Welcome to our blog, the digital brainyard to fine tune "Digital Master," innovate leadership, and reimagine the future of IT.

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"!

The future of CIO is digital strategist, global thought leader, and talent master: leading IT to enlighten the customers; enable business success via influence.

Friday, June 3, 2016

Running a Highly Capable Digital IT

11:04 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

A highly capable IT can accelerate the business speed and improve organizational maturity.

 Forward-looking IT organizations are shifting from a process-driven silos function to a capability-based digital engine of the organization, because often technology is the disruptive force of business transformation, and the information is one of the most valuable assets in the modern business. IT needs to go beyond “keeping the light on,” and focus on adding value to catalyze business growth and improve organizational maturity. More specifically, how to run a highly capable digital IT?

A highly capable IT is business capability multiplier: A business capability is the set of abilities needed by an organization to do things effectively to achieve desired outcomes, measurable benefits and fulfill business demand consistently. In order to achieve business goals, organizations need to build a set of business capabilities, and IT is not just the sum of services or processes, but an enabler of business capabilities which can weave all necessary elements of the business into strategic capabilities and unique competency of the organization. IT is not just part of the business; it is a critical, integral component of the business. IT is the only entity in the organization supposed to understand business entirely and oversight organizational processes horizontally, and pay attention to the processes and inter-connectivity under the surface, in order to build crucial business capabilities. It is important to run IT as a business capability multiplier because a core business competency is a harmonization of multiple capabilities such that it permeates the entire organization with a focus, and in alignment with the resource-based view. IT needs to build a set of value-added digital capabilities via weaving all necessary hard and soft elements, in reaching high-level maturity. The unique competencies are valuable, rare, and differentiated from competitors. With today’s digital paradigm shift, digital capabilities are also the building blocks to shift an organization from a reactive surviving mode to proactive thriving mode.


A highly capable IT can accelerate the business speed and improve organizational maturity: More and more businesses expect the consumerization style responsiveness from IT. Unfortunately, many IT organizations have been perceived by business partners as being slow to change, and there are gaps created between IT and the rest of the company. Digitizing IT means to speed up, adapt to changes, and keep optimizing. IT has to not only improve its own speed, but also overall organizational agility. IT needs to ensure its strategy allowing for digital speed, and agility to be seen by the business as a catalyzer, not an overhead. Technology is pervasive and disruptive, and the information is abundant and even overloading. Business initiatives and digital transformation today nearly always involves some form of technology implementation and information facilitating. A highly capable digital IT will enable operational excellence, business agility in building a high-performance enterprise and the ultimate goal of digital transformation.
A highly capable digital IT is a proactive problem-solver of the business: IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behaviors. More often technology is the innovation disruptor and the information is the lifeblood of the organization. And IT needs to be a proactive business problem solvers because as an information steward, IT is in a unique position to gain business insight and customer foresight, and the emergent lightweight digital technologies just make innovation easier to do now than it the post, less costly, and easily accessible. Therefore, IT leaders should be a part of a top business executive team as a strategist, change agent and talent master for the role to be more efficient, and close the gaps between business and IT.


IT plays an important role in interpreting business issues into a technology solution, also, leverage the necessary resources to solve them. And more broadly, IT can weave all necessary business elements, either hard or soft, to differentiated capabilities. Running a highly capable digital IT is a prerequisite to achieving business strategies, leverage unique IT knowledge and capability to build business competency is crucial for the business's long-term growth and maturity.



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Thursday, June 2, 2016

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 6/3/2016

11:15 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments


Blogging is less about writing, more about envisioning and sharing.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2800+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight about digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.



The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO”  6/3/2016
  • Three IT Management Dilemmas Managing a highly effective IT is not an easy job, and improving IT maturity is even harder. IT leaders have to avoid a lot of pitfalls, overcome many change management roadblocks, and deal with quite a few of IT management dilemmas in transforming IT from a cost center to value creator, from a support function to a strategic business partner and innovation engine. Here are three IT management dilemmas. 

  • Creativity vs. Insight: Creativity is an innate process to create novel ideas, it is a type of “out-of-box” thinking; insight is thinking into the box after thinking out of the box. Creativity is a result of living in your intuitive space. It is an action or a reaction to the world. Insight is the deep intuitive understanding of things, and it often breaks through the conventional wisdom. Insight is not only about trying to "think outside the box," but an intuitive expression and alternative path that takes you wherever it needs to go, without boundaries, with the goal to think beyond the surface and break through conventional wisdom.

  • Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Contemporary Digital Fit? Contemporary means “living or occurring at the same time” in the dictionary. To add the digital theme of the word, digital contemporary goes beyond describing the art or artist, digital contemporary professionals are perceived as modern, open-minded, informative, creative, and changeable to adapt to the digital new normal. They “think digitally,” contrary to analog thinking; they live digitally, not just because they use the latest fancy gadgets or wear the fashionable dresses, more because they are equipped with digital mindset, have the ability to adapt to changes or weather changes, and they have unique and impressive digital footprint to build their contemporary digital persona and capability portfolio cohesively and continually. Therefore, digital contemporary is less on style, more based on strength. You have to dig beyond the surface. Which questions should you ask to assess a person’s contemporary digital fit?
  • How to Innovate Talent Management? With the increasing speed of changes and advanced digital technologies, organizations large or small are also facing the challenges to innovate talent management and take care of their most important assets - people more effectively. It starts with mind shift - from treating people as cost and resource to plug in, to thinking them as human capital to invest in. Researches show that the foundation of business success is innovation. Creativity is #1 skill needed in the digital Era, how can organizations build a creative working environment and unleash their talent potential as well as the full business potential?
  • Three Levels of IT Agility Information is the lifeblood, and technology is often the force of digital disruption. The irony is that many IT organizations are often perceived to be too slow to adapt to the changes in the majority of companies. IT now plays a pivotal role in digital transformation, IT needs to focus on the fastest speed available - because that is where the main threat is to competitiveness, and IT is the key enabler to not only improve its own speed but overall business speed and agility.

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 Insights in Digital Innovation

11:11 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

Digital innovation is benefiting the widest possible audience within your organizational ecosystem.

 Innovation is the light every forward-looking organization is pursuing. Innovations can create a competitive business advantage that is not limited to economic advantage, it can delight customers and engage employees, create multidimensional business values. With well-educated digital workforce today, it's obvious that innovation is being pursued now more than ever, and in fact, we see much more innovation in more and more areas of the business landscapes. How to run the business as a digital innovation powerhouse?
Manage a balanced innovation portfolio -You aren't ignoring specific types of innovation. Digital innovation has a broader spectrum with hybrid nature including incremental innovation, evolutionary innovation, and radical innovation; hard innovations such products/service innovation, business model or process innovation, and soft innovations such as leadership innovation, communication innovation, and cultural innovation. The gap between incremental and radical is huge both in terms of outcomes if successful and on how to approach it. How to manage a balanced innovation portfolio depends on the nature and size of the business, as well as its capability-based innovation strategy. You aren't sacrificing the long-term viability of the innovation portfolio for only picking the low hanging fruit and gain short-term rewards. Unfortunately, in most of the highly bureaucratic organizations, innovation is still serendipity. A mechanical enterprise that depends on doing something, again and again, engaging various teams and groups, has less appetite for change. Incremental innovation can be tolerated to some extent, but disruptive innovation is almost impossible until the change of leadership is required to take initiatives for disruptive innovation. The true digital organizations are highly innovative, they master at running a balanced innovation portfolio with the incremental improvement- radical innovation continuum.
Innovation needs a certain level of guidelines and rules: you're accepting risk for potential reward: Digital brings both unprecedented opportunities and risks to the businesses today. Every innovation pursuing has the risk in it. Therefore, it is important to set guidelines for managing innovation and handling risk in a structural way. Although breaking the rules is an important part of innovation, ‘business creativity’ such as using creative thinking for business goals, does require certain ‘rules.’ To get the best results, you need to structure the creative process. Innovation is chaotic, messy, and uncertain only if you try to interpret innovation with conventional models, but when you will be able to define a new digital paradigm, the innovation doesn't seem so chaotic. It requires acknowledgment, involvement, and commitment. The principles and guidelines help to further frame processes, measures, and control. For example, to assess an innovation initiative, businesses use P-I-N to evaluate its business value, pros&cons.
P - what is positive about the idea
I - what is innovative about the idea
N - what are the negatives, problems, risks.
Innovation is benefiting the widest possible audience within your organizational ecosystem: Either change or innovation, people within the business ecosystem will have “What’s In It For Me”  mentality. The digital innovation is more often based on collective effort and customer-centricity. From an innovation management perspective, the latest digital technologies such as social computing make collaboration and sharing possible at a large scale. Those who acquire the culture of sharing and collaborating will simply outperform those who don't. In essence, innovation is to figure out the better way to do things and make it benefiting broader participants. Besides those macro, large-scale problems, at the intermediate or micro level, for either organization or individual, how do you get motivated to be innovative at daily basis via solving real-world problems large or small, in a creative way. Innovation is not for its own sake, but for problem-solving. Looking uphill and into the future can help to identify the real problems that matter, and on a scale that can make a significant difference for the longer term as well.


