The Monthly “Digital Fit” Book Tuning: The Digital Professional Competency Apr. 2020

 The forward-looking organizations are now looking for people that have the right minds, characters, attitudes, traits, or can demonstrate the ability to do the work more innovatively.

TDigital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit“ is to share insight about multidimensional enterprise fit from digital characteristics, organizational structure, change, knowledge, and talent perspectives; evoke critical and paradoxical thinking about digital “fit vs. misfit,” spark healthy debates on how to define and develop true digital fit, and build a fitting working environment to inspire creativity and accelerate digital transformation.
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   The Digital Professional Competency

The Logical Scenario to Build Digital Workforce Competency The digital world moves into a hyper-connected and interdependent digital relationship under “VUCA” business new normal. Part of the digital transformation journey is to prepare people to get digital ready psychologically and intellectually. Modern digital technologies bring unprecedented convenience for people to learn and work, improve their productivity, learning agility, and innovativeness. Evaluating the digital readiness of the business is important to allow room for adjustments and keeping the organization dynamic and informative. Here is the logical scenario to build digital workforce competency.

Three Characteristics of Digital Workforce Digital organizations are always on, interdependent and hyperconnected, people are always the most important asset in any organization before, today, and future. However, compared to a traditional industrial workforce, the digital workforce is a new breed -it's the super-connected generation with a multitude of varieties - multi-generations, multi-cultures, and multi-devices. More specifically, what are the new characteristics of the digital workforce??

How do you define “Digital Fit”? 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 the wrong, average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person? Or put simply, for what should they be right? How do you define “Digital Fit”?

Five Traits of High-Quality IT Professionals People are always the weakest link in any organization, this is particularly true for IT organizations due to the changing nature and complexity of technologies. IT skills gap is a significant challenge facing IT leaders today, the common complaints from talent managers include: people do not have the right competencies; they can’t find the right skills to fill the positions or their non-IT partners do not understand IT, etc. Are such problems an organization-specific, or systematic? What are exactly the skill gaps and what are the resulting symptoms? What are the emergent traits to be high-quality IT professionals regardless of the specific skills, how to reinvent the "IT geek" stereotype and build a healthy and positive IT culture for catalyzing innovation?

Three PoVs of Talent Competency The word competencies, and thus the true meaning of its use, comes from competent which means being capable of doing something. The knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened due to the increasing speed of changes, and a huge skill gap in the workforce needs to be filled due to the continuously updated technology and regulation, digitalization and globalization, etc. The forward-looking organizations are now looking for people that have the right minds, characters, attitudes, traits, or can demonstrate the ability to do the work more innovatively, not just based on the previous experience, but through recombinant capability and integral talent competency.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The “Realization” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

 Creating the awareness of the problem is the first step to making a solution be understood and accepted, realizing “We can't stay the same,” the realization only comes when the problem is perceived.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.”

 It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Realization” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Strategic problem-solving is a process of drawing artistic realization about the best future into a scientific canvas.

2 Realization indicates the wisdom that you have learned by observing your previous actions. Indeed, all scientific principles relevant to the strategy should be used but with your artistic improvisation.

3 Organizational change management has a strong role in business transformation, benefits realization, and strategy execution.

4 Change leadership and sponsorship is critical to driving strategy and adoption. Combined with that, change management is focused on execution, resistance management, and adoption leading to the realization of intended business results.

5 Creating the awareness of the problem is the first step to making a solution be understood and accepted, realizing “We can't stay the same,” the realization only comes when the problem is perceived.

6 It will cost you big time redo and fix a bad design. Implementation is about the realization of such a concept or plan.

7 When all departments truly collaborate with IT to improve the organizational vision, transparency, realization of leveraging IT as a competitive advantage versus just commodity, everybody wins.

8 Sometimes, energy usually gets focused on problem-solving, and a realization becomes a rush where thoughtfulness about people and processes is a casualty of time.

