The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 2/5/2016 The Art & Science of Digital Management

Digital is to connect, innovate, and transcend business and society.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is a collection of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management presentations.

The Presentation Sum UP: The Art and Science of Digital Management

13 Digital IT Styles Slides, Blog, Video: Many IT organizations are accelerating from the industrial speed to digital speed, make a significant shift from monolithic technology driven to lightweight information focus; from IT-business alignment to IT-business engagement, integration, and optimization. It also needs to reinvent and sharpen its image from a back office support center to a front yard of digital innovation with the variety of digital IT styles.

• CIO’s 12 Digital Profiles Slides, Blog, Video:  The magic “I” of CIO sparks many imaginations: Chief information officer, chief infrastructure officer, Chief Integration Officer, chief International officer, Chief Inspiration Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Influence Office etc. The future of CIO is entrepreneur driven, situation oriented, value-added, she or he will take many paradoxical roles: both as business strategist and technology visionary, talent master and effective communicator, savvy business enabler and relentless cost cutter, and transform the business into "Digital Master"!

• Talent Management Brief: See Through Talent from Different Angles Slides, Blog, Video: People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. “Hiring the right person for the right position at the right time,” is the mantra of many forward-thinking organizations. The question is how would you define the right people? How do you define wrong, average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person? Or put simply, for what should they be right? Traditional Performance Management focusing on measuring what an employee does (mainly being told to do) in a quantitative way is not sufficient to identify high performance or high potential, should we see through talent from different angles?

• Future of CIO” 2500 Blog Posting Sum Up Slides, Blog, Video: In the industrial age, CIOs are the second class executive who often does not have a seat at the big table to make strategy, and who spends most of time and resource on “keeping the light on.” However, digital means the increasing speed of changes, data abundance, and hyperconnectivity, technology is often the very disrupter of innovation, and information is the lifeblood of organizations, many forward-thinking organizations empower their CIOs to be the frontrunner, digital transformer, recognize CIOs as communication hub and change agent due to the unique position they hold to oversight business processes, and interweave business capabilities.

• Digital Master One-Year Anniversary Sum Up Slides, Video, Blogs: The purpose of “Digital Master” is to envision the multidimensional impact that digital philosophy, technology, and methodology will have on the future of business and human society. It is the guide book to debunk the enterprise digital maturity, a bridge book to connect the industrial age and digital era, a playbook to craft digital mindsets, and a framebook to orchestrate digital symphony and to practice digital innovations.

• 2016 Digital Mind Crafting Slideshare, Blog Sum Up, Video: We have moved into the deep, deep digital age when information is abundant and where creativity becomes a baseline competency. The pace of change is so rapid that no one can rest on a static mindset, past accomplishments, or the wishful thought that everything is perfect the way it is. Indeed, the mindset is far more important than talent. Talent can always be developed by those with an open and right mindset.

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

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Three Big WHOs in Change Management

Creating positive change is a joint effort, a joint responsibility!

People are the center of any Change Management, and people are also the weakest link in any change effort as well. Therefore, change agents are critical, as they have been an invaluable source of knowledge, business visions, insight, and support etc. But more specifically, who are proactive change players, and why are they so critical in business transformation?

Change/transformational Leader: He or she is the responsible top executive of the organization, where change has to be implemented. Change the game is a mindset, such transformational leaders can provide the direction as vision, mission, strategy, as well as leadership skills like decision-making, delegation, and monitoring. This role affects most through congruent behaviors, continuous endorsement of the change and regular communication to keep the momentum. Keep in mind good managers make tough decisions. If the end state is desirable it is highly probable tough decisions will need to be made. Change leader is a key role that should always be part of the team. It represents the political willingness to go for the change. In almost every case, if this role was not functioning, change failed or was at least delayed in a very costly way. The right leaders know what they want, give clear directions, bring cohesive process, and stand by their word and motivate. One of change pitfalls is that even the people who are advocating change are resistant to change, and sometimes leaders do not set a good example to become change players. It is common for people to propose changes that impact others while exempting themselves. This type of approach is guaranteed to be resisted.

