Innovating by Questioning

"You can't solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level." - Albert Einstein 

Innovation is the new way to do things; innovation creates change to the next level of performance. However, innovation management cannot be a one person challenge and needs careful planning, recruitment, and support to cover everything from fundamental research through experimentation, evaluation, and exploitation. Failure to understand both the extent of these services and the likely timescales for real success can undermine the whole proposition around innovation. People who innovate are pro-change and not afraid to challenge the status quo and they have the unlimited curiosity to ask questions. What are the most important questions a leader who is focused on innovation should ask him/herself?

The 5 Whys: The 5 Whys is an iterative question-asking technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Why? and then Why? again and then Why? Again 5 times. The"Why" is always at the center of innovation leaders’ question list. Are the innovations you are trying to promote actually relevant to the business now, or in the future, or at all? Innovation is a buzzword that can easily be misused unless you have a clear goal of what you want to get out of it. Is it cost savings, efficiency, better go to market strategy, improved IT agility in supporting new business, etc....?

What: What do you consider "innovation" and what have you implemented that you would consider innovation, what's out there to improve it, what will the business benefits of doing it and if beneficial, start the process of getting it done (project). Innovation means better ways of doing something, so ALL leaders should be focused on this in relation to improvements that can be made to the business. So the question is what needs improvement. This is then seen as proactive action and improves the profile of the leaders and consequently performance. This allows for the fact that business users’ needs and requirements (the company) must come first in terms of resources and the leaders should make this position clear but companies should always be looking to improve and so it is very hard to raise objections when innovation is positioned in this way. A further question may include such as 'What do I want to be known for?' This is more of a reminder to think in an innovative way. Innovation is best conceived when you've removed yourself from the comfortable and the known to embrace unknown with risk intelligence.

How: How does it add value? And how does it impact your business process efficiency or bottom line? Concern connections between technology and the business that 'intend' to increase efficiency, one of the questions is "how can I directly tie this innovation to the bottom line?" -that is usually difficult, and often one of the many reasons innovation is stifled. Unless these basic components are in place, then there is the risk of a serious mismatch in expectation between the provider and receiver of innovation. Is the culture open to innovation, and if not, how can I introduce it? How much risk am I willing to take on to create innovation? How to allocate the right resources - time, money, people - to make innovation a habit in my company?

Who: It is a critical innovation strategy for hiring the right people in the right places. Change/ Innovation is hard enough and not a one person challenge. It is extremely difficult to find and hire people that have innovative mindsets to facilitate change in organizations. How do we pay for the innovation we know we need to deploy? Followed up by "where can we refocus?" There is no such thing as what cannot be done unless you make a habit of hiring people that cannot do. It is amazing how easily vendors and internal staff are intimidated and how easily people believe their staff to eliminate the threat. It takes an amazingly strong person to create innovation. Those that have failed call it a buzzword. Look at all the "we can't do that" or "it's how we do it here" in the organizations and start innovating in those areas. Force yourselves into "the zone" where danger = solutions... Maybe you'll find innovation that can push your company to grow. 

How much/many: Innovation is useless unless there are real, measurable benefits in the quantitative or qualitative way: Faster time to market, productivity gains, higher efficiency... Is there a usage scenario or how to measure innovation in my organization?

The future of leader leads by questioning; the effective innovation manager shall also innovate by asking, ask those "5W + H" questions to navigate through; and ask the right questions are more than half of your innovation success.

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Top Three Traits of Respective Leaders

 Highly effective leaders get respect, not because of their titles, but because of their vision and influence; insight and wisdom; ability and humility. 

Leaders and managers are different roles. A leader has a vision and personal influence to convince others to achieve that vision. A manager controls the day-to-day activities and resource utilization of the company. They may be the same person, but play a different role to fit circumstances.  More specifically, what are the top three traits of an effective leader?

1.Vision

The most important thing for the leader is to create a clearly articulated vision of success, unambiguous measures of how the team will know when they get there, the ability to enroll others in that vision and provide effective coaching and support throughout the journey. This takes insight, intelligence and the ability to see opportunities that others cannot see in a way that is easily articulated and understood, express a clear vision consistently and in terms suitable for the audience (Board, management, and all staff); - Establishing and communicating a high-level idea, game plan.

