario with clear stages, well-set decision-making parameters, performance thresholds, combined with an iterative, experiential learning process that supports wide-ranging exploration at each stage. The organization's long-term success is based on a set of differentiated capabilities, with innovation as its core competency.

How to manage innovation risks effectively? Every innovation pursuit has risks in it, and every risk has opportunities in it, Exploring breakthrough innovation means you are doing something that hasn't been done before. You're accepting risk for potential reward. Therefore, it is important to set clear guidelines for managing innovation risks in a structural way. Innovation risk management need to consider both endogenous and exogenous drivers, the primary focus of the risk management process would be to identify and control those risks that can be addressed such as financing, marketing understanding, competitor analysis, identifying the space of opportunity, defining the scalability of the products/services, what timescale to allow, as well as capital investment, etc. Innovation is risky by its nature, the effective leadership, risk-tolerance culture, and well-established framework, etc are all crucial to improving the success rate of innovation, especially breakthrough innovation.

Innovation is not serendipity, it’s a mindset, a process, and a business competency. The right set of Q&As helps to clarify innovation strategy and overcome the panic of doing breakthrough innovation. Innovation breakthroughs that really hit the spot are often the radical new approach that makes a leap of the business to the next level of the growth cycle and achieves the high return on investment for the long term.

Read More

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 7/25/2019

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 5800+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

The Vivid Shape, Texture, and Architecture of Digitally Mature Organization Going digital is about breaking down the past and leading toward the future with a quantum leap. With rapid changes, the overwhelming growth of information, emerging technologies and dynamic markets, staying competitive means running a highly innovative business. Organizations are constantly morphing under pressure from the waves of creative destruction that keep business in innovation mode. Highly innovative organization leverages innovation strategy as an effective constraint to stay focus on building the innovation capacity of the business and unlocks a new market or revenue stream.

The Corporate Board "Performance Fit" Performances are not just numbers with metrics, they are numbers in context, results related to business goals. Business performance can be affected by numerous factors of which governance is one of them. The corporate board as one of the most crucial governance bodies in the modern enterprise plays an important role in setting digital principles for improving performance management effectiveness and monitoring business performance smoothly.

Tuning Key Elements to Keep Digital Fit Digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. It makes a profound impact from the specific function to the business as a whole and the entire digital ecosystem.Digital exploration is all about planning, investing, designing, developing, operating, consolidating, integrating, optimizing, and orchestrating. Here are five crucial business factors organizations have to continue tuning in order to keep digital fit and drive transformative changes successfully.

Reinvent Digital Organizations from Five Aspects The exponential growth of information and continuous disruptions bring both opportunities and risks, unique scenes and hidden pitfalls. There are competitions, conflicts, and controversies all over the place. A digital organization can bring greater awareness of the intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business process, people dynamics, resource alignment, information abundance, and technological touches. But reinventing business to get digital ready is an evolutionary journey which requires much more time, energy, passion, courage, experimentation, retreat, and reflection.

The Monthly “Dot Connections”: Innovation Dot Connection July 2019 The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Organization of the Future is an organization designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of the strategic imperatives of the digital era. The work is not the place you go, but a live organization and an experiment lab you can connect the future dots.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking about 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.

Read More

The Best “Time Management” Quotes of “Digital Master” July 2019

Time Management is the life philosophy to build confidence, set priorities, and boost creativity.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Time Management” quotes in “Digital Master.’

1 Time is the most perishable thing, it is not storable. Time does not wait for anyone, and it treats everyone equally.

2 Time management is not about punctuality, Time management prioritizes actions.

3 Time Management is the life philosophy to build confidence, set priorities, and boost creativity.

4 Time management is the act or process of planning and exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities.

5 Time management removes fears, helps not to regret, to differentiate between falsehood and truth; time is the cure for the sad memory, but it’s the hope for a better tomorrow.

6 The effective time management will definitely put you on firmness and infuses will power, confidence and dashing as to go head, accept challenges or calculated risks, also surprises, upsets, and roadblocks.

7 The effective time management boosts creativity. It makes one bold and shed the fear of failure, lethargic tendency and any inability that prevent progress.

8 Time management cannot be taught but can be gained through self-improvement from the inner transformation of self.

9 We need to be very vigilant about time. The wise time management can make life more meaningful, creative and productive.

