The New Book "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Preview

The board of directors as the de facto guardian of modern organizations has an important role to play in steering the organization toward the uncharted water and blurring business territories.

Organizations today have to live up with the business dynamic which is uncertain, ambiguous, complex and flux. The overwhelming growth of information is permeating into every corner of the business, and rapid changes are touching every activity, function, business, and industry. The matter of fact is that the changes sweeping the business are hugely disruptive and there is nowhere to hide.

The board of directors as the de facto guardian of modern organizations has an important role to play in steering the organization toward the uncharted water and blurring business territories because they oversee strategy management and set the policy for driving changes. With more and more organizations are on the journey of the digital transformation, from the board composition perspective, which challenges do you face, when and how do you tackle the issue of change in the boardroom? How should board directors get an in-depth understanding of their role and responsibility while the business change is accelerated across the business scope and knowledge life cycle is shortened significantly? What are important perspectives to build a digital savvy board? And how to build a high-performance board for today and the future?

The great questions stimulate quality brainstorming. The corporate directors are the senior leaders, shall they ask or answer questions? As in many, if not most instances, there is a perception that leaders "should" be the most experienced and thus have all of the answers. That's a fallacy. Confidence comes from being comfortable in your role as a top leader, acknowledging that your job as a leader is NOT to provide answers for yesterday but facilitate solutions for tomorrow. In fact, the board directors are the mastermind behind the digital transformation via asking insightful questions. Asking good and pertinent questions is critical for governing changes and driving digital transformation. The high performing Board shows the ability and openness to "question itself, senior management team, and its decisions and discussions.

The purpose of the book “Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As “is to share 100 insightful questions for rejuvenating the boardroom to get digital ready. It is important for boards to make invaluable inquiries and take proactive approaches for leading digital transformation seamlessly.

• Question and brainstorm on much-needed oversight and additional rigor to the boardroom composition and succession planning process.
• Practice critical thinking and independent thinking for identifying blind spots, criticizing the strategy constructively and advising management insightfully.
• Practice “out-of-the-box” thinking to ask open-ended questions about IT and how to build an IT friendly and technology-savvy digital board.
• Practice strategic thinking and systems thinking, ask insightful questions, to become the mastermind of digital transformation.
• Make profound inquiries about the future of leadership, constantly question the status quo and set the digital leadership tone to get digital ready.

The contemporary corporate board as the directorial role plays a significant role in overseeing strategy, advising corporate executives and monitoring business performance. The board directors should also walk the talk to digitize the boardroom with strategic imperatives because often the digital tone is set at the top and echo spirally to all levels of the organization. The differentiator between a digital leader and a laggard is not about the title and authority, more about the mindset and attitude. Digital attitudes are about being experimental and persistent. Hence, digital board directors today need to show intellectual curiosity, creativity, learning agility, and risk tolerance, etc. A high mature digital board is like a lighting tower to navigating the business toward the right direction and taking all these significant responsibilities more “thoughtfully.”

Chapter 1 The Digital Board’s Composition Inquiries: The boardroom composition will directly impact on how they lead and which tone they will set for the entire organization to follow. While there are many components of leadership, one of the most important ones is the ability to adapt, model and influence change.

Chapter 2 The Digital Board’s Digital Inquiries: Digital is about the accelerating speed of changes and the abundance of information. Digital boards as the strategic advising role are the “mastermind” behind digital transformation to oversee strategies, drive innovation, catalyze changes, and monitor performance.

Chapter 3 The Digital Board’s Strategy Inquiries: Digital boards help the business management identify and close strategy blind spots, pinpoint decision fatigue, explore the boardroom fundamental and strategic oversight responsibility, and monitor its implementation and performance results, amend wherever necessary to match changing marketplace conditions.  

Chapter 4 The Digital Board’s IT Inquiries: Given how applying IT is becoming so intrinsically important to so many different enterprises across industrial sectors, digital board directors should ask more insightful questions about IT because leading companies across industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business.

Chapter 5 The Digital Board’s Leadership Inquiries: Contemporary digital boards should set the critical tones from leadership grooming to talent development to culture cultivating, to ensure the right people are put in the right positions for leading digital transformation and improving the digital leadership effectiveness and maturity.

The Digital directorship Manifesto

Figure 3 The Digital directorship Manifesto

The best-in-class board practices scientific governance disciplines based on logic and rationalization with inquisitive attitude and inspirational leadership style, to steer the enterprise ship in the complex and ambiguous digital business dynamic, to expedite changes and accelerate digital transformation.