     2. Influence

This can be derived from wisdom, charisma, rewards, expert power (people respect your expertise), referent power (your title) or coercion (force or threats). 

A: Mentor: Leaders must be a mentor! Mentors give without thought of return and are dedicated to seeing their staff succeed. They are a role model or coach – who supports his/her team Integrity.

 B: Trust: A leader is someone that you trust. Trust - Trust the team, channelize energies, give people free-hand to think and provide solutions, nurture/mentor people. To be followed by co-workers because they want to, not because they have to. 

C: Empathetic engagement - listening, challenging and concluding positively in terms that the individual/audience understood, at any level of the organization; knowing his/her team upon strengths, weaknesses, goals, and objectives. Ability to see and treat people as people, not as objects. Many people unknowingly work and live within their own boxes and oftentimes fail to see co-workers, bosses, and subordinates as people but objects, and in doing so fail to see and hear their viewpoints which cloud the judgment as leaders.

D. Transparency - When there is a hidden agenda, the people that work for you become suspicious. Recognizes team members for the value they bring. Commitment to your people - a boss can be committed to meeting a goal, managing a budget, etc., but a leader is committed to the people they lead. 

E: Learning mind: They understand that learning can come from anywhere and are not afraid to let their staff members teach them something new! Ability to be a follower. True leaders always know when it is time to be a follower. In addition, they must not be afraid to let others shine. In other words, the best leaders inspire, encourage, and engage their teams in projects and tasks that push them and then provide the support necessary to allow their staff to be successful! Inspires others to be their very best and invests in their success  "A leader is best when people barely know he exists when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves." - Lao Tsu 

3. Execution 

It takes courage with the ability to take action and make swift decisions even unpopular ones.  

   A.  Insight: Being insightful at making decisions becomes game-changers for the organization.

   B. Communication: Immensely persuasive in getting others to align with the mission and build the team - picking the right people, garnering their strengths, and protecting/elevating at appropriate times.

  C. Problem Solving - Resolve problems/issues before they become big, address them and move forward.

D.    Innovation: To champion the innovative use of technology in the workplace. Also, cultivate the culture of innovation: In other words, clear direction is critical yet it is also extremely important to create the right culture and behaviors - without these even the most intelligent of bosses become unstuck.

   

            E. Humility: To live by the golden rule, with humility. This includes giving their time and energy to help others freely with sincerity without expecting anything in return. 

The leaders are the person that knows their company's Why, and their own personal Why. And highly-effective leaders get respect, not because of their titles, but because of their vision and influence; insight and wisdom; ability and humility.

 

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Process vs. Data: Which Comes First

Data is the lifeblood, and the process is the body function of enterprise. 

Data is like the life blood of business, processes are like body functions, made up of steps that convert inputs to outputs. process management is to manage known from the flow. Process vs. Data, which one should come first?

Logically, the process always comes first: Processes exist whether they are undocumented/ documented. Businesses have processes before flow-graphing was invented and before computers existed. The process is "what are you trying to do, what result are you trying to achieve." Then, you can ask, "what data do you need." If you don't know what you are trying to do, how can you possibly know what data you might need? At the same time, you can see the value of collecting lots of data, since you never know what might be needed in the future, but that is a different question.

In an ideal world, the process should be primary. Whereas businesses usually use inherited systems as data sources, the process has not to be constrained by them. You should have to construct data adapters for the process to work properly. But in the real world, you have always been constrained by existing systems and databases. The process never stands alone, and rarely is the sole source of data for any meaningful process. So while you consider process primary, you must consider existing data sources as constraints. Ignoring them while designing processes is likely to lead to a bad result and rework.

It’s just another chicken-egg debate: As long as you have the freedom to design what you want to do. Then you design the process, define the data you need along the way... All is good. In many cases, you are often forced to look at existing processes, existing data collection, and the challenges are to make things "lean." Do you need to collect the data, or is there a way to streamline the process and get the same data leaner. Do you collect Big Data and are you benefitting from it? When you have to mix Data Management initiatives and Business Process improvement, only the concerted approach will work and the overlap is inevitable. So it turns to be another chicken and egg debate.

Data drives processes, when multiple groups and / or department and / or people involved in the process. For example, customer onboarding process, dispute tracking process is highly dependent on data, data elements, and business rules for process optimization. In these scenarios, data has a significant role in defining the process and data comes first. A good process includes an understanding of value, function, Data, responsibility, and control flow. Function and Data are thus integral to a good process.