Read More

Debunk the Myth of Digital Business Ecosystem

Understanding the people and the organization through an ecosystem lens makes it possible to allow the organization exploring digital in all directions.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. A high mature digital organization can bring greater awareness of the intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business competency, people dynamics, resource alignment, information permeation, and technological touches with ecosystem perspective. The digital ecosystem is dynamic, hyper-connected, expansive, and interdependent. It provides unprecedented opportunities to strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer business elements; it expands when the components of the business system consume all sorts of resources and broaden their scope of influence. There are known known, known unknown, and unknown unknown. How to debunk the myth of digital business ecosystem and leapfrog the business to the next level of the organizational growth and maturity?

Understand and adapt to the digital ecosystem: The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating cross industrial boundaries. Forward-thinking companies across the vertical sectors claim they are in the information technology business. The organization nowadays is like the switch connected to the dynamic ecosystem which keeps evolving and expanding. It’s like the self-adaptive system which is able to re-configure its own structure and change its own behavior pattern during strategy execution by adapting to environmental changes and managing risks. The organization becomes "unconscious" when it is no longer responding to the external environment and it’s seemingly detached from their business ecosystem. To effectively respond to the new dynamic, the organization need to awaken the ecosystem consciousness, start thinking about ways for adapting to their ecosystems and create new revenue streams while becoming highly responsive and innovative. The ecosystem partners need to communicate, participate, negotiate, and cooperate with each other to reinvent a super-conscious business.

Make the ecosystem alignment: With the ecosystem consciousness, business resources should be managed at the level of the ecosystem, rather than managing as individual pieces, to improve business effectiveness and maturity. It’s also important to align the different parts of the ecosystem to integrate modular, layered, and industrial components into loosely coupled dynamic business competency. It accelerates the business speed to deliver products or services and responds to the marketing dynamic by combining the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new experiences and business competencies. Because loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system, as long as the interface is kept stable. Instead of being rigidly grouped around a specific business, ecosystems draw together mutually supportive companies from multiple industries that build strategic partnership, make resource alignment, and collectively seek to create differentiated offerings and capture value they could not reach alone. The dynamic ecosystem explicitly seeks to create a flexible environment in which people can grow, treat customers, channel partners, suppliers as industry ecosystem participants to create and co-solve tough problems and many common challenges.

Purposefully plan the ecosystem: Companies operate within ecosystems to deliver value to their customers. For many organizations, the ecosystems have evolved without much attention or planning. To succeed in today's digital dynamic in the long term, the most successful organizations have a very clear vision and understand of why they exist, the value they bring to customers and the very reason for changes. It’s important to begin thinking about ways for broadening their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive. More specifically, to reach the high level of ecosystem consciousness. first, the ecosystem needs to be understood, then, it needs to be well planned, and also needs to be thoughtfully renewed as well. Companies today need to understand the dynamic competitive landscape, proactively look for ecosystem partners that can help the business succeed, orchestrate a broader ecosystem beyond functional or business borders, and demonstrate the benefits to the ecosystem in ways that might have happened in the past but at a much faster rate with much broader impact in the digital era.

Organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations or interactions surpasses the individual’s capacity to be able to do whatever it does with smaller scales. Understanding the people and the organization through an ecosystem lens makes it possible to allow the organization exploring digital in all directions, develop the company as a living thing, and perceive the business through multidimensional perspectives, such as the lenses of technology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, organizational and communication sciences, etc, understand, adapt to, and purposefully plan and orchestrate a hyper-connected and interdependent digital ecosystem seamlessly.

Read More

The Monthly Foresight: Perceive the Future via Multidimensional Views July 2019

 Re-imagining the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unlocking business performance and potential needs to take a systematic approach. 

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most wanted trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? How to lead to the digital future effortlessly?

          

Perceive Future via Multidimensional Views   

The “Zoom In, Zoom Out, & Diagnostic View” of Digitalization: Organizations’ digitalization is surely a transformation journey, as it has to permeate into business vision, strategy, communication, culture, and processes. etc. Before taking actions, start a deep observation to understand your business by capturing a multifaceted view. Cognition, resources, information, motivation, or complexity of each dynamic affect the pace of transformation and the timing of subsequent progress. Here is the “zoom in, zoom out, and diagnostic view” of digitalization.