9 Reformation, refinement or evolution of the individual through self-realization is the most ideal aim for the betterment of Humanity.

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Avoid IT Management Pitfalls by Using IT Architecture Tools

Among the reasons why architecture is important, worth practicing is that the analysis of architecture enables early prediction of a system’s qualities, considering the whole, and their purpose to achieve the goals for the thing being architected to unlock organizational performance and maturity.

With continuous disruptions often led by technology and abundant information, IT is the key component in building up differentiated business capabilities nowadays.

Excessive IT complexity limits innovation and enlarges gaps between IT and business. The useful tools such as IT Architecture(ITA) helps the management improve the growth capacity and maturity of the organization and rebrand IT as a trustful business partner.

ITA makes it easier to avoid the kinds of problems that "order-taker" IT organizations run into all the time: Many traditional IT organizations get stuck at the lower level of maturity, IT leaders need to make an objective assessment: Is IT being perceived as an order-taker? If the IT organization is strictly tactical, then "Yes." If the Help Desk mechanism is a glorified “To Do” list, then, "Yes." IT organizations need to maintain their value in an environment of increasing growth and complexity of their business units. IT management can leverage IT Architecture as a strategic planning and communication tool to keep focusing on top prioritized business issues and be able to see beyond tactical solutions and reach strategic dimensions. The longer view is essential to make sure that the patterns and impacts IT organization is going to provide in business solutions can be sustained not only in the "systems," but in the systems of people.

To avoid “only fixing the symptom” pitfall, an IT Architect is a technology strategist who understands the need for root cause analysis of an issue with regards to existing systems and is able to find a systemic solution by working closely with business functions. IT architecture is also a critical tool for IT-business alignment and integration. If you cannot build for sustainable development and the pragmatism of efficient delivery for achieving business goals; no matter how elegant the technical designs are, they are doomed.

Enterprise Architecture is a great strategic planning tool because infeasible or conflicting business strategies perhaps never get resolved but drive wasteful or conflicting behavior: Digital enterprises are inherently and intensely complex and unpredictable systems, amplify multiple effects and shape business structures and systems continuously. IT strategy is an integral component of business strategy. Strategies need to be first and foremost long-term, specifically, because they are directional and need to allow for the organization to knock the rust off and move coherently in the right direction, as well as look at the function (products and markets), processes required and the structure, resources, authority of the system.

Conflicting business strategies waste resource and lead conflict behaviors, IT should be part of business decision making for dealing with conflicts by applying EA as a useful tool, outline the areas where possible conflicting priorities may lie and outline how they are able to be handled by the organization in terms of resource allocation such as time, budget, people, etc, in order to arrive at an optimal solution for the benefit of the entire company.

ITA as an effective decision-making tool: Sometimes, unvetted or unreviewed business decisions and initiatives that optimize one area of the business at the greater expense of other areas: Traditional organizations were run in silos in the industrial age, most IT leaders have been silo managers who have a narrow view of IT management and don't really have the business skills or personality traits to take a holistic perspective and make effective decisions. IT architecture helps to achieve a situational balanced compromise or a trade-off, also understand IT management in the company scope, facilitate IT-enabled business initiatives, responsibility, objectives, and needed resources to be successful.

Effective IT management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process. IT leaders and architects should work both within IT and on IT, across the business scope and seek ways to deal with enterprise complexity smoothly. It's important to leverage ITA as a balanced tool to light up the business full cycles and emerging properties (trends, opportunities) to create the business synergy and ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

The architecture is used as an instrument to orchestrate capabilities and avoid implementation of redundant, complex, and duplicative capabilities: Effective IT leaders leverage IT Architecture to create a decent IT-enabled business capability map and use that to frame activities/artifacts. Capabilities may include dependencies - one is part of another or depends on another. The value of capability maps is the ability to identify capability patterns of the enterprise to make holistic investment decisions.