Always emphasize on the Data part: Though process may come first, always put emphasis on the data part. Each step generates data ranging from a simple "done" declaration by an individual performing the step, to the collection of, for example, various data elements needed by steps downstream from a step that has the focus. First keeping the practice you want to incorporate as processes. Data quality, the frequency of occurrence, impediments of decisions for Data variance and many analytical factors have a major influence on the fine parts of a Process Definition. Process definition though has been marked as the principal skeleton of an Enterprise Business Regulations, yet to define it to the finest position, data science has a huge contribution. When you talk about the Business Decision Management, you should have Data analysis part first to get all Social education embedded within a process. Recent development on Digital Transformation can also be invited to make your processes implanted in the womb of OMNI Channels when data analytics and science have been well thought off and recognized within the definition of your process.

Like so many things, it depends: The technical answer would be processed first because someone had to do it the first time in order to measure it. But the reality is that over 90% of the processes of today's world are based on some previous iteration. As new mediums and environments emerge, the initial balance starts heavy on processing data, and then shifts toward data over time. An outsider who comes into an organization and is unable to find anyone who can describe a particular process can reverse engineer that process by carrying out data mining. If the process is mostly linear it is easy to reverse engineer a process. If the process is complex with multiple branching points where different pathways are undertaken on the basis of data, experience, judgment, intuition, and, at times, arbitrary action, it becomes more difficult to derive a process from data.

Hence, it is just another chicken-egg debate, process and data go hand in hand. Processes are defined around some outcomes/KPIs and objectives to improve in a defined region where Data is important to be defined for the same. Similarly, Data has no meaning until it is owned and given some identity. Processes give the Data a shape to be quantifiable as well.

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Running IT as Digital Reinforcer

It is not that businesses need to reinforce IT ASAP, but they need to reinforce accountability.

There are stresses in many professions and people must respond accordingly. Technology is becoming more critical than ever before and organizations will need to ensure that IT professionals are challenged, but not overwhelmed if they expect to retain them. So why haven't more technology professionals and business leaders leveraged managed services to reduce the burden affordably, and how to run IT as the digital reinforcer?

Fortifying ownership mentality: Leaders need to own such problems. The organizational leaders and IT leaders (at all levels) create this environment. There are too many excuses on why work and stress loads are at their current levels, it’s time for leaders to own the problem. They (again at all levels) need to fully understand the issue and decide to remedy it. Stressing out employees is not helpful to the company or its stakeholders in the long-run. It exposes how a leader might address the pressures his/her staff feel; how that leader keeps his/her focus on the staff to ensure personnel is professionally healthy. Is that leader in touch and engaged with the reality of what the department is facing, do they help achieve success or just take credit for it? Set boundaries between your staff and those they serve; enforce those boundaries and allow your people to have a life outside of work. Promote the staff who ignores those boundaries because they are leaders who take further responsibility and think holistically.

Highlighting competitive differentiation: A clear understanding of what services are supporting your competitive advantage is needed. Services not critical in this regard can be brought/bought outside. As IT is increasingly supportive of the competitive position and the business, in general, careful consideration must be made about which knowledge or skills have to be secured. Mis-judgement in this regard will hamper the long-term ability of the IT department to independently support strategic initiatives from the business. Your supplier will help you out but will offer the same solutions to the competition. The alternative solution though might be an increasing quality of the IT departments, delivering services first time right takes less effort than fixing issues and business will be pleased as well.

Reinforcing accountability: It is not that businesses need to reinforce IT ASAP, but they need to reinforce accountability. A lot of issues come from false reports and hotfixes for resolution. Standardized Enterprise Reports will show where resolution needs to be in place across the board and can allow in meetings to show strength or weakness in the company. The right formula also depends on the organization and what they are trying to accomplish. If you have very tech-capable users, the attention to the support experience may not be as important as having highly qualified development staff. A quality IT leader will gather the requirements from the business leaders and develop a plan that, while it may not be their personal favorite, submits to the needs of the business.