Digital directorship goes Deeper over louder;  

from Compliance to Performance to Excellence;      

from homogeneity to heterogeneity to High-Maturity.

Digital directorship requires a clear vision, multi-dimensional intelligence, and creative communication:

       Inquisitiveness over  “status quo”;

       Constructive governance over check box compliance methodology;

       Problems Solving over bureaucracy;

        Creativity over Rubber stamp;

    Constructive Criticism over groupthink;

        Information-savvy over “gut feeling”

Digital directorship achieves high maturity in pursuit of mastery:

             Digital Mind Fit over conventional wisdom;

             Fresh Eyes over assumptions;

      “T-Shape” Expertise over outdated knowledge;

              Creative Tension over friendship;

 System Wisdom over linear thinking.

Digital directorship is the MASTERMIND behind the digital transformation.

Leadership is all about change and directorship is about steering the business toward the right direction. Digital transformation is in every forward-thinking company’s top agenda; innovation is the light every organization is pursuing, and digitization becomes the new normal of business expansion. All of these bring the significant opportunities and responsibilities for the new breed of digital BoDs. Because the board in a high-level directorship position plays a crucial role in setting key digital tones for leadership development and talent management. High-performing boards also set goals for their own performance and regularly evaluate how they are performing as the board. An effective board enables and directs management towards good outcomes, and ensure the business is on the right track to reach the well-defined business vision.

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The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Introduction

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter 1 Introduction: The Digital Board's Composition Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter II Introduction: The Digital Board's Digital Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As": Chapter III Introduction: The Digital Board's Strategy Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter IV Introduction: The Digital Board's IT Inquiries


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter V Introduction: The Digital Board's Leadership Inquiries

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Three Fitting Characteristics to Make the Business Stand out as a Digital Master

Winning the digital dynamic means engaging innovative thinking, enforce cross-functional collaboration, build the unique business competency, and take a structural approach.

With rapid changes and exponential growth of information, companies large or small are brainstorming the digital ways to think and experiment the better way to solve either old business issues or emergent problems, delight customers, improve employees’ engagement, increase productivity, and inspire creativity across the enterprise ecosystem. Organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation. So, what are fitting characteristics to make the business stand out as a digital leader and reach a high level of business maturity?

Unique competency: To keep running and building the business advantage, organizations need to have two sets of competency. The necessary competency to run the business as others do and reap some quick wins, also the differentiated business competency to stand out as the industry leader with the strong business brand. Methodologically, companies are leveraging the latest digital technologies to open up the digital way to think and do things with people centricity. It means to break down silo thinking and enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration, capture business foresight via the abundance of business information to predict the business trends, and involve new ways of bringing together diverse thoughts and resources to create novel ideas, figure out the best tailored solution to meet the business's requirement, and offer feature insight and added value based on the digital ecosystem understanding. The competitive necessity keeps the lights on and focuses on meeting the customer expectation and delivers what the business asks for; while competitive uniqueness allows the business to dream bigger, maximize its full potential and achieve the art of possible. And leading businesses today are shifting from experimenting digital to going digital, it is important to take the logical steps and a structural approach for managing a typical capability life cycle which spans need, requirements, acquisition, in-service, obsolescence, and disposal. To keep digital fit, it is important to build a cohesive set of business competencies, commit to transforming themselves to a high-performance digital business powerhouse.

Digital responsiveness: Digital means the increasing speed of change and continuous disruptions. How successful organizations can handle digital disruption depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment. Today’s digital dynamic enables companies to leverage their various environments, or ecosystems, to chase growth opportunities and accelerate business performance. That means the organization can manage its information and knowledge excellently, so the business is able to ride the learning curve with speed and adapt to changes intelligently. The hyper-connecting nature of digital offers particularly fertile ground for developing cross-industry ecosystems and business growth opportunities, in part because the ways of doing business and meeting customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age, there are always alternative ways to deliver products or services, delight customers and solve problems, so companies need new ecosystem partners to pursue them, the point is to speed up. The digital organizations are more dynamic, if you look at a business as a collection of subsystems, the degree of business responsiveness depends on how those subsystems interact with each other, and those interactions can be structural, technical, informational, or human. The less friction between the changes and the more seamless business interactions enable the business to flow and accelerate its performance and growth, and ultimately transcend into digital masters. 