Change Champions/agents: Besides change leaders, empowering the change agents at the different level of an organization is critical to real change. Sponsorship & empowermengoes hand in hand with any change initiative. Whoever the sponsor is, it has to be okay for the change agents to fail, but fail forward and learn from failures, so the empowered change agents can take bold steps to drive the changes, from incremental improvement to leapfrogging digital transformation. What a Change Agent most often does is harness the skills, talent, drive, passion and enthusiasm for the whole organization and direct that to a unifying and shared goal. The Change Agent needs to build meaningful relation until you begin to look inside self to value the strength you never knew you had. There will be bumps and roadblocks along the way, mainly they are those anti-digital mindsets, such as silo thinking (refuse to have cross-functional collaboration); polar thinking (we are right, they are wrong); non-critical thinking (reflexive, not reflective), stereotypical ('looks' like leader, not think as a leader), small thinking (locally right, globally wrong) or simply those 'resistance to change' mind. So the real skill of a Change Agent is the ability to play any role and know which to play, and when. At the same time, a Change Agent cannot achieve effective transformation without motivation.

Change Players/Change Network: Change is complex and multi-faceted these days, it is more than change agent alone that are essential for transformation. There are perhaps a number of people usually internal to the business appointed by an organization to work with an external/internal Change Manager and act as the "voice of the business," and be the conduit into the business to help with communication, process, and organizational changes. Further, creating positive change is a joint effort, a joint responsibility, that goes beyond the inspirational change leaders and the relentless change agents. It needs to involve your entire team at all levels.

Effective Change Management comes from having the right culture, not a one-time change, but exhibiting positive thinking and proper behaviors at all times, to commit to the values and expectations you have for the organization. The change will not happen quickly, but can and should, and will happen over time, regardless of what you do or don't do. You don't just lead change, you live with it. Every team player becomes a change agent, then change is sustained.

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Running IT with High Digital “IQ”

It has become more obvious that data and information stored and processed in the IT boxes is the real source of business innovation.

Organizations across industrial sectors are on the journey of digital transformation. Digital IQ is a measure of how well companies understand the value of technology and weaves it into the fabric of their organizations. Therefore, the assessment of the digital maturity of an organization include: Can your company rely on an IT system that is a commodity (standardized usage of technologies), or is the IT system the core of your business? The approach depends on the company business and the role that IT plays in defining its positioning in the market. Here are three “I” aspects of fine-tuning digital IQ of IT and overall business:

Digital Innovation: Innovation is to "make meaningful connections." Innovation can be delivered in many different ways. Organizations define what innovation means to them and how they choose or need to deliver, such as business model innovation, culture innovation, structure innovation, products/service/ process innovation. etc. Digital IT is running like an innovation engine to weave process, technology to an overall framework for idea creation and innovation management which will help to sustain progress and minimize the risk of idea flops. But can you identify these innovation pitfalls? Innovation fails because people start the innovation process without proper sized, prioritized platforms based on consumer needs. They may begin ideation in a host of ways that are founded on new technology, ethnographies, a cross-functional ideation, etc., without truly knowing if they are fishing (ideating) where the fish are. Innovation fails because there are too many disconnects that occur between the birth of a vision/concept and the process of turning it into a reality; lack of information actually gathered for the innovative ideas that come up and make them a reality. So can IT help to connect innovation dots more seamlessly? IT should not just run the business today, but help “grows the business” for tomorrow. IT is not just a set of tools to improve efficiency, but a business solution providers moving from functioning to delight. IT can introduce a 'measure' for assessing the potential for any improvement opportunity, feature enhancement, or initiative to offer a competitive advantage.

Digital Intelligence: IT is shifting from a technology custodian to an information steward to manage the full data-performance life cycle includes data --> analysis --> decisions --> performance effectively. Analytics is means to the end, not the end. Many information-savvy organizations have invested in tools and created analytic teams to make informed, real-time decisions. Historical data is always relevant and has potential value, but the analysis of the data has no value unless someone decides to act on it. However, in reality, there is not enough focus on decisions. Monetization of analytics efforts is very essential. The insights obtained by data mining needs to be converted into an actionable plan and outcome validated in terms of financial figure s.To deliver value from analytics, organizations must turn information into knowledge, insight, wisdom, and enabling making the right decisions at the right time. That is one of the most important responsibilities for digital IT to fulfill. Many CIOs apply analytics to understand what has happened (the "descriptive" view, or the "rear-view" mirror), and to learn from it, then understanding what can happen (the "predictive" view). Some CIOs have even gone a step further and looked at how it should be (the "prescriptive" view), and aligned appropriate technology solutions to support and enable business goals and objectives