To avoid duplication, you must also be aware of the integration of a single functional capability into a holistic portfolio of digital capabilities across all enterprises, to build a unique and sustainable business advantage. By leveraging ITA/Solution Architecture as a good tool, the management can get a better clearer picture of IT solutions from a cost, transparency, and complexity perspective, as well as eliminate waste which is not used and save effort on maintaining it.

Apply IT architecture as an effective IT management tool to avoid the syndrome: Well-intentioned projects that the business wants, but don't deliver value: The business/IT architectures are the effective management tools to help evaluate whether the business initiative is worth the effort with tangible ROI. IT projects are essential "business initiatives with technology dependencies." IT project management has a high failure rate. There are many causes to fail an IT project such as Scope Creep, Failure to obtain stakeholder commitment, ineffectual team, or failure to plan or execute well. You need to define the root causes of IT-enabled business initiatives.

Highly effective IT management uses ITA as a useful tool to communicate and navigate, to ensure IT delivery is about People, Process and Technology, not just technology. When looking for the success traits of those really successful organizations that seem to always be able to execute projects and programs well, they mostly have inspiring leadership; well-designed architecture and roadmap, engaged and driven employees and technical expertise, as well as sound management disciplines, to ensure value deliveries.

Leverage EA as a problem diagnosis tool to avoid ignoring the root cause of problems because they are politically difficult to address: Many business managers or professionals still apply silo mentality and linear management discipline to solve ever complex business problems. When they only want to see things from their own point of view, see what they want to see, or, hear-what-they-want-to-hear, they often miss the point to understand the real problem holistically. A better solution that crosses all industries is to keep peeling back the layers by applying architecture or other useful tools to discover the real cause and address it.

To overcome the “problem-solving” impasse, it’s critical to leverage business/ITA architecture as a useful tool to challenge, debate, and learn by applying holistic thinking and opening the dialogues to close blind spots and bridge gaps for identifying and solving real problems, rather than only fixing the symptom while the real problem keeps coming back.

We no longer live in the world that runs in years, but one that runs in minutes. The major issue at hand in architecture is effective partitioning leading to effective decomposition to handle the complexity. The IT maturity within an enterprise determines the focus and priorities of most CIOs. Among the reasons why architecture is important, worth practicing is that the analysis of architecture enables early prediction of a system’s qualities, considering the whole, and their purpose to achieve the goals for the thing being architected to unlock organizational performance and maturity.

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The Monthly “Digitizing Boardroom” Book Tuning: The Ultra-Modern Corporate Board Apr. 2020

 An ultra-modern board can amplify leadership influence, advance the digital management mentality and lead digital transformation seamlessly.

Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses in the right direction and achieve expected business results. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals.

Here are the multiple perspectives of shaping a strategic boardroom.

 The Ultra-Modern Corporate Board 

Building an Ultramodern Board to Lead Digital Transformation 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 as the top leadership team and governance body should become the advanced mastermind behind the digital transformation, to envision, inspire, influence, and innovate. Because the substances of leadership are all about vision, change, positive influence, and progression. The spirit comes from the top, an ultra-modern board can amplify leadership influence, advance the digital management mentality and lead digital transformation seamlessly.

The Digital Board with Global Competency Global competency is the ability to understand and act on issues of global significance or solve complex problems that have a global impact. Collectively, at the board level, global competency represents the global leadership, mindset, knowledge, insight, expertise, attitudes, skills, and behaviors necessary to thrive in today's hyper-connected and interdependent world.

Three Traits of Contemporary Digital Board Directors The corporate board today is the mastermind behind the digital transformation. Due to the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility of the digital era, the directorship in any forward-thinking organization must have the ability to guide, inspire and motivate people top-down and bottom-up toward accomplishing shared visions and goals. But more specifically, what are the common leadership traits and characteristics of digital board directors? And what are complementary mindsets, skills, and experiences needed to build a contemporary digital board?