Innovation fluency: Innovation fluency means that organizations today have a better ability for connecting dots across functional, industrial, geographical, or generational boundaries. The more dots you connect, the better opportunities you could spark the innovative ideas, and improve digital fluency. A leading digital organization with innovation fluency can handle innovation streams for different goals and different time frames and manage a balanced portfolio including both radical innovation and incremental innovation, hard innovation and soft innovation. The organization with digital fluency means that the business can speak the digital language fluently, follow digital principles with discipline, develop the next digital practices, and share lessons learned to avoid other people's mistakes. To improve the digital innovation fluency, the key to success in an organization is to have the right people in place to manage the process, leveraging diverse experience, insight, and judgment to rigorously make the needed decisions, cultivate the culture of innovation, and improve innovation fluency.

Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. Keeping digital fit means that organizations shouldn’t just respond to changes in a reactive way. Winning the digital dynamic means engaging innovative thinking, enforce cross-functional collaboration, build the unique business competency, and take the proactive and systematic approach to lead change and stand out as the digital master.

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Five Aspects of Change Management

Change Management can become more successful with people at the core of change, the cause of changes, and the purpose of change.

Change management is the overarching umbrella that encompasses extensive business planning, empathetic communications, and discovery of concerns/objections/potential points of failure, developing a shared vision, addressing fears and resistance, communicating valid and compelling reasons for cooperation. Change Management is no longer just a few business initiatives, but an ongoing digital capability which enables the strategy implementation. Here are five aspects of Change Management.

The management mentality aspect: With the fast pace of changes in today’s digital dynamic, change management shouldn’t be just some random initiatives with very low success rate, it needs to be built in as an ongoing business capability. However, too many organizations are mechanistic with command and control hierarchies, get stuck with the static mindset and comfort zone for too long. Hence, there is a critical mindset that needs to change, and that is the mindset of management, to ensure change not only possible but also not fluffy, it is embedded into the business culture - the collective mindset, to lubricate the digital flow and strategy implementation. It is the time for the change when silo thinking becomes the very obstacle to achieving business effectiveness and static mindset of management try to control the things that you cannot control because change is simply inevitable and progression is unstoppable. It is time to change when the opposite of critical thinking, such as reflexive thinking, group thinking, mindless, etc., becomes the mainstream thinking themes in the organization because it means that the organization gets stuck at the low level of maturity, facing the huge danger of business pitfalls to failures.

The emotional aspect: Emotions are very important as change is a personal thing. There is so much psychology in openness to new ideas and perspectives, change or business transformation. It’s the TIME for changes when you see the negative emotions (ONR - Objections, Negativity or Resistance). People like to change, but do not want to be changed and there is the difference. Change inertias are often caused by negative emotions or ineffective performance management. Fear of change happens at both personal and organizational level, fear of disruption, the existence of chaos. From the emotional aspect, people need to feel safe, to overcome their fear, to be convinced that the new solutions are better than the old ones. When faced with change, we all go through the phases - denial, resistance, exploration. and acceptance. So it is important to try to find ways to make people feel involved in the design and implementation of the change. The more transparent about a change effort, the less uncertainty, and consequently less fear, the change management will be more effective. There is not a one size fits all approach to addressing the different psychological responses and thereby reducing anxiety because there are different psychological perspectives.

The attitudinal aspect: Remember change management is a gradual process. To achieve the desired change, an organization must create an environment that encourages change attitude, enables effective collaboration, share & promote ideas, and provide necessary incentives for employees. Be flexible- change will always involve failures as well as success. Change should be viewed as an opportunity, and Change Management needs to be people-centric. Willingness to fail is an important factor which must be fostered by top managers. Failure is tolerated and even promoted within the company culture - the collective attitude. Change Management needs to be changed when necessary. Reinforce success but don't punish failures.

The behavioral aspect: The resistance that delays more than anticipated often comes from these areas of the organization where employees were informed rather than involved. It’s important to have the team own a process by bringing them in early and getting their involvement in creating the process. 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 your plan flexible and implement changes based on staff feedback. During the whole process, make sure that all staff is aware of the plan/process, timely updated, and responsible for something. Make each individual feel responsible for the success of the plan, engage them actively and make sure that your new change proposal solves their current problems, and provide a better working environment. Hence, when the need for change becomes apparent, the management should turn the spotlight on measures and incentives as drivers of expected behavior, to both motivate changes and make the change sustainable.