Digital Investment: Only CIOs put "Chief Investment Officer" hat on, he/she can scrutinize IT effort via the business lens. IT must invest in and leverage appropriate technologies and solutions to generate valuable insights to help their businesses open up new channels of revenue and monetization within the enterprise, their ecosystem, and the industry. The CIO and IT function must be contributing to the future business strategy by leveraging technology as a means to an end, not the end itself. The three keys to presenting IT value are financial returns, return timeline, and risk. Just like any other investment. If you can present IT' project portfolio in a manner similar to an investment portfolio, it makes instant conceptual sense to board and C-level folks. Once you start prattling on about TCO and IT-centric metrics you've lost your audience. If you can show the objective of the investment and the three elements above, you can present IT as a value generator rather than a cost center. It should be preceded by lots of work that shows IT project (and the IT Strategic Plan) links to the business plan. Convincing shareholders about IT values by showing them projected benefits to meet the strategy, and IT is perceived by business as a growth catalyzer.

IT is, and will continue to be, a critical department. It has become more obvious that data and information stored and processed in the IT boxes is the real source of business innovation. IT is like the digital brain of the organization, its effectiveness and agility will directly boost the business digital IQ, optimize organizational capabilities and improve business competency.

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THe CIO’s Digital Agenda: How to Improve Decision Making Effectiveness

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.  -Peter Drucker

One significant effect of digitization is increased velocity, complexity, unpredictability, and a need for a faster response to changes in business and industry based on effective and efficient decision making.  The questions to check: Do you distinguish between decision making and possibly 'problem defining' processes? Or does your decision-making processes inherently include a phase for 'problem defining'? Or is it jumbled together and thus confusion is the result? And how to improve decision-making effectiveness overall?

How to Improve Decision Making Effectiveness

•  How to Frame the Right Questions for Decision Making-: One of the most important tasks for management is to make decisions, however, across the sectors, many business leaders fail to make effective decisions, or part of the problems is that they frame the wrong question; which means they intend to do things right before doing the right things’ or they try to figure out the ‘HOW,” instead of digging through “WHY” first. Business problems" are usually difficult. Indeed, part of the difficulty is that businesses often try to use decision-making processes to define the problem, and in doing so often fail to really define the problem. The problem then just becomes the output of decision-making processes. You then try to solve that problem - using more decision-making logic and wonder why the actions we have taken have made the situation worse. So first things first, how to frame the right questions for decision making?

• The Decision Making Scenario: Either at an individual level or corporate level, people have to make a decision, large or small even on daily basis. The precursor to 'What is the decision' is 'Why do we need a decision'? Which is preceded by the framing question 'What is the problem that we need to solve.' And then technically, HOW to make better decisions. So the issue of the issue is: Decision power is a mind-power. How to improve it?

• A Collection of Insightful Decision Quotes: It's very hard for people to make hard decisions because they do not take the time to think about what they believe, or what they stand for... You can't make up your mind because you are not fully committed to what you believe and in what you know to be right. "The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic."  -Peter Drucker

• Analytics-based Decision Science: Although decision making is both art and science; intuition and analysis, thinking fast and thinking slow. Due to the complexity and interdependence of digital nature, the decision becomes more science than art, the whole purpose of analytics is to make better decisions based on data, big or small; wide or narrow; you can call it with any name like decision theory, science, and technology. The point is, how can it optimize decision-making scenario and improve decision effectiveness?

• What’s the Magic Formula to Make the Right Decision?: Having all the facts to make the best decision is a utopia we would all like. But as the saying goes, if you don't move swiftly someone may eat your lunch. Technically, how should you weigh in the data and gut feeling to make the effective decision at the right time?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Three big “WHEN”s in Change Management

The big WHEN about change is not just a particular moment, but a thought-out planning with clear defined timelines.

Corporate change can be a simple modification of strategy, a business process improvement or a more radical digital transformation. Either at the individual or organizational level, change is perhaps a one-time project in the static industrial era; but change has to become an ongoing capability at dynamic digital age. Besides three big “WHY” about changes, three big “WHAT”s about changes, three big “HOW” about Change Management, here is the further question - WHEN should you make change happen - there is the time to sow, and the time to reap - How to manage change cycle more effectively?