The Characteristics of Digital-Ready Board The digital journey for organizations today is inevitable and unstoppable, it is important to understand that digital transformation is multifaceted, business optimization and integration need to be done with a “big picture.”Digital savvy Board of Directors as the advising role is responsible to steer the organization in the right direction, understand what's required and how as a high-level basis of going digital means to the business. A digital-ready board with the following characteristics has the advantage of pulling enough resources and pushing the business forward confidently.

The Digital Traits of Board Directors At today’s digital dynamic, as businesses change shape, size, expansion, and transformations, they need conditioning, improvement, and navigation. Board directors are the directorship and leadership role, to help the organization steer in the right direction, to explore unknown, and have confidence and insight to take the right path for reaching the destination. Digital boards as the strategic advising role are also the “mastermind” behind digital transformation to oversee strategies, set policies, catalyze changes, and monitor performance. The real BoD’s dilemma is that driving the business forward is extremely difficult, it means looking into an unknown future and attempting to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities. What are the digital traits of contemporary board directors, and how to improve the digital boardroom effectiveness and maturity?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 6600+ 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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The “Generation” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

Harnessing the different experiences, perspectives and ideas of people from across multiple generations has enormous potential for societal advancement.

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

1 Many company's workforces span three or even four generations—Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Y (Millennials) and Z: each with different leadership, communication, working, and learning styles.

2 Each generation is defined by a set of stereotypes, and in fact, that different ages and worldviews learn differently and through different media and methods.

3 Getting different generations to work together is part of team building. This is important for any enterprise because their clients and customers will also come from diverse age groups.

4 Generations grow up with different beliefs and perspectives. The conditions of the economy, the state of the world, technology, and social trends all impact the overall behaviors of the generation.

5 All generations need to realize they can learn from each other, instead of assuming they each know everything they need to know to run a successful business.

6 Harnessing the different experiences, perspectives and ideas of people from across multiple generations has enormous potential for societal advancement.

7 Global businesses need to shed the tendency to bridge the generational differences and shape the cross-generational mindset with common digital traits and perceive a more complex and complete picture of their workforce.

8 It is a major advantage when a cross-generational and cross-cultural workforce comes to brainstorming for ideas, thoughts, and ways to get creative.

9 Now we are all C-generation (the “connected” generation) into the new hyper-connected digital society, to build the digital culture of sharing collective wisdom.

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The Key Abilities to Impact the Effectiveness of Senior Leadership

Leadership is an influence that is based on their ability to inspire, confidence to assert, wisdom to negotiate, and uniqueness to bridge.

Digital Paradigm means holism, hyper-connectivity, interdependence, and people-centricity. Leadership is complex and situational, the hardcore digital leadership capabilities are multidimensional, and there are numerous variables that need to be leveraged in assessing leadership effectiveness.

It takes time to build core leadership competency and maintain a consistent reputation. Here is a set of key abilities to impact the effectiveness of senior leadership.

Be capable of managing a more ambiguous/longer time frame set of issues: In a world where change is significantly speeding up and information is growing exponentially, ambiguity is a new reality. Business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy, it’s important to collect relevant information, capture business insight, be capable of managing the top prioritized issues, learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the uncertain issues of tomorrow, and define more than one way to achieve the business goals from the long term perspectives.

Highly complex, ambiguous and dynamic environments demand a greater understanding and application of systems thinking, take a holistic way to understand the interconnected world, and all its systems and subsystems work. The approach to deal with uncertainty and unpredictability also includes planning and allowing the acquisition of new information along the way. Top leaders today should have a certain level of ambiguity tolerance to inspire a culture of innovation and risk-taking, appreciate different perspectives, different knowledge, and different ways to frame a set of issues, and take different paths for experimenting, exploring, and solving problems creatively.