Running a Future-Driven Digital Organization Digital organizations are the living systems which keep growing and maturing. Organization of the Future is an organization designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of the “VUCA” digital new normal, hyperconnectivity and fierce competition. Re-imagining the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unlocking business performance and potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form. Digital leaders must realize that you cannot wait until there is an immediate pressing task, continuous adaptability is necessary in an ever-changing world, in order to run a future-driven digital organization.

Shaping a Holistic View -Seeing both Forest and Trees? Holistic thinking involves understanding a system by sensing its large-scale patterns and addressing the big picture. In terms of a holistic viewpoint,' one does often need to integrate different stereotyped or mechanistic viewpoints; it is the integration and searches for new viewpoints that are holistic. At times, when you only want to see things from your own point of view, see what you want to see, or hear what you want to hear, often you miss the point to understand the real problem holistically as well as how to solve it creatively or systematically. Here are three aspects of shaping a holistic view of digital transformation.

Gaining Insightful Understanding of Digital Characteristics The digital organization is a complex ecosystem with the blurring line between functions, organizations, and geographic locations. The forward-looking view of the organization is to determine what the future needs to look like, what the digitalization must look like, and how digital leaders can navigate digital new normal and thrive in the exponential digital era. How insightful digital leaders understand the digital characteristics and how skillful digital leaders swim in the rough sea of information will decide their leadership effectiveness and maturity.

What’s your System View of the World Both business and the world become over complex and interconnected, the linear thinking often applied in the industrial age seems to be too limited to see the intriguing and interwoven picture of the world. When we do the linear thinking, we do not see the impacts and consequences of our thinking and actions socially, environmentally, locally and globally. The systems thinker looks at their business as being part of a larger system, the socio-economic system, which is part of a larger system - the natural environment. So is a systems view of the world needed? How can this kind of thinking and perception become mainstream and promoted in such a way that it is adopted as a serious alternative to linear thinking?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5800th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the businesses and society. 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.

Read More

Innation & Informativeness

 There is no doubt that the board only fulfills its role to shareholders and the management team when it is focused on unlocking performance and unleashing digital potential.

Performances are not just numbers with metrics, they are numbers in context, results related to business goals. Business performance can be affected by numerous factors of which governance is one of them. The corporate board as one of the most crucial governance bodies in the modern enterprise plays an important role in setting digital principles for improving performance management effectiveness and monitoring business performance smoothly.

Good governance can create good performance, especially in the long run: Corporate governance has a great impact on corporate performance, not through governance structure directly, but through good governance behavior. The corporate governance has a direct link to each business and its processes. Not only from the financial results, but also from the involvement and signs being displayed inside the organization, about what guidance, values, and principles governing the company's commercial activities. Effective corporate governance creates effective decision-making system and good controlling system which can assure the corporation’s operation under the correct directions and behaviors correctly. The governance structure specifies the distribution of rights and responsibilities among different participants in the corporation (such as the board of directors, managers, shareholders, creditors, auditors, regulators, and other stakeholders) and specifies the rules and procedures for making decisions on corporate affairs. Corporate governance indicates a relationship with the board, shareholders, management and the stakeholders. If all these parties would perform to the vision and mission of the organization, it would increase the business performance and improve organizational maturity.

Make a fair assessment and get objective perspectives on business performance: Performance is about business growth and achievement. Effective governance must create excellent performance, especially for long-term business growth. The corporate board’s role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization, They need to focus on the performance of the management team as well as their own performance. In achieving the role as the performance monitor, the board needs to be talented enough to vet strategy, gain an in-depth understanding of what’s blocking business achievements, targets, work together as a group to speak in one voice, delegate and monitor business performance they decide not to manage. To identify and break down business performance bottlenecks, they need to help the management understand the whole story behind the scenes and ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. More specifically, performance monitoring is not limited to financial performance only, but also to the firm’s performance in creating value for employees and customers. The "performance" responsibility of BoDs should be focused on the maximization of the business capital allocation and improvement of the shareholder’s value. Ultimately, the board takes the praise or the blame depending largely on their ability to influence the business outcomes.