Embracing varying perceptions: This is a great topic because if your people fail, your mission fails. How you find a solution to any problem depends on your perspective on that problem, but every problem has numerous angles to take into consideration. Thus, in most cases, it boils down to how you view the problem from two different outlooks; from above or from below. Now you still have all the different angles to consider but they may look very different depending on your perspective. Whether you are looking from above (CXOs) or below, both have the intention to ensure the best result for the company. From above and understanding that this viewpoint is vital to the long-term goals of an organization, managed services can look like a great answer. You get technical expertise, a deep bench of resources at a reasonable annual cost. You eliminate some of the employees relates expenses, responsibility, and overhead particularly in regards to choosing good employees or dealing with bad hires. On paper your costs are trending down, your network diagram and technical portfolio look stronger and your business continuity seems significantly more robust. All of these elements might, in fact, be true depending on where you started from, but from a different angle, see a different point of view.

Shaping governance and capacity planning: Capacity planning needs to be part of the corporate initiatives around continuous improvement. Capacity modeling is just one of the activities that are required for a high performing IT department. This will allow for a transparent view from across the organization that should help level the playing field. Better yet, if all the departments in the business practice capacity planning, you will move closer to organizational harmony and efficacy, and it is important to measure the ROI on such an activity. Capacity planning will not lower the workload; however, it will give management a true picture of activities so a decision can be made on the ideal workload. The key to successful capacity planning is to know what you are doing, being transparent, and clear leadership (at all levels) and governance so everyone knows what they are to execute on. Implementing governance requires effort and expense. If the technical leadership is already on its heels managed services can reinforce the IT department and help implement those policies with CIOs. Too many organizations lack a governance system and are in reactive mode. A quality program within the IT department will enable you to switch to a proactive mode and bring you in control. Any minute saved fixing issues will enable you to spend another minute preventing one & supporting business initiatives. 

 

Strengthening the CIO leadership: Last, but not the least, the issue of IT project failure rate has more to do with the CIO leadership, or the lack of it, more than anything else. Too many IT leaders are chosen for their technical skills rather than their influential leadership ability. When this is carried to the C-level, it becomes a recipe for disaster for the entire enterprise. The CIO must be involved in two types of integration. The most important thing is the integration of technology with the goals of the enterprise because technology without business application has no value. The second is integration between technologies so that the entire system is much greater than the sum of its parts. This second piece of integration can be delegated to a technology systems integrator on the CIO's team. However, integration with the business requires a CIO who is fully enmeshed with the other executive staff members in the business aspects of the enterprise. This leadership and business-oriented CIO can then take the real business needs back to their technology team and get them working on the right things. This CIO will see technology as a tool to meet business needs and make the enterprise more competitive and successful. That attitude will filter through the organization and the team will strongly feel the responsibility to help choose business supporting technologies that will be successful.

Organizations rely more and more on technology; the IT department has more and more to overcome. Running at digital speed, people tend to have high expectation of digital flow, very little patience with technology issues, and, therefore, businesses have to spend enough time focusing on the people element, start with leadership, enhance governance practice, and reinforce IT based on tailored solution and continuous improvement.

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How to Develop the Performance Measures for Strategy?

 A good strategy tells you not only what specifically needs to accomplish, but WHY.

The strategy will start being more and more dynamic, so the consistency and "perennial" guide of the organization will be better represented by company’s identity. Leadership, strategy, and management will build, develop and make that proposed (desired) identity. Going further, the metrics should also be immersed in a sustainable development way of thinking. However, what’s systematic thinking and which approach should you apply to develop the performance measures for your strategy?

The strategy has two components: Strategy has one component envisioned and a second component being an evolving strategy (the corrections, fine tuning, and adjustments). Your vision should be broken into the major goals and measurements required to realize the vision and then broken down to the specific order and time frames. These should be validated as much as possible and well debated. 

The strategy has four tests: First and foremost strategy must be measurable! The four parts or test of a good strategy are: (1) can it be validated; (2) is it easily communicated and understood to a level where it is ingrained into the workings of the operation, (3) can it be clearly identified what problem is to be overcome or capability created; (4) and does it have a high probability of actually solving it. 

The strategy has four-step cycles: (1) Part one is clearly identifying what needs to be done; (2) secondly how it will be done -the operational tactics and timeframes; (3) thirdly what specific results/ outcomes are expected when and (4) finally the vital evaluation and feedback loop. If the results are not what was expected, then you can look at if the strategy needs adjustment or revision or did the implementation execute to plan and finally were the results achievable. Laser focus on the details and utilizing key leading indicators to identify as early as possible if the planned results are likely to be achieved so adjustments are made timely is key.