Be able to frame the right questions, count on the answer and understand the scope of the answer and any constraints on validity or accuracy: In this exponential era, we will be confronting a number of high-complex problems and unprecedented levels of uncertainty. The top leadership roles need to spend significant time on making both strategic and tactical decisions on a daily basis, facilitating and understanding the scope of answers and constraints for solving problems smoothly. It requires an integration of different sets of knowledge and digital fluency across multiple disciplines in order to understand complex business problems holistically and solve them systematically, without causing too many side effects.

Many business leaders fail to make effective decisions, part of the problem is that they frame the wrong question; which means they intend to do things right before doing the right things. Inappropriate framing is the root cause of most bad decisions and immature problem-solving. With overloading information and a shortened knowledge lifecycle, senior leaders are able to capture profound insight, re-frame the problems by asking the right questions to gain collective wisdom and come up with premium solutions.

Be able to keep things transparent and visible across interdisciplinary management approaches: Organizations today are at the crossroads where the segregations or silos of business units intend to reach across the aisles and work with each other respectively in order to unlock business performance. No doubt about it, transparency is a fundamental factor for performance because it enables effective communication, increases visibility, builds trust, enforces collaboration, manages change smoothly and integrates the loosely coupled functions into coherent business competency.

The goal of being able to keep things transparent is to transform the organization into the system approach, not through the command-control hierarchy only. Transparency is important at many levels from shop-floor workers to their supervisors and managers to directors and shareholders. A prerequisite for transparency is trust. Trust can only be built in an organizational environment conducive to ideal-seeking behavior. Trust for transparent performance is only possible if culture is nurtured formally or informally, by the leaders at the top who support an open and trusting work environment and enforce consistency throughout the organization. With transparency and trust, senior leadership can make influence from mindset to behavior, and evolve to what is needed next for radical changes and societal advancements.

Leadership is an influence that is based on their ability to inspire, confidence to assert, wisdom to negotiate, and uniqueness to bridge. An effective leader needs to have multidimensional thinking ability, broad business acumen with transdisciplinary knowledge and deep expertise in their domains to build key competency and improve leadership maturity.

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The Monthly “Performance Master” Summary: How to Measure Organizational Maturity Apr. 2020

Either at the individual or organizational level, maturity is the state of ripeness, quality, fluency, balance, and resilience.

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

  

      How to Measure Organizational Maturity

Three Aspects to Measure Organizational Maturity Organizations today are over-complex and hyper-competitive, management continues to keep the business running, but the lack of insight on how well their organization is doing for the long term. Is it functioning well or dysfunctional? Which management metrics shall you apply to measure organizational overall health and maturity? Who and what tools are being applied to measure if an organization is healthy or sick? Proactive or reactive? Intelligent or dumb? Customer-centric or operational driven?

How to Assess Business Capability Maturity Organization’s capabilities are business to execute its strategy and deliver value to its customers. Every surviving business has certain capabilities; however, only very few high-performing businesses have a high mature level of capabilities, for not only running the business today but also competing for the future. Hence, from the management perspective, it’s important to assess business capability maturity accordingly, as say going "if you want to understand something, you have to be able to measure it,". But what are some attributes and what are the measurement scales?

The New Book “Performance Master” Chapter V Introduction: Digital Performance Management Maturity The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of the business and every aspect of the organization. Digital transformation is not a stand-alone initiative, it is a continuous journey to adapt to the new normal of the dynamic business world. Metrics are part of transparent visual management allowing pulling. So, how to measure up the performance and improve the digital performance management maturity.

How to Measure the Maturity of Organizational Agility Many forward-looking organizations are moving from doing Agile to being agile if we can only manage what we measure, how to measure the maturity of organizational agility? The measuring needs to go beyond agile, because "agility" is a philosophy of managing complexity and unpredictability through empiricism. How do you measure a philosophy?