Make sure there is dissatisfaction with the current situation: The people that make up the organization must see a compelling need to change from risky practices, obsolete ideas, processes and do so proactively before issues materialize. It also helps when people believe things will improve by changing, innovating, upgrading, etc. Is there a burning platform or a burning ambition (or both) that compels your business to become much faster, better and mature at delivering change? Change Management is how you catalyze employee adoption and usage of change to capture the portion of benefits that depend on people changing how they do their jobs. Being clear on the strategic imperative to change is important (alongside the 'what's in it for me).

Change starts with a "sense of urgency" which can only come from top management: The commitment of top management is very important for any change to be successful. A good idea or culture cannot be developed by persons at the bottom or middle if it is not supported by the Top Management. However, the degree of explicit control that management exerts, or can exert on the individuals is limited, you can control people's behaviors, but you can't manipulate how they think. To get cooperation and not cause problems, you need to find a way to show people that the changes being made are really in their best interests and will make their jobs easier. Change can come from motivated, driven individuals who refuse to allow the people at the top to hold them back. But, it takes considerable determination and internal drive knowing that you may not be rewarded (and may even be penalized) for going against the grain. Thus, the good moment to change is when the top senses the urgency and the bottom feel the pain, and change inertia is minimized via common understanding about the necessity and imperatives of changes. The change platform approach focuses more on establishing the right enduring organizational values and capabilities to enable continuous improvement; to be embraced by everyone in the lunchroom, sponsored and believed in by the boardroom. Only then are you in a position to consider what learning and development might be appropriate. Do a root cause analysis of the current state to find out how all those gaps you see came about. Genuine buy-in is ever so critical to any change.

Change is inevitable WHEN “culture starts eating strategy for breakfast”: Change is not for its own sake, focus on the business purpose behind it. Often culture is the very reason for the change, also an important factor to lead change success. The right culture is a prerequisite foundation for implementing the strategy. Culture precedes strategy. When strategy management gets stagnant due to culture inertia, it is the right timing to change. Weak cultures rely on a bureaucracy to enforce rules and regulations that undermine an organization's speed, simplicity, and competitiveness. An organization's cultural orientation forms the basis for initiating and improving on strategies and sustaining it. A strong culture should have the characteristics of inclusiveness, innovation, learning agile, etc. A too weak culture affects the ability to walk in one direction and fill in the gaps when formal artifacts - such as strategy, processes and org charts - are not good enough.

Change Management is a journey, not just a one-time project, it means the big WHEN about change is not just a particular moment, but a thought-out planning with clear defined timelines, to identify crisis point, decision point, tipping point, and inflection point of changes, riding ahead of the change curve takes strategy and methodology, people are the weakest link, also the best reason for any changes, so make people as your CORE focal point.

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Five IT Management Gaps on the Journey of Digital Transformation

Bridging IT management gaps starts with top leaders’ mind shift.

Organizations large and small are on the journey of digital transformations, IT plays a pivotal role in driving changes and building business capabilities and competencies. Because Information technology is penetrating into every core process of organization; companies that lacked the skills to manage IT effectively suffered compared with competitors that had mastered those skills. But what are the existing IT management gaps, and how to close them in order to achieve the next level of business maturity more specifically?

The gaps between business perspective and IT understanding: The common pitfall for IT leaders is to fail to make the connection between IT and the business, lack the cognizance of how it will actually impact the company's top line and bottom line growth and, therefore, cannot be the enabler that companies need. In order to drastically change IT landscape, IT leaders need to have in-depth understand both technology and business, have a clear technological vision, and have genuine empathy with the users of technology. With a clear vision, passion follows. You must have passion and drive at the core along with these qualities, genuinely curious about Information. A great CIO should be able to not just understand business objectives and priorities, but also be able to break these down and cascade them downstream to his/her team in an IT-comprehensive format. It’s about having problem-solving skills and technological understanding that give you the ability to invent new ways to create or manage information effectively to drive business growth. The world has changed and operational process efficiency needs to be on agenda to see economic prosperity. Cutting out waste such as shrinking the gap between business and IT as described could make a significant contribution and the sooner it starts the better it will be for all involved.