The evaluation/measurement aspect: You can only manage what you measure. How do you design metrics to measure what changes and how these changes are measured? What are the relevant metrics and how can they be quantified and validated? Measuring change involves first accurately identifying where you are now. Then, clearly identifying where you want to be once the change is complete. Both require the necessity, to be honest, and to establish clear, understandable, and easily calculable metrics. The problem with many KPIs is that they are created and applied at a subordinate level without taking into consideration the possible implications for the organization as a whole. Change leaders and managers can also leverage a balanced scorecard in measuring the outcome of the change. That metric needs to be "SMART" so people can see what the outcome will look like throughout their transition.

Changeability is one of the most critical strategic capabilities which underpin successful execution, and move the organization from efficiency to agility, from reactive buy-in to proactively enrolling and engaging, leadership is crucial in managing change smoothly. Change Management can become more successful with people at the core of change, the cause of changes, and the purpose of change.

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The CIO as “Chief Instrument Officer”: How to Lead Changes and Orchestrate Digital Transformation Effortlessly

The digital CIO needs to be the proactive, visible and influential top business leaders.

Every forward-thinking organization claim they are in the information management business, nowadays IT plays a critical role in the business growth and digital transformation. Within a mature organization, the CIO is a leadership role which requires the breadth of the business knowledge and the depth of technical insight. What determines the level of the CIO position is the impact they have made across the company and even industry, and hence their reputation, their reporting line, their title, hopefully further to their achievements, rather than their mere contribution for the company bottom line that helped them reach the current level. In the digital era, high mature CIOs are “Chief Instrument Officers,” who can lead changes and orchestrate digital transformation effortlessly.

Digital CIO needs to lead more as a conductor than a constructor: Thanks for the lightweight digital technologies, IT is shifting from “T” focused monolithic support function to “I” driven mosaic information hub, in order to speed up and improve the digital organization's responsiveness, performance, and maturity. As many organizations are reaching the inflection point for the radical digitalization, while IT provides an important structure and framework to streamline the process and enable the digital transformation. IT will do less about building from scratch, and do more to explore different business options, on-demand software services to help the organization build dynamic business capabilities and provide tailored solutions with continuous delivery much more quickly. Learning the business is a must for the CIO to come up with an experiential knowledge coupled with information for enabling and empowering the enterprise. For larger enterprises, their IT resources and dynamic capabilities are often the company's secret sauce and the key to how they deliver value to the business and drive digital transformation. From IT leadership perspective, while the in-depth understanding of technology is critical, no less important is the ability to articulate the business impacts and opportunities of emergent digital technology trends to the C-suite. CIOs should convey their technological vision and have to leverage the different points of views to truly become the strategic advisor of the business, conduct changes, and frequently align differing business priorities for improving the business performance and maximizing the digital potential of their business.

Define the IT change roadmap with “5W+1H” navigation to improve IT organization's changeability, performance, and maturity: The general expectation from IT has changed. Not only are they being seen as a business enabler, but they are also now mandatorily required to give ROI for the investments, as well as lead changes proactively. In fact, the required changes, at the most fundamental level, need to be well documented. Timelines are already decided by the business and now the choice of technology gradually as well. Another facet could just be the control of when to implement change with cost-effectiveness and process efficiency. Don’t embrace every trend or fad though, seek the business justification for IT initiatives, costs for internally implemented products/services can be determined with a high degree of confidence whereas external products can change their pricing schedules bringing uncertainty to costs on a going forward basis. A clearly defined roadmap is available, and the industry best/next practices are in place to serve as a framework upon which the solution can be implemented over time. With a comprehensive IT roadmap, the CIO can instrument the digital transformation in a more structural way to provide service/solution delivery with the cohesive set of enterprise capabilities and repeatable management processes in place.    

The digital CIOs should also master instrument of information management to ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time to make the right decisions: Digital IT has to focus on both information content and context, and understand how that information can be tapped from the underlying data and be utilized to turn it into valuable strategic insight, how the information and insight can be penetrated through the business and be actively used in enforcing the business performance. The role of modern CIO is to identify and blend the ways that information and technology can assist and shape the business by linking all digital aspects together for achieving high business results. The CIO as “Chief Instrument Officer,” has to keep the in-house order, and must simultaneously coordinate with all sorts of business partners or stakeholders across the geographical territories and time zones, take into account the time lag, to ensure they can orchestrate the digital transformation harmoniously and effortlessly.