Three Aspects to Reach the Next Level of IT Maturity Either at the individual or organizational level, maturity is the state of ripeness, quality, fluency, balance, and resilience. IT is moving up its maturity from functioning to firm to delight, running full speed with less friction. IT maturity is based on overall business maturity. IT maturity can further accelerate business changes and make a leap of digital transformation. Here are three aspects to reach the next level of IT maturity.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6600 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes 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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The "Performance Master" Book Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 1 Introduction

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The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 5 Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Conclusion

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection I

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection II

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection III

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The Best “Trustworthy” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

The key to trust is to establish trustworthiness as a character trait and digital culture. 

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. 

It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Trustworthy” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Help people not to fail, and if they do, show yourself to be trustworthy by supporting them. Communicate, delegate, trust and hold accountable.

2  A company can have all the recognition, celebrations and such it wants, but unless the relationship is a trustworthy one, these activities will be of limited value in increasing engagement & employee performance.

3 The key to trust is to establish trustworthiness as a character trait and digital culture. To be able to innovate and be able to trust, have the courage to learn when you fail; which we all do every now and then, take responsibility for the failure, learn from it and move forward.

4 Behaving in a trustworthy manner is crucial: Using the forces of respect for every employee, versus fear and punishment. Belief in the high value of both team and each team member, profits, and performance.

5 Accept feedback that is truthful and accurate, constructive with good intention.

6 IT needs to behave more like an integral part of the business and build a trustworthy culture within IT, between IT and business, and within the organizational scope?
7 Being a leader means to support the effectiveness and achievement of final results, to set the tone for building a positive and inspiring working culture, to motivate, to be confident and trustworthy working with the people, communication with stakeholders, and transform vision into reality.

8 Logic and rhetoric have studied what makes arguments effective and trustworthy, valid so that you can feel confident in accepting the conclusion

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The “Nonlinear” Business Logic Behind Digital Organization

The nonlinear vertical business logic comes through different characteristics such as mixed structures, hyper-diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, and increased flux. Business management.

Business logic is a blanket term that covers several very different types of components such as business rules, workflows, algorithms, and integration logic. The very natural attempt of humans to take powerful techniques such as linear mathematics or logic and apply it to the world very quickly comes up against insurmountable difficulties.

Logic is often nonlinear and multidimensional in today’s “VUCA” world. Here are a few perspectives on the multifaceted logic behind running the contemporary business.

Decision Logic: Running a business is fundamentally iterative decision-making and problem-solving continuum. Without strategic clarity, clear logic, and system reasoning, decision making is simply becoming serendipitous with a high-rate of failures -the shortcomings inherent in a current decision-making knowledge context. Overly static decision processes or lack of structures will also cause ineffective decision-making. There is nonlinear logic behind decision making because there are so many variables you just have to weigh, sometimes you have to sacrifice to save and other times you need to disable one thing to enable another. Effective resource allocation and utilization is an important factor for decision making. A dynamic decision-making scenario helps to both leverage a logical decision process as well as evolve the emergent business property.

Modern businesses are systems, the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation. The nonlinear business decision logic involves both internal factors, such as decision situation, context, relevant knowledge, resource, etc, as well as external factors such as technical factors, political and legal conditions, competition and consumer demands, etc. Good decision-makers are the great thinker with logical thinking. The logical mind is not equal to conventional thinking, the most important capability of cognitive mind with strong logic is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding, identify problem areas, dig into root causes, in order to make sound decisions and choose solutions and move forward.

Business Model design logic: At the strategic level, business logic is nothing but Business Model to make a profit. The business model is an entire frame of elements that describe the intents and constraints of an organization. The logic behind it is about “why” the business works,“what” the business is all about or what it will do for customers. It is an analytical model that lists all of the sources of value, cost, and risk, and contains formulas with strong logic to interconnect them and come out with a detailed business plan.

Business models describe, as a system, how the pieces of a business fit together. It usually contains numeric values representing one's assumptions about the market and costs, etc. With strong logic, the business model designers should methodologically review a list of levers for business model components, and systematically generate the list of potential business model options, and then, narrow choices based on their business core capabilities in order to maximize the multidimensional business value.