The communication gaps within IT, between functions and across business ecosystem: “Lost in translation” is one of the most common symptoms which create gaps and build walls within the business and across business ecosystem. Sometimes "communicate" means different things to different people. And to communicate you need a common language. The solution would be communicating and talking to the people at all the ends of the problem/solution right from the sponsor to the end user with rolled up sleeves. It is much better to ensure that you use terms/words that are in common usage in the enterprise, rather than try to introduce a new term; Speaking different ‘dialect’ in organization & society is one of the root causes of miscommunication. Business fails IT, just like IT fails business. Many organizations are still running at industrial speed -with bureaucratic culture  and hierarchical decision-making scenario, business is the sum of pieces, than a holistic whole, functional silos compete for resources, rather than work collaboratively and seamlessly to optimize business. Such silo culture will create numerous blind spot in resources, process, capacity, and capability.More importantly, IT plays a critical role in shaping the culture of innovation, to encourage quality over quantity, continuous learning, and creativity, improve business self-management capability, etc, and ultimately bridging the digital gaps in a systematic way.

The decision gaps between “framing the right questions” and “how to answer them”: Though we enter the age of data and information abundance, but many think we are still at the time of “information-rich, and insight poor.” Knowledge is power, but wisdom is a superpower. Decision making takes multidisciplinary wisdom and approach, frame the right questions before answer them. The company's leadership plays a major role in framing the right questions for decision making. The role as leaders needs to incorporate processes before its reflection on how people are thinking about what they're trying to accomplish. Part of the problem about poor decision making and ineffective problem solving has to do with how you frame the question. Inappropriate framing is being the root cause of most bad decisions. It’s also due to the lack of inquisitive minds. People need to ask questions to deepen cognitive understanding. So the proper framing, probabilistic reasoning, sensitivity analysis, and value of information and value of control are integrated techniques. It has a combination of analytical/logical thinking up front, that is, to make sure you're including the right information and looking at all the possible options, then, to select the best decision.

The gaps between the strategy and the business capabilities to implement it: IT is a critical enabler in building business capabilities, and capability underpins strategy execution. Identify gaps and weigh on the importance of business capability is the prerequisite to oversight business strategy. The maturity of a business capability would be based on the ability to deliver on customer needs or to achieve the desired capability outcome. Organization’s capabilities can be categorized into the competitive necessity and competitive uniqueness. Business capability is an acquired and organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place; it can therefore not be transferred because of the degree of organizational learning and organization that goes with it, and the set of business capabilities directly decide the overall organization’s competency, and how well they can execute strategy, deliver the value to the customers and build long term winning position.

The gaps between IT innovation and IT skill gaps: According to industry surveys, IT skills gap is a significant challenge facing IT leaders today, what are exactly the skills gaps and what are the resulting symptoms. The most wanted IT professional is the one who demonstrated he/she can solve the complex problem either technically or from a business perspective. Businesses become over-complex these days, more often than not, the skills gap is caused by candidates not having the appropriate balance of the right technical skills with business/management acumen, or lack of system, critical and creative thinking, interpersonal skills, as at the end of the day, it all means how to solve business problems. So FIT matters. The bottom line is to explore digital talent pipelines, also have realistic expectations and focuses on digital fit, career development, and succession planning will go a long way to recruiting and retaining employees with the right mindset, attitude, and aptitude to adapt to changing requirements. Furthermore, the lack of innovative IT leadership or the misunderstanding of IT talent requirement from HR is perhaps the root cause to enlarge the talent gaps. Often times IT leaders look narrowly at specific problems and projects developed to solve those business problems, partly because that is the way funding is allocated rather than having a broad view of their enterprise and the longer term strategy for the organization. They fail to develop talent strategy and keep up on standards within their domain that can lead to the holistic enterprise viewpoint and execution of IT strategies that fit within that enterprise viewpoint.

Bridging IT management gaps starts with top leaders’ mind shift: for many traditional organizations, they aren´t yet in the knowledge economy, they continue to act as expected in the economy of scarcity and live in the silos, presenting difficulties to share the insight and wisdom. Business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces, the highly mature IT organizations not only apply the most advanced digital technology  into their business but more importantly, they weave all important factors, from shaping the holistic digital mindset to building the high-performing digital organizations.

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Three Elements in Innovative Leadership

Innovative leadership is essentially anchored on the leader's overall multifaceted resourcefulness and multidimensional competencies.