The digital CIO needs to be the proactive, visible and influential top business leaders, get out of the comfort zone, think profoundly, act decisively, and provide a clear vision that their staff can get excited about how to delight customers, and get engaged in doing more about innovation. Ultimately, the CIO's success is about vision, leadership, business acumen, innovation, strategic planning, strong interpersonal communication skills, expert influence, team-building, entrepreneurship, passion, commitment, and energy.

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Organizational Plasticity as the Digital Trait

The business plasticity is the organization’s capability to change, adapt and innovate with speed.

The neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to rewire, connect, and adapt; the business plasticity is the organization’s capability to change, adapt and innovate with speed. Many organizations are on the journey of digital transformation which represents the increasing speed of changes, the overwhelming growth of information, the shortened life cycle of knowledge, the new chapter of digital innovation, and the next stage of business maturity. It has to improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its digital ecosystem, with people at the center of its focus. Thus, organizational plasticity is the digital trait of the organization.

Adapt rapidly: Adaptation is an inherent characteristic of humans, Self-adaptation is a phenomenon strictly linked to see learning (and knowledge) increases if shared and consumed. Organizational adaptation is the ability to be highly responsive to the fast-changing business environment. The biggest challenge for companies today is to identify both opportunities for business growth as well as risks which cause the business to fail following the "VUCA" digital new normal. Change is always in progress. We need the flexibility to adapt "in-stride" as necessary to move the goal promptly as we discover the knowledge and events of tomorrow. The digital leaders should continue to ask: Can the current business system handle a shock in the business tomorrow? The shock could be both positive and negative, such as strategic business transaction, a new large customer, new vendor relationships, loss of business and need to scale up or down. Consider nature and culture as to self-organized but interlaced environments, and humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions. From the economic and organizational point of view, the business with high organizational plasticity can keep a clear focus on the "desired/defined end results." Changing, adapting to or mitigation is a "practical" way for the existing change plan to bring about the goals of tomorrow. A key element in self-adaptive organisms is people. Self-adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational change with the consciousness to change. This “incremental consciousness” about our own potentials is changing the way we see ourselves, our roles in a community - a team or a company.

Improve continuously: Improvement is about change, but change does not always make an improvement. The rule of thumb is that: Improvement CANNOT happen without change, and change SHOULD NOT happen without improvement. In other words, the change shouldn't be for its own sake, change without good reason and adding value is futile and useless. Improvement is, therefore, a direct result of a change process. Change management is a tool used to effectively accomplish organizational improvement. The culture of continuous improvement means to continue to discover that "there is always a better way." Change is always there; improvement can only be there if people accept change, and make the most out of it. Helping people adapt to new things in their work environment can be extremely disruptive and if the goals and values are not clear it will not succeed. Change with improvement in mind is a proactive approach that allows for planning and support considerations to be made and, therefore, is much more likely to turn into a smooth and successful collaborative transition. Improvement is the reward for being willing to change. We become better individuals; therefore, the business or society improves as well.

Innovate relentlessly: Due to the complexity of today’s business dynamic, innovation is essentially about reducing the unnecessary business complexity to tackle the complexities of business dynamic. At the individual level, to be a good innovator, one must be able to understand the current situation via different lenses. Think out of the box to come up with a better way of doing the right thing. Collectively, businesses, especially the large well-established corporations and within that environment, innovations can range from small to game changers. Also, it is important to note that within the organizations, innovation is rarely an individual action; rather it is a team effort, often across multiple organizational silos. Thus, culture and teamwork are crucial for improving the success rate of innovation management. The flip side of innovation management is that the members of a team must always go the same way, and too often this is towards orthodoxy rather than innovation. Thus, it is important to leverage innovation-enabling processes and systems, less rigid, more flexible, and build a culture of innovation. An innovation support processes or system can be seen in companies which clearly indicate innovation as the required competency for managers, and it's tied to performance management and total reward system. Innovation journey is like taking a hiking trip at the trail very few or even no people ever went before, it takes courage and emotional maturity, to overcome barriers, avoid pitfalls, stay focus and innovate relentlessly.