Three key questions to clarify strategy: It is important that complete consistency is kept between the goals of the strategy process and the targets that are set in an operational annual plan. Using three key questions in rolling out a strategy to minimize misunderstandings, as expecting that people fully understand what is in your head is the dangerous and usually detrimental assumption. These questions go a long way to open up the dialogue and ensure everyone is on the right path. Don't be surprised if at first people can’t answer the questions. This is an excellent indicator of future issues and allows you to provide the appropriate level of support and guidance early in the project. Here are the three questions which can be asked to eliminate a lot of the confusion: 
1)Tell me how you will define success? This question requests the individual to tell you what they think needs to be accomplished in these words and can be used to validate they have a good handle on what needs to be done. 
2) What will your strategies and tactics be used to achieve the outcome? This provides a roadmap that can be used to evaluate approach and progress as the project unfolds. 
3). What issues, concerns, assistance do you think you will need or encounter?

Measures varying based on different objectives. Depends on whether it is a corporate strategy or a business unit strategy. When you define goals and objectives, resulting from a strategic thinking/ implementation process, these goals should have a mid to long term time horizon with intermediate checkpoints. If you make those checkpoint reviews annually, they can coincide with the annual planning process. Objectives are different, hence the measures will also vary. A strategy sets goals and directions - and must include steps on the ladder of activities, leading to the goals. These "steps" or milestones must be quantified and on a timeline. And specific leaders in the organization must take ownership for each of the "steps" - and it must be part of their performance measurement. At a corporate level, financial measures will help the organization to choose between alternative strategies and make it organization)profitable. For example, NPV (Net Present Value) and Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) as some of the parameters. You can also aim for a targeted market share and penetration rate. May be targeted ROE for the company as compared to the industry. 

If you don't know where you are going any road will get you there. A good strategy tells you not only what specifically needs to accomplished, but why, and in many cases what is at risk in doing or not doing the goal. Strategy steers the enterprise ship by providing the navigation through the risks and obstacles to successfully reach your desired positions. At a high level, it is critically important, to first understand the "waterfall' relationship that follows strategy. The strategy should dictate the supporting business processes and these business processes, in turn, drive the supporting organizational structures required. Therefore, to have a "complete" picture of how effective your strategy is, you must have relevant metrics that measure not only financial and market performance, but operational and organizational performance as well.

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Big Data Harmony

The critical step to solve analytics puzzle is to build people power and create Big Data harmony.

Big Data has big potential to help business grow revenue or satisfy customer, however, it takes both strategy and tactics to create such Big Data harmony, and unleash full potential of data analytics.

Data integration: Big Data effectiveness is certainly proportional to the degree of organizational integration. Big data – why breaking down the silos between marketing and IT is essential. One of the key factors driving the success or failure of a customer implementation is the degree to which marketing and IT work as a single team, but not just between marketing and IT, where the implied assumption is that all the organization's data is already clean and snug in the group data warehouse or dumped in a Hadoop environment, for example, ready to use, this is often far from the truth. Thus, the need to find an effective collaboration between the business and IT is an old challenge which is no different with big data. That said, getting this right is literally the battle ground and is therefore very critical. 

Mutual understanding: The deeper issue about the separation is between 'users' and 'developers'. There is a tradition of users asking for something, IT developing a large monolithic 'solution', and then the usual blame game where users claim IT didn't understand what they asked for and IT claiming users didn't specify it correctly! There is always a contradiction between users and developers. The better approach is to cascade as a combination of technology and philosophy that allows more users to easily and intuitively adopt the approach; the components could satisfy users and keep developers busy, give users the ability to create their own solutions from a suite of components: Building complex software that does the job they want done as easily as they draw an org chart. Then you have things done, users happy, IT happy, business operating, and accountants ecstatic! Though it is a long way to go. The point is IT shall work that allows users to dynamically construct their own software systems (including ones for fast, big data and real time analytics!), leveraging discrete components built by IT. It turns out that they makes users happy - they get what they want without delay - and also IT - they get to be more productive because they are building components rather than monoliths. That type of approach breaks down the artificial barriers between techs and non-techs and, for once, actually serves the business at hand.