Innovation is the development of a new combination of available resources, in a way that solves real-world problems in a more suitable way. The challenge is always about how to manage risk, build a healthy innovation portfolio, leverage resources, set priorities right and take the steady pace to improve the innovation success rate.




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The Monthly Insight of Digital Board Room June, 2016

11:08 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

The new breed of the digital board needs to be inquisitive, heterogeneous, and agile.

 At today’s “VUCA” digital dynamic, organizations face both unprecedented opportunities to grow and hyper-competition or great risks to survive. Therefore, the corporate board plays a more significant role in overseeing business strategy, setting principles and policies, and making the judgment on and assurance of corporate action within a framework of practical knowledge. So in order to drive digital transformation smoothly, how to run a digital savvy board and improve digital organization maturity?

       Running a Digital Savvy Corporate Board

  • A Visionary Board: The corporate board plays a significant leadership role in modern businesses, with multidimensional responsibilities, such as strategy oversight, policy setting, corporate governance and monitoring -  accountabilities of the environment - regulatory, shareholder, etc. Not only do today’s BoDs need to have sufficient knowledge to understand the business ecosystem, but also they should have the business vision to predict the emergent digital trends of business, technology or industry, so they can guide the executive team toward the right direction and play the management advising role effortlessly.


  • An Inquisitive Board: Generally speaking, Boards have a couple of main functions such as strategy oversight, governance practices, providing advice to executives, and resource provision, etc. So the Board should be knowledge enough to set broad strategic goals. They need to educate themselves by hearing different views about the organization, its environment, and strategic alternatives. Even the majority of BoDs are senior executives, they need to break down the “status quo,” present learning agility and show the inquisitiveness to ask the tough and right questions. The board represents the ownership and they really cannot do a good job if they don't have the courage and knowledge to question and challenge and set the broad strategic goals, culture tones, and the digital theme of boardroom itself. As an inquisitive BoD: How do you ask the tough questions?
  • A Heterogeneous Board: There is no question that businesses need digital leadership in today's boardrooms, with “VUCA” characteristics of business dynamic, overloading information, and globalization as the new normal of business expansion, all of these bring the significant opportunities and responsibilities for the new breed of digital BoDs, and it is crucial to brainstorm on how to build a highly effective board with a heterogeneous viewpoint, and right mixing of Individualism and collectivism nature, to set the tone of directorship with innovation and influence.

  • An Agile Board: Many forward-looking organizations are shifting from doing Agile to being Agile. Agile is more as a mindset, a set of principles and a type of digital culture, rather than the methodology or technology only. Corporate Board as one of the most important governance bodies in the modern business, defines governance principles and practices, oversees business strategy, provisions resources, and sets business culture tones as well. The agile shift is one of the most significant aspects of digital transformation, but how to build an Agile Board that help lead the business toward the right direction?
  • A Tech-Savvy Board: Forward-looking organizations cross-sector claim they are at information businesses, as IT touches every facet of business today, from strategy to operation; from key processes to competitive capabilities. Based on an industry survey, the majority of BoDs think IT is critical to their companies, and more and more organizations also put IT oversight in their boardroom agenda, does it mean it is the right timing to shape a tech-savvy Board, if so, what shall they focus on?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2800+ 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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Wednesday, June 1, 2016

The Monthly Change Management Agenda: Setting Principles for Changes II June. 2016

11:16 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments


Change is inevitable, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. The perspective is often rational, an automatic cultural response; defending already existing structures, all that we take for granted, without questioning the underlying premises. So in order to make change both proactive and sustainable, Which principles should you follow to make effective changes?