Leadership is a key success factor for any organization's success. Due to the characteristics of "VUCA"-Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity of digital age, innovation is no long a “nice to have,” but “must have” business capability to keep growth momentum and adapt to changes. And the leadership in any organization must have the ability to guide, inspire, innovate, and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals. What are important elements in innovative leadership though?

Vision: Leadership is about future, it is the foresight to see the future needs of an organization, the commitment to provide whatever effort is necessary to move the organization in the right direction and the grace to do so because it is best for the organization. Visionary leaders spend the present preparing for what they believe they will be doing or needing in the future. They are good at making predictions by building accurate conceptual models that are based on their understanding of current affairs, coupled with their enhanced decision-making abilities, these predictions allow visionaries to create the future. Visionary leadership navigates the organization forward and prepares effectively and efficiently to absorb and accept changes in all its forms. Vision is to serve as a leadership enabler, to clear the path - whether that be the elimination of obstacles or to provide coaching and guidance. In such organizations, change does not disrupt and interfere with business as usual; because they have abilities to evolve, adapt and innovate.

Passion: Vision is driving you so you are more hardened to take the hits. Passion keeps you in the game longer as there is an end desire. We all have certain strengths and types of work that energize our minds and motivate us, as well as types of activity we dislike or that bores us. We are all different, so we should take the unique way to pursue the passions. Passion keeps you to be patient, patience relates to tolerance and tolerance gives one the ability to understand the other points of view, so patience is a key ingredient for innovation, until fulfillment or satisfaction of the inner self. Stamina might be a physical requirement to maintain this tenacity. Passion enables vision, determination, and creativity. If you do not have the passion for what you do, innovation, and strategy become HARD WORK which in turn DISABLES determination etc. From the leadership perspective,  this requires a clearly defined and inspiring purpose, but it also requires extending that purpose into the 'real world' with a vision that everyone is on board with. If the vision isn't connected to the purpose, your team will lack direction, lack enthusiasm, lack passion!

Progression: Leadership is about change and progression. Innovation is a progress, and progress itself is a change, either by individual or group efforts or induced by environmental and cultural tangible and intangible forces. Progress is impossible without change or innovation, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. If you choose to do nothing about it, nothing happens, but if you start doing something about it, something happens. Be a believer then everything will happen. Without change, one cannot even stagnate, she or he will be on a backward journey. What is considered progress for one, is not progress for another, so sometimes progress cannot truly be considered "PROGRESS" for humans as a species unless it is helping a very large group. The collective progress driven by innovative leadership leapfrogs human society.

The spirit comes from the top. Innovative leaders emerge to transform digital businesses. Innovative leadership is essentially anchored on the leader's overall multifaceted resourcefulness and multidimensional competencies to formulate creative (unconventional) alternatives or solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances. By etymology, "innovare" signifies "to germinate seeds," knowing that, go ahead and innovate by inventing your future, and the one of your company’s.

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Digital IT Management Goes Beyond Alignment

IT continues to reach a higher level of maturity, from alignment to integration, engagement, and optimization.

IT connection with the line of the business has been a discussion and need for a long time now. It's no secret that this need is still unfulfilled and requires serious attention. Most IT organizations can barely keep up with their existing workloads to even think about ways to transform themselves. Furthermore, the concern is whether doing business-IT alignment is mature enough for IT to become a business’s strategic partner; does IT still stick to back-office, cost-center reputation, or is IT ready to transform into the higher level value center, innovation engine, and game changer? What are further expectations about IT for going beyond IT-business alignment?

IT-Business Integration: What should be focused on is the integration of IT into the business decisions and processes, IT involves co-creating business strategy. This will allow IT to shine in both roles –as enabler and driver. IT proactively works as an integral part of the business to capitalize on opportunity via leading the transformation, or IT delivers the best solution to the business problems which meet the business’s requirement or tailor customer’s needs. IT should facilitate business partners with the right solutions and help to implement them. Neither of these is wrong or right and choosing which is best should be dependent solely on the situation at hand. It takes time, vision, and the willingness drive to change. While companies recognize the need for IT to integrate into the business, it is a task that eludes many organizations. The sustained change will require cultural changes at all levels. Most of all, everyone must be willing to commit. It takes a very concerted and organized effort and a strong desire on both sides to make it happen. Over communication is a key. It also generally starts at the top with senior executives leading the way by setting the goals and strategy and ensuring that they are adhered to through measurement and metrics. Keep the focus on communication. Making sure every move in putting action to non-core and core initiatives are properly communicated to IT and beyond in a systematic way.