Data quality: Clearly one of the top big data spending areas for these organizations is customer analytics. This is such a great fit for big data. So, you've got customers with omni-channel data points relating to customer behavior - past and, presumably, present trending to future. A kind of double-helix model of the relationship between customers and products/services which, theoretically, is going to illuminate potential -sell opportunities? However, consider the issue of data quality, which is critical in the success of any data initiative, big data or otherwise. Think of the data captured in the channel network. That's a lot of fast data sources - passing into predictive analytics with historical data temperance - leading to insight canvasses. Using 'fast data sources', not 'big data sources' is because - from observation of other operational areas such as compliance, end-of-day calls, operational resilience, etc. - this needs to be done as close to the point of observation as possible in order to respond as proactively as possible. Therefore, create a set of components (modules, micro-services, blocks) and make those available to the various bits of the operations under observation so that they can exploit validated code to build bigger, more immediate solutions that address dynamic questions. Components would include access to data sources, different analytical models, different alarm / alert outputs, recommendation services, etc.

People magic: IT is a key enabler. Marketing is a key user. But they're not the only stakeholders involved in making data valuable. So there are certainly more stakeholders at play than just marketing and IT in ensuring the sustainability of any sort of data intervention. While we may all agree that the silos need to breakdown, but how, is it about people magic? People with acute organizational smarts; people with well-developed relationship skills; people with the mandate to create a data environment as a strategic asset for the organization. It's these people that create a win-win environment between ALL relevant stakeholders to drive a well-governed, high-quality enterprise resource that the organization can use with confidence, subject to the reigning legislative landscape of course.

Big Data is a big puzzle, the critical step is to build people magic and create big harmony, in order to explore the untapped opportunities it can bring to grow business and improve organizational maturity.

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Talent vs. Skill

Talent could be the right balance between "heart" and "head," the right balance between what is innate and what is developed and trained.

Talent is an innate, or natural ability to do something well. So it has to be identified as distinct from a skill, which is acquired by learning and practice. Talent is something deeper that empowers or boosts skills, but how to identify it, acquire it, improve it, or stimulate it? Talent is like DNA: DNA defines what you could be; not what you will be. Someone once said, "Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.” Backed by the proper application of training and practice, talent can become useful, profitable skill; without training and practice, talent is unmet potential.

Talent is something in the building. You feel comfortable doing it no matter how long or times you want to do it to your fullest, talent is a natural quality in certain people. But the effort and training can help one improve talent-based skills and keep one to be competitive. It is the ability to put the skill to proper use, hopefully for something good or useful. It’s intangible; it can't be measured easily or quickly. Talent is a gift. Talent represents what an individual has a natural gift to accomplish or perform an innate ability to do well. It differs from skill. One of the simplest ways to describe talent is that it's a natural gift that you have. It was once said, 'it's impossible for us to wear out our gifts because the more you use them, the stronger they become.' Skill, on the other hand, represents something you need to do/learn in order to achieve success. You may not be naturally inclined or particularly gifted in an area, but you need to develop a skill or competence to achieve success in your roles/positions/jobs. A skilled person could learn something and do it very well without being naturally talented it. But when a person has a special talent for something and he/she is actually interested in it and matched with the right position/job fit, he/she will outperform others in that role. When we match a person's talent with organizational needs, we hit the jackpot, and the learning curve isn't as steep.

                                                                                                            

Talent is strictly related to the GREAT performance he/she can achieve. Everyone, well skilled and trained, could achieve a good, really acceptable and appreciated performance. Yet, only talented people who perform what they like (the gift) could achieve extraordinary performance (if trained). Being talented at something and liking it are two different things. Sometimes you enjoy working in the field where your talent lies and sometimes you don't. You have to like doing what your "talent" is. You may have a gift for numbers and math or for speaking but not necessarily like performing the work of, but it comes natural and you do it well so people take notices and you get asked to do it more and more. Although being talented at something or liking it are two different things, but more often, talent is what you 'like' to do. Then, surely, you have to practice and be motivated to excel in application, skill, and performance. Isn't it? If so, the other question is: How can you find the talent? How can you find what you like it?