High-performing boards set goals for their own performance and regularly evaluate how they are performing as the board and where are the board’s performance bottleneck: As far as evaluating the performance of the board, many boards are evaluating their performance at both collective and individual levels. Individually, even the majority of BoDs are senior executives, they need to break down the “status quo,” and present learning agility. They should frequently brainstorm issues such as board composition, structures, and leadership, take the periodic assessment of performance and leadership effectiveness. Competent board directors present dynamic leadership, strategic thinking, persuasiveness, and mentorship skills. Collectively, the digital board with a blend of great expertise and capabilities can improve the board leadership effectiveness significantly. 

There’s a correlation between corporate governance and business performance, and there's a clear connection between bad governance and poor performance. There is no doubt that the board only fulfills its role to shareholders and the management team when it is focused on unlocking performance and unleashing digital potential. A highly effective board enables and directs management towards good outcomes, and ensure the business is on the right track to reach well-defined business goals.

Read More

CIOs as De Facto “Chief Innovation Officer”: How to Manage Intensive Digital Innovation

 Innovation happens when you change the game or bring the different twist to what is currently perceived or established. 

Innovation is what leads to differentiation. Technology is often the disruptive force behind innovation, and information is the most time-intensive piece of digital innovation puzzle. In an industry where innovation threatens to tear down legacy systems and practices, just as it generates new opportunities, it's natural to fear the unknown or be skeptical of the unproven. There is a full emotional cycle behind digital innovation. CIOs as de facto “Chief Innovation Officer”: How to manage intensive digital innovation smoothly?

Communication: The success of innovation management starts with effective communication. If you can get the IT leaders and staff to engage in open dialog with the business people, sharing ideas and learning, you can generate lots of fresh ideas and accomplish wonderful things. Being generous at sharing ideas with all coworkers, communicate and support others regardless of leadership style or personality differences. Innovation happens at the intersection of people and technology. IT and the business are intertwined but must be on the same page of innovation management, engage talent in innovation-driven conversations and make it as a regular habit. IT is a business enabler, but a high mature IT organization also has the vision to be a driver for business innovation. It’s about how to apply open, creative, and multi-channel communication styles to bridge IT-business gaps by using common language, truly understand critical business problems and solve them creatively. Initiate both horizontal (cross-functional) and vertical (dig deeper about some important subject) open communication, collaborate on strategy and work together to drive business innovation systematically.

Coherence: Innovation is not serendipity, but collaborative teamwork and coherent business efforts. Digital organizations spontaneously self-organize, generate patterns, structures, and layers, and above all, create novelty over time. Consider digital organization as the coherent, self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem, Coherence improves idea flow and streamline information flow. Due to the exponential growth of information and complexity of modern business, digital innovation is intensive with lots of confusions and many missing pieces. Innovation management success is achieved by diagnosing problems clearly, identifying talent gaps insightfully, sourcing the mix set of skills and capabilities relentlessly, tuning business processes and structures effectively and efficiently, and building a healthy innovation portfolio to deliver desired innovations continuously. Organizations have to strike the multitude of digital balances such as innovation leadership vs. management, theories vs. practices, standardization vs. flexibility, logic vs. intuition, etc, in order to achieve innovation management coherence and improve the success rate of innovation management. The differentiated innovation management competency is built via the top executive generous sponsorship, the middle-management dedicated execution, and the bottom line engagement and fully supports.

Community: At the heart of innovation is a life cycle of idea generation, interaction, selection, and learning. CIOs as the de facto “Chief Innovation Officer” can reinvent IT as an innovation hub and build wide user-community to nurture great ideas generation, increase interaction, improve learning, and build a culture of innovation. Organizations cross industrial sectors have begun applying collaborative platforms, tools and methodologies to enforce broader communication, facilitate innovation dialogues, broaden the impact of innovation practices, and accelerate the pace of innovation. In a healthy and self-renewing innovation ecosystem, employees, customers, channel partners, suppliers, and industry ecosystem participants are all active agents who can bring up fresh ideas to the table and have permission to combine the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new ideas and develop them into full fruity. Innovation community is dynamic and fluid to allow ideas flow frictionlessly, strike the multitude of digital balances which impact with each other in order to achieve a state of flow, a state of zest, and a state of harmonization.