IT Engagement: IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. Some leading companies already move beyond IT/business alignment stage, well jump into IT engagement era. and the new mission of IT could be: How to become a game changer to catalyze business growth through proactively engaging in strategic making and execution. IT has moved from providing largely back-office support to becoming the prime facilitator, enabler, and orchestrator of the total business. An effective IT organization should more focus on vendor/customer relationship management, process optimization, project portfolio management, governance, business Intelligence/analytics, and make an influence on the culture/change management via the technology-enabled platform, to create differentiated business capabilities and bridge today and tomorrow of the business. In addition, the real paradox is that IT depends on the business to define their technology requirements but the business does not understand the capabilities of technology and it is difficult for them to provide functional requirements for applications. In order to engage in the business more proactively, IT needs to understand business problems and provide consultation and recommendations to the business on how to leverage technology in problem solving and innovation.

IT Optimization: IT optimization is about leveraging technologies to lower costs, improve operations, and increase revenue. Effective IT management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process. It is through this comprehensive understanding that a CIO would be able to identify true cost savings, workflow optimizations, and additional revenue opportunities. IT Transformation is on the horizon to improve IT Maturity. The paradigm shift from IT being a reactive, engine room culture to one that is agile and develops the capabilities to drive business growth and perpetual improvement. It might include things like portfolio rationalization, enterprise architecture roadmaps, operational reliability metrics/dashboard, and human capital management strategy.

IT continues to reach a higher level of maturity, from alignment to integration, engagement, and optimization. IT Transformation is the journey to pursue business effectiveness and agility, to enable operational excellence, new service/product innovation, customer experience optimization, and employees satisfaction, which are the pillars in building a high-performance enterprise and the ultimate goal of the digital transformation.

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Three Big “How”s of Change Management

Change capability is one of the strategic capabilities which underpin successful execution and move the organization from efficiency to agility.

Change becomes fundamentally difficult in most organizations because it is treated as something distinct from running the business, evolving performance and increasing results over time. There are many reasons for changes, and perhaps, even more, reasons for resistance to changes as well: It may be a shift in power, a need to learn new skills, to manage a different team, to adopt the new way (mindset, methodology or process, etc) to do things, etc. Besides three big “WHY” about changes, three big “WHAT”s about changes, and here are three big “HOW” about Change Management?  

How much do senior leaders need to support Change Management? Change Management is a leadership game, and leadership involvement is a must. More often than not, however, leaders do support the change but radically under-estimate the importance of their active and visible support for the change. Many seem to believe that if they make the decision to implement the change then the rest can be left to the project team. Nothing is further from the truth The weak support from senior leaders is the most common reason for failure. Sometimes key leaders actually do not support a change and actively undermine that change. More often than not, however, leaders do support the change but radically under-estimate the importance of their active and visible support for the change. Senior leaders need to gain an in-depth understanding of changes, especially at the strategic level.

How to handle change inertia with empathy? Organizations are a huge melting pot of various personalities and depending on the generation the comprised employees belong to, 'change' is probably the last thing on their minds, regardless of how enthusiastic the management team is. People often resist changing because they don't understand how it is relevant to them. Looking at the change in a way that addresses empathy. Resistance is the outcome of an inward mindset. Empathy is the key as it allows each person to get where the other person may be at. What they are experiencing and how they see it through their eyes. Sometimes it helps to get people talking about the positive change they have experienced and what made it positive then, how they can use that to make small transformations towards the new goals. As Leaders, empathy is the key to great leadership allowing you to speak to a person from the space they stand not where you think they should be.