Organizational plasticity is an important digital trait to keep the business competitive and improve its maturity. There is no single initiative or program or the "theme for the year" that will suffice to raise the plasticity of a company or business functions or individuals. The key is not to choose one path over the other, but to tailor your own path,  practice, practice, and practice more for accelerating digital transformation.

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CIOs as Chief Interaction Officer: Three Questions at the Big Table to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Modern CIOs are "Chief Interaction Officer" and "Chief Influence Officer" to envision and communicate, connect and innovate.

Traditional IT organization is often perceived as the support function and a cost center and traditional CIOs are perceived as tactical IT managers and tech geeks. To really be considered an equal peer with other top business executives and board directors. CIOs have needed to both convince and deliver the alternative view of IT being a profit enabler and innovation engine. IT leaders have to communicate effectively to advocate IT as the strategic partner of the business. Because miscommunication or “lost in translation” is the key issue to separate IT from the business, it is worth the effort to take better communication approaches and be both creative and critical in enforcing business and IT collaboration. At the big table, which questions CIOs should ponder in order to enforce communication and accelerate digital transformation?

How do CIOs envision business growth or potential disruptive innovation via the power of the latest technology, and communicate them with clarity? At the big table, CIOs need to talk more about commercial outcomes, not technical throughput; CIOs need to be seen to be leveraging current assets before seeking the latest techie toys. In short, IT leaders need to talk like and actually deliver as business managers. The role of the CIO continues to evolve rapidly in the midst of overwhelming information growth and the accelerating changes in technology. The exponential growth of the information brings significant opportunities for business growth, also unprecedented risks to the company's surviving. Thus, they should act as “Chief Interaction Officer” for making an influence at the entire company scope, and practice tailored communication from the boardroom to different shareholders. Because the business must start to see IT as an integral part of the business, a strategic partner, and not just an enabler. From IT management perspective, have IT team leaders partner with and even embed themselves in business functions so they can ensure the related folks understanding the commercial end point of the work rather than it being an abstract set of code. At the big table, CIOs should learn how to ask open questions such as “What If,” “How about,” to initiate creative communication about business innovation and digital transformation. Until CIOs think, talk, and act commercially rather than technically, they will remain strangers in a strange land.

How does modern technology help to shape efficient business processes, improve cost structure and catalyze business growth? At the big table, IT performance needs to be communicated with hard numbers other executives are interested in. CIOs need to develop financial metrics that will help to clearly communicate IT performance with C-level executives in plain business language. They are interested in how IT can help the business improve both bottom line process efficiency as well as the top line business growth. A detailed breakdown of the costs is also very revealing as C level executives usually only see summary level costs. The detailed cost breakdowns can lead to better strategic IT investment decisions, that are empirically based. IT investment now is a strategic imperative for a forward-looking business to pursue growth. The effective roundtable discussion makes it clearer what the benefits of the IT investments are.

How does IT move up the maturity from IT-business alignment to IT-business integration to conducting digital transformation? Traditional IT organizations struggle with IT-business alignment, the information and data keep growing and flowing at the modern organization, IT plays an unprecedented role in determining business success. Thus, digital IT should be an integral part of the business. IT integration to orchestration scenario will bridge the gap between the business silos, break down the organizational boundary, and shorten the cycle to collect the right information for streamlining decision making and empowering innovation agenda. It is so important for CIOs acting like “Chief Interaction Officer,” because often times, the business crowd wrongly equate IT solutions with concerns of expensive technical difficulties and the IT crowd builds more out of its own know-how than the need of the business client. Until both IT and business can build the true trust relationship and both parties transcend to a genuine hope and belief in one another, the gap will still exist, even be enlarged because the different parts of the business evolve digitally with different speed. Without a clear strategy and a creative and persuasive way to communicate it in the language of the business, CIOs will always have trouble getting even "aligned," not to mention of reaching the higher IT maturity level of proactively enabling and engaging with the business. The key challenge is to find a way so that both sides, even though sometimes they have to speak different 'languages,' can communicate effectively. Ultimately, IT should orchestrate digital transformation initiatives because IT is a builder of current and future capability for both the organization and its ecosystem (the market comprising competitors, suppliers and other agents, regulators and so on), so much of the board conversation about IT should be framed in respect of the business activities and the ecosystem.

Language influences perception. Modern CIOs are "Chief Interaction Officer" and "Chief Influence Officer" to envision and communicate, connect and innovate; and how to well manage the different dimension of relationship will directly impact their effectiveness and leadership influence for the long term.

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