Talent is something that comes naturally with some people who are born with certain talents, which can be recognized at very early stages: If they are raised in a good environment then the talent is developed and well utilized and serves the people. Also, it depends on if you are using you right brain or left the brain. At early stage talent or better "I like to do it - I feel comfortable, I feel good - but I don't know why" comes from "heart", from your human nature, from instincts, from passion, from emotions, from feelings. And it is not rationale. Then, at an advanced stage, it is mixed with brain and rationality, trained, developed and it becomes TALENT. So talent could be the right balance between "heart" and "head", the right balance between what is innate and what is developed and trained.

Everyone is born with some "talent" or the other hand, the inability to understand their own gifts is what ends it, especially since it needs nurturing and training! If not done early, other social influences will blind the ability to recognize this gift! The next question may be, how do you undo this blind spot and understand the gift? The attitudes (positive or negative) multiply the potential impact of the combined Talents + Skills +Knowledge. When you use goal setting to focus all that energy, it creates positive behavior change that leads to improved results.

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The Holistic IT Governance

It takes strategic and systematic thinking and a holistic IT governance approach in running an Agile IT.

Digital IT is permeating into the very fabric or core processes in modern organizations, thus, IT governance is crucial to steering business in the right direction and make effective business decisions.

However, what is the best approach to begin implementing formal IT Governance specifically aimed at improving the quality of demand? How can the "competition" for finite dollars be structured so that the end game, best benefit for the enterprise, is achieved? How much of a decision-making body (vs. advisory or discussion forum) is the IT Steering Committee (ITSC) and how do they make those decisions? How does one keep the ITSC focused on WHAT IT should work on and not HOW IT accomplishes it ("If IT was more efficient at keeping the lights on, you could have more dollars to spend on new things")?

Starting with the board sponsorship: Make the recognition by the BoD and officer team that the IT dollars are enterprise resource and are finite, and must be leveraged to the benefit of the enterprise. IT governance's purpose is to facilitate all business units in competing for the dollars based on the benefit to the enterprise. Begin with the CIO identifying every component of the cost associated with "keeping the lights on", then the currently approved projects by title, executive sponsor, budget, schedule, and resources dedicated to each project.

Categorization and prioritization: There is no reason the executive team shouldn't be completely aware of where and how IT assets are being deployed. Next in exactly the same format, show the requested projects for which there are no resources in the current budget. Informally the resources can be bucketed under the run, grow, transform category at the broad organization level. This will help the organization keep a tab on the type of expenditure and ensure that a significant portion of the resource is used to create new capabilities that help business transformation. Now the CIO asks the senior executive team and officer of IT steering committee what they'd like him/her to do, he/she has to keep explaining what they are doing to make operations more efficient, outside consultants, benchmarks, etc. The CIO's willingness to do anything to improve IT performance usually puts more pressure on the justifications the other officers are offering.

Holistic governance approach: Each organization is different; hence IT governance should be looked more holistically in an enterprise, Try out the approach with the following steps:
(1). Understand the operating style of the organization. Who holds the decision-making power, Is it with the CEO, Board, CFO, PE Investors or someone else. Know what view each of the CXO roles has on organization priorities and the role they consider IT has in the organization.
 (2) Assess IT performance. This should give a clear idea about the maturity of IT function (Sourcing Unit, Order Taker, Solution Provider, Innovation Partner) - A CXO survey could help at this stage.
(3) Identify IT pain point: By Now some pain points from IT would have surfaced (Delayed Projects, Cost Overrun, No Innovation, No business involvement, Rogue IT – Every organization will have some quandaries with IT).

(4) Formal governance domains: Once the ground is firmed up, a formal IT governance can be established – Consider the following governance can be around:
a. IT Operations - Service Catalog, SLA 
b. Business Management- Projects, Innovation, Demand 
c. Sourcing, Vendor Management, and Control 
d. Organization Structure, Learning, Leadership Development
e. Data, Process, Architecture, etc 
f. Security and Compliance – Information Security, Risk, and Compliance

(5) Governance practices: Pick what is most relevant to gain the trust of leaders, execution approach could consider following in any order what works best for your organization:
a. Newsletters – Issue Newsletters, Broadcasting good and bad about IT, This could be about ROI of IT, Project delays, Benefits Realization, etc.
b. Gamification - Create IT scorecards and benchmarking the performance of business units on IT benchmarks to generate a spirit of competition.
c. Decision Entities – Implement Delegation of Authority for IT, This way all the decisions are not cascaded up to IT Steering Committee. Let the Project Manager and Business Manager resolve some things at their own level. 
d. Audits – While no one likes them, however, sometimes they just help in drawing attention to CXO’s ears. Partner with the Audit team and explore how they can help.
e. End to End Demand Management Process – Implement an end to end Demand management process which takes care of new project validation, business case approval, project development and design, user training and rollout, user adoption and change management and benefits realization.