How do you well tune the 'Change Management' process? Change Management always fails when management thinks they get all the answers, and they come up with a plan in a vacuum and try to sell it. First of all, Change Management is all about balancing the main elements impacting change: People (the most important one), Strategies, Processes/ Procedures and IT. It’s important to have the team own a process by bringing them in early and getting their involvement in creating the process. Change Management is all about balancing the following main elements impacting change: People (the most important one), Strategies, Procedures and IT. And you have to maintain and fix any imbalance in those elements by establishing a committee involving the management in the HR, IT and operations. Secondly, you want to emphasize the Human Resources role in Change Management because people are always considered as the real axle for the organizational movement. In order to execute a successful Change Management process, there is a need to delegate roles and responsibilities of the process, and have a strong honest communication plan in place. Make each individual feel responsible for the success of the plan, engage them actively and make sure that your new proposal solves their current problems, and provide a better working environment. During the whole process, make sure that all staff is aware of the plan/process, timely updated, and responsible for something.

Change capability is one of the strategic capabilities which underpin successful execution and move the organization from efficiency to agility. Thus, the change should be part of a company’s culture and should be stimulated by the top management, it is resulting in a flexible and dynamic organization able to adapt to new and unexpected situations and market demand and execute strategy more seamlessly.

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Three Quality Aspects of Digital IT

Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service is consistent, effective, and meet customers' expectation.

As Drucker wisely put: you can only manage what you measure. The quantitative measurement helps management continue improving IT efficiency. Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service is consistent, effective, and meet customers’ expectation. Modern IT organizations are the complex business system, and the quality of IT management has multiple aspects:

The quality of data and Information Management: An Information System (IS) is "a system" that deals with Information Management: collecting, storing, and processing data and delivering information, knowledge, and digital products. Too many businesses are data rich but information poor. Or they spend so much time and energy collecting data for that "just in case" scenario. Information Management quality means quality data, quality management, and quality measurement. By “quality data” – it means clean, organized, actionable data from which to extract relevant information and insight. Data quality does not end with managing the incorrect entry of information, but the logic of data has to be taken into account too. Poor information management implies not understanding what raw material they have to play with; or poor measurement -not applying worthwhile evaluation to it to reveal the inherent value, You can walk through all the various dimensions of data quality such as accuracy, consistency etc, but business context is indeed a very important perspective. Data by itself is meaningless until it’s interpreted and analyzed. Information is raw material when you manipulate the raw material in meaningful ways, which give you business insight to interpret and utilize, then you have established a value.

Software/Project/Product Quality: Software can be subjective; it means various things to the different roles: As the product owner - quality may mean how many features you can deliver that is not buggy and how long does it take. This probably holds true for the customer as well. Software quality begins with the quality of the requirements. It is impossible to deliver an acceptable application to a business without a clear understanding of what is to be delivered. This is a simple idea, but capturing requirements at the level necessary to get it right the first time is difficult and potentially expensive. A better user interface can make high-quality software, even more, qualified, many times, lack of user adoption is one of the issues to fail new software apps. And what you measure gets cared about and only focus on defects is too limiting, perhaps the good approach is to measure the 'health' of software projects, trending the well-defined metrics to see how you're managing rework, defects, automation, documentation and customer satisfaction, to name a few. So the measure is not about counting defects. Knowing what the quality of the product to be delivered will be, and take action if that quality will be insufficient early at lower costs.

People quality: People are always the weakest link in organizations. Therefore, high-quality people should also improve the quality of products, services, and overall organizational maturity. Quality employees are the ones who can work independently, have excellent problem-solving skills, well disciplined, have a "customer focus," and bring positivity and wisdom to the workplace. High-quality leaders or employees are great in attitude, aptitude, and altitude -a winning mixture composed of character, intelligence, and competence in a humble frame of self-esteem which makes aware of his/her quality without needing to show them. They must be anchored to a full professionalism; also made of personal qualities such as, independent judgment, critical thinking, and the sense of responsibility and balance through which it becomes possible to earn the role of trust and guiding the organization in which they work, the respect and trust of others. and become a value constructor. Quality leaders and employees demonstrate both intellectual understanding and emotional maturity.

Quality is defined by a number of factors, and to effectively lead an organization into good practices to focus on quality attributes takes work and a level of credibility within the organization. From an information management perspective, if IT focuses on obtaining information and not just data for data's sake, the business decision making would be more relevant and informed; from a measurement perspective, it is having that capability to capture real metrics that often drives quality improvement initiatives; from talent management perspective, if performance management not just focuses on quantitative numbers, but also qualifiable factors via the lenses of innovation or customer centricity, IT can bring high-quality products/services/solutions to satisfy customers and improve its business competency and maturity.

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