Innovation is the core activity of human evolution of changing the environment to reach stellar performance and make a profit, for saving of resources, for solving common problems, and for expediting collective human progress. This requires an effective innovation system that is capable of supporting both widespread incremental innovation in products/services and disruptive innovation in business model. CIOs as the de facto “Chief Innovation Officer” can develop a balanced innovation portfolio to improve business vitality and ensure future business growth and organizational maturity.

Read More

The Monthly Organizational Structure Tuning: Tuning a Flexible Digital Organization July 2019

A digital organization is an organic living thing with attributes such as open communication, “ownership,” “flexibility,” and “creativity,” etc.

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. From an organizational structure perspective, how can you fine-tune the digital dimensions of your organizational development to harness innovation?

Tuning a Flexible Digital Organization

Building a Digital Organization with Strategic Flexibility With rapid changes and fierce competitions, forward-thinking organizations today aim to move into a more advanced stage of digital deployment by tailoring their own unique strength and business maturity. Running a digital organization means high-responsiveness, high-performance, and high-innovativeness. Because the ways of doing business and meeting customer expectations both tend to be more adaptable than the siloed industrial age. The reality is that organizations that do not respond to external environmental changes will quickly outcompete as nimbler and more adaptable companies catch up and take their customers. How to build a digital organization with strategic flexibility?

A Flexible Organization Digital is the age of choices; just like consumers have more options to shop via multi-channel platforms; organizations also have more opportunities (and risks as well) in scaling or innovating their businesses. Today, "flexible organizations" are on the digital way to drive business success. These companies are able to "navigate" the change and the complexity of the present business world via creative problem-solving and continuous innovation practices.

Tuning a Flexible Digital Organization? Compared to the traditional organizations with an overly rigid hierarchy or strictly pyramidal structure, digital organizations today are flatter, hybrid (the mix of the physical building and virtual team setting) and highly adaptable to changes. These companies are becoming more flexible, able to navigate changes and the complexity of the present business world via creative problem-solving and innovative management practices.

How Can Digital Characteristics Brighten the Shadow of Bureaucracy Traditional organizations have a pyramidal hierarchy and overly rigid organizational structure and processes, which often enforce silo thinking and business bureaucracy. Generally speaking, bureaucracy is a system based on a hierarchy of authority and division of workforce functioning in a routine manner. Bureaucracy is criticized by its inflexibility, inefficiency, silo, stagnation, unresponsiveness, lack of creativity, etc. It is correlated with a mechanistic view of the organization and reductionistic management discipline. With increasing rate of changes and fast growing information, the organization needs to be adapted in a digital way that it can respond effectively to the dynamic changes and to the variety in the environment. But more specifically, how can emergent digital characteristics brighten the shadow of bureaucracy to improve management effectiveness and organizational maturity?

Three Aspects to Build Flexible Digital Workplace Compared to the traditional organizations with the overly rigid hierarchical setting and classic management style, the digital workplace is more dynamic, flatter and engaging. A digital organization is an organic living thing with attributes such as open communication, “ownership,” “flexibility,” and “creativity,” etc, as well as the hyperconnectivity with its digital ecosystem.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5800+ 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.

Read More

The Best “Senior Leadership” Quotes of “Digital Master” July 2019

Senior leadership makes influence from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical changes and societal advancements.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Senior Leadership” quotes in “Digital Master.’

1 The senior leadership of the organization or the society are like the steering wheel to ensure their ships are moving in the right direction towards the uncharted water.

2 Senior leaders play a critical role in setting principles and policies. Hence, abstract thinking helps them differentiate substance from style, grasp the quintessential from outdated information.

3 Senior leaders should enforce communication to tailor audience via different styles. From abstraction to elaboration. Open your mind - listen (read) carefully, expecting to find some new insight.

4 As a C-level position is at a higher level of leadership tier, many times, abstraction enables an agreement.

5 Senior leaders should have the ability to frame the right problems, before delegating others to solve them.

6 Senior leadership makes influence from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical changes and societal advancements.

7 Senior leadership is less about the status quo based on the steep hierarchy, more about the depth of insight and high level of leadership maturity.

8 Senior leadership is neither equal to seniority nor a big title, it implies a high level of intellectual and emotional maturity.

9 The digital senior leadership should reflect on profundity of the thinking and persuasiveness of the communication.

Read More