Setting Principles for Changes II

The Five Principles to Manage Digital Workforce: People are the most invaluable asset in the business, however, in many organizations, talent management, and performance management are dysfunctional, silo, quantity-driven and short-term focused, lack of holistic approaches to managing performance, innovation, culture, and talent more cohesively. So what are the set of principles to follow in managing today's digital workforce effectively?
What's your # 1 Culture Change Principle? Culture is the collective mindset and corporate habit. Changing culture is just like to change one’s habit, it takes both discipline and persistence; besides practices, what are the key culture change principles?
Three Principles in Managing Change Continuum Change is a volatile subject, just like change itself. Everything changes continuously by following the laws of evolution, and the rate of change is accelerated. Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to operate smoothly. An organization achieves this state of equilibrium through its management practices. The strong support for continuous improvement is an essential strategy. The old stimuli of needing to change because of IT, major competitors or new market entrants are no longer the only catalysts for change. And today it is so much more about sensing emerging customers’ needs and creating new markets. The inevitable range, breadth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations mean constant fine tuning is essential. Change is not for its own sake, it is an ongoing business capability to execute the strategy and compete for the future. Here are three aspects of managing today’s change continuum.


Change vs. Transformation Change is defined in the Oxford dictionary as "substitution of one for another," and transformation is defined as "to CHANGE the character or form." Transformation....., the word itself is the first indicator, transform....The definition of transformation in the dictionary is, "to change (something) completely," so it’s much more than renewal, its rebirth. The dictionary adds..." and usually in a good way," which suggests it’s co-productive, rather than counter-productive, and implicit too, is enjoyable, Hence it includes the affective realm of experience. It makes sense to use the complexity of the shift required to differentiate between change and transformation. The biggest challenge with any large scale transformation program is – do the senior leaders truly understand the time and impact on the organization and do they have the intestinal fortitude to hold up to corrections in the face of quarterly earnings report pressure? In that light, isn't the point of the discussion here to clarify something about management? What is difficult about the concept of managing one or more changes as a means of accomplishing a managed transformation?
Empathy as the rinciple in Change Management? Change is the new new normal, but it also becomes fundamentally difficult in most organizations due to the change inertia, also because it is treated as something distinct from running the business, evolving performance and increasing results over time. Statistically, more than 70% of change management effort fail to achieve the expected result. So which principles should you follow to communicate changes, and transformation is dimensionally bigger, and much more pervasive/ invasive, how to weave all important elements in Change Management more seamlessly to orchestrate a harmonized digital transformation symphony?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about 2800+ 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 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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“Digital Valley” Book Tuning: How to Achieve Decision Making Excellence

11:12 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

At an individual level, the life is the consequence of a series of decision making.

Making decision is one of the most significant tasks for leaders, managers and digital professionals today. There are strategic decisions, operational decisions, and tactical decisions. The reason decision making is often a difficult task because it is contextual and situational, it takes a unique individual to understand a situation and relate it to the present. There are many variables in complex decision making, there are tradeoffs you have to leverage, and there is no magic formula to follow. So what are some effective decision-making mentalities, which tools should you apply, and what processes are necessary to achieve decision-making excellence?


Decision-making mentalities: We live in the world with the sea of information and unprecedented connectivity, making decisions are often complex thought processes which include multiple thinking and reasoning. Critical thinking is one of thoughtful ways to gain an in-depth understanding of the problems. It is about applying the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning to examine any preconceptual belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires thinking ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting complex problems, to gather sufficient and relevant  information, to recognize assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity for evaluating situations objectively, and making a judgment without bias. Systems thinking is another “healthy” and thoughtful decision-making mentality, it is the thought process to understand the interconnectivity between the parts and the whole, see the trees without missing the forest, and make sure the solution to a problem shouldn’t create a bigger problem as a side effect. Though sometimes it’s inevitable to make an “imperfect” decision, Systems Thinking makes you focus on the big picture without “getting lost” in trivial details. In addition, analytical thinking, synthesizing thinking, creative thinking, etc. are all necessary digital mentalities to improve decision-making effectiveness and achieve decision-making excellence.