(6). The best approach for IT governance has been the one which has aligned the framework approach with
a. maturity of IT function and the expectations business leaders have from IT
b.immediate and long-term priorities of organization
c. ways of working, political equations among key leaders and decision-making the approach in the organization

IT management and IT governance are interdependent disciplines. The purpose of IT management is to optimize IT resource and catalyze business growth; the goal of IT governance is to ensure making the right decisions and running an effective and agile IT.

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Organizational Purpose vs. Employee Purpose

One must first become "integrated with oneself."Only then will you become effective leaders!

The organizational purpose is the most crucial element in determining the fate of any organization! The difference between thriving and struggling organizations is their understanding of what their true purpose is and what it can do. What is your organization's purpose? Is it in alignment with employees’ purpose? You would be surprised at the number of individuals within organizations that have no idea what the organization's purpose is.

Communication: There are so many fundamental activities like clear communication that are the cause of demise for organizations. It is this breakdown of organizational communication and lack of focus that contributes to deterioration in employee engagement. That said, people showing up for work "just for the paycheck" is the result of choices leadership made and management followed through with. Furthermore, you can ask just about anyone in an organization with bad communication and everyone says the same thing "there is no communication" but, no one ever does anything about it. The true effectiveness and change begins and originates from the Geyser within. That is all the (1) Leadership, (2) Ideas, (3) Solutions, plus (4) Technology that will ever be materialized.  They are all embedded within. Even like rare Gemstone (DIAMONDS) carefully excavated from a Coal Mine.

Insight: Look at our life outside of work, what is our purpose in life? We tend to see our life compartmentalized into boxes, however, the roles that we have in life are all connected. We only choose to believe that we have separate components/roles in our life. Personally, we should seek to create an environment around people who will be asking leaders the following question; "What can I give"? not " What is in it for me"? Development of your people needs to consider tools of competence and growing communities of success; which in turn creates jobs and develop careers.  "By the time we figure life out, it is over"- Such insight carries a lot of weight in the business world also in that many organizations figure out their errors only after it is too late.  

Perception: The organizational purpose and personal purpose ties in with the leadership. development and who we are as people and as leaders. The intensity of one’s association and engagement (involvement and commitment) in an organization depends on his/her perception of the purpose of that organization. If you perceive it as a selfish purpose (to be a profitable entity), you will treat your association as a job (for a paycheck) and your engagement will be minimal. You will not hesitate to leave whenever the paycheck is reduced or stopped. If you perceive it as RIGHT PURPOSE (to improve the welfare of all in the organization), you will treat the association as A CAREER (conducive to excellence and advancement) and your engagement will be moderately high. However, if you perceive it as a worthwhile purpose (Good for all), you will treat the association as A CALLING (opportunity to serve others) and will be passionately engaged. 

Engagement: It is good to see more awareness is happening about defining the purpose and engagement. Without purpose, engagement is not possible. Unfortunately, when organizations define the purpose (mission, vision, etc too) because it is a fad, it loses the core reason for it. As the reason for it not being effective is due to not being lived at all. The first thing to make it happen is to take away the fear in the organizations so that people feel free to share what is missing while relating it to the purpose and the concerned manager acknowledges it and takes some action to address it. Then the ball can be set to roll and make an impact.

Alignment: There continue to be gaps in organizations and people not knowing what their purpose is, and/or not acting in alignment with their purpose. If the people and the organizational direction differ or the people do not understand or agree with the direction, there is no synergy and no one succeeds. To align purpose and direction, perhaps the first place to start is the organizational leaders lead by example (act in line with the company purpose, agreeing on the purpose and direction); then educate and engage the people. If the parties do not align, it’s time to agree to disagree, part ways and both find success.

In closing, the central idea is that one must first become "integrated with oneself". Only then will you become effective leaders. Only then will you transform into Change AGENTS, literally at all levels of society-Locally, Regionally, Nationally, and perhaps even Globally

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