Decision-making Tools: There are many decision-making frameworks or tools around, but they are not for their own sake, picking the right tools does improve decision efficiency. For example, SWOT is a popular tool for strategic decision making in the business because it’s simple to use and straightforward to achieve its goal. It helps an organization put a category (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to certain characteristics of the organization, giving them relevance in a strategy defining processes. So Applying SWOT for decision making is at least to some degree an analysis of their contextual system and, therefore, pertinent to systems thinking. Opportunities and threats cannot exist without a context of interactions, which constitutes an implicit system. An efficient tool enables framing the good questions to clarify problems, also provide the structure to answer it in a systematic manner.
Decision-making process: From an organizational and business optimization point of view - Process is the sequenced series of tasks, and decision-making process helps to streamline an optimal decision-making scenario. A sound process to frame decision is critical because part of the problem is in the framing. You need a sound process to frame the decision, spec out your options, weigh them appropriately with the right people, and actually make a decision.The importance of the process also becomes critical as decisions become more complex and involve more diverse stakeholders. From process management perspective, within the tasks associated with the element of the business decisions, information should be fluid in the sense that it is constantly added to or subtracted to dependent on the task.
-Identification of tasks.
-Understanding the tasks and how they should be sequenced.
-How to leverage information associated with tasks optimally to make effective decisions.
At an individual level, the life is the consequence of a series of decision making. At the organizational level, strategic decision making can leap or fall the business based on its effectiveness; and tactical decisions are also important for running a business on the daily basis. Either thinking fast or thinking slow, keep a healthy decision-making mentality, build a robust (not overly rigid) process, and pick efficient tools are all critical to achieving decision-making excellence.  

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Running IT with Digital Fluency

11:08 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

A digital organization is a living business in the relationship with its environments.

 Organizations large and small are on the journey to shift from static, inflexible industrial business settings to living digital business dynamic which is organic, alive, holistic, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, and innovative. Digitalization means hyper-connectivity, over-complexity, and interdependence; it blurs the functional border, organizational border, industry vertical border, geographic border, and knowledge domain border. IT plays a significant role in such a transformation because technology is often the disruptive force and information is the lifeblood to keep the business flow. But the first things first, how to run IT with digital fluency?


Experimentation: Running a digital IT means innovation, customer-centricity, and employee engagement. Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. It means IT has to experiment the new way to do things, change the mentality about "we always do things like that," encourage creativity, because digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a set of differentiated capabilities to accomplish a defined goal. The definition of innovation is simple - to gain benefit by doing something different. Experiment the better way to communicate and collaborate with business partners; Digital is the age of customers, experiment the new way to optimize customer experience. Assume that every problem has multiple solutions and ask yourself and others for "three ways we might address this issue."Push for multiple solutions by pulling the necessary resource to experiment and discover the new possibilities. A digital organization is a living business in the relationship with its environments, customers, suppliers, shareholders, and above all enhances and supports the creative human spirit by connecting, discovering, and experimenting.


Information Savvy: Digital means flow, information flow, idea flow, and mind flow. IT is shifting from a technology custodian to an information steward to manage the full data-performance life cycle: data -> analysis -> decisions -> performance effectively. It means to break down the silo, create the information savvy environment that encourages the utilization and the flow of information and knowledge. 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. An information savvy organization can make sure the right people getting the right information at the right time to make the right decision; it means the organization can capture business insight or customer foresight to rise above the waves of the emergent digital trends, and grasp the upcoming opportunities for business growth or oversight risks and avoid pitfalls smoothly. Thus, the business can accelerate growth and achieves high-performing result effortlessly.


Agility: Digital is also about increasing the speed of change, hyperconnectivity, and fierce competition. Running a digital IT means to synchronize with business speed via integration and optimization, not just alignment and consolidation. A digital IT can both adapt to change and create necessary change effortlessly. Because enterprises have always been parts of simple and complex digital ecosystems, so to function seamlessly, an enterprise has to be linked to the many and varying touch points between itself and its dynamic environment. Therefore, you have to look holistically at the problem domain to architect and design an adaptive organization to address business and system dynamics. Agility is also interrelated with learning ability because a learning organization is more comfortable with complexity, ambiguity, paradoxes and they have a penchant for candor. So high organizational learning relates to high response in recognizing and addressing system constraints. The more learning agile an organization is, the faster it can adapt to changes, and the more digital fluent it becomes.


The purpose to run IT with digital fluency is to mind the gap between business and IT, leverage the latest digital technologies to craft frictionless business culture, re-frame business processes to bridge silos, and build optimal sets of business capabilities to delight customers. So IT can drive business change and digital transformation effortlessly.



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