Integration Logic: Digital organizations are dynamic and ever-evolving. There is a shift from what a system IS to what it DOES to its context; also a shift from seeing a system as a set of interconnected components to seeing a system as a set of interwoven threads. It’s important to understand the coherent Business Logic of the whole enterprise, mostly not at the level of part of the organization. It involves multiple integration logics such as technical integration, operations integration, GRC integration or customer-centric integration, etc. Without that whole picture with cohesive integration logic, separate parts of the organization will care for their own part and maybe for interfaces and not more

Integration has a set of costs and benefits that are determined by the situation and what is integrated. Because each integration effort perhaps spins off into chain reactions that may not be recognized until the budget is gone. Integration can be very difficult and hard to justify ROI. Implementing integration logic combined with the process maturity to ensure ROI, security, data consistency, and interoperability remains the goal of business to accelerate business performance.

The traditional management based on linear logic and reductionist management disciplines is outdated, causing silo, frictions, and more business pains. The nonlinear vertical business logic comes through different characteristics such as mixed structures, hyper-diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, and increased flux. Business management, especially at the senior management level, should take a holistic view, apply interdisciplinarity for planning, and practice integral digital management for improving organizational performance and maturity.

  

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The Monthly Communication Brief: The Framework and Tools to Enhance Communication Apr. 2020

Communication is the key to improve leadership effectiveness and modern management effectiveness. 

The great communicators are the high-quality leaders or professionals who can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding; the great communicators are the great artists who are fluent in creative expression or metaphorical description.

Communication is both art and science. How to set principles and develop practices to improve communication effectiveness and build communication competency?

          The Framework and Tools to Enhance Communication

The Digital Communication Framework with Three Vertices? Communication is the key to improve leadership effectiveness and modern management effectiveness. Great communicators are working to spread their messages throughout the organization in a diverse set of activities with mixed communication styles, and sometimes, they have to be fluent in multiple business dialects, with contextual intelligence; and keep communication flow with clarity and verification. Often, communication gaps caused by cognitive difference, ambiguous process or management bottleneck stifle changes and block creativity. At both the strategic and operational levels, how to apply the digital communication framework with three vertices to improve business communication transparency and effectiveness?

Leverage the Business Architecture as a Tool for Riding the Digital Transformation Tide The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. It’s important to leverage the business architecture as a navigation tool as Business Architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and transformation.

The Pros and Cons of 360-Degree Feedback systems 360 feedback is a widely adopted HR tool to accept feedback from varying sources, either for leadership development or employee performance management. However, there is both positive and negative feedback about the tool itself. What is the organization trying to accomplish, and how will a 360 process help achieve that? Do you think that multi-raters assessment methods are more likely to give accurate and easily-acceptable results from the employee's point of view?

How to Leverage Systems Thinking in Persuasion rather than Reasoning? Systems Thinking is to see the interconnected relationship between parts and the whole, it’s the ability to study the forest for understanding the context of trees. It’s an important reasoning tool for strategy crafting and decision making. From a communication perspective, what is the role of tools such as Systems Thinking in persuasion rather than reasoning?

What’s Inside the BoD’s Tool Box Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and velocity of the digital era, the directorship in any organization becomes more critical and challenging. The purpose of the governing body, or board of directors, is to direct the organization in the right direction, practice governance discipline, and monitor its performance. Corporate governance is to make sure that management is doing its job properly. The corporate board needs to shift from reactive to the active and proactive mode for adapting to the dynamic business environment with continuous disruptions. To improve the directorship effectiveness, what’s supposed to be inside the board of directors’ toolbox to enforce its governance discipline?

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

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The Best “Predictability” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

Engaging in creativity inevitably creates tension, conflict, and emotionally charged debates and disagreements because we need both control and predictability, creativity and change.

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

1 Organizations that thrive on managing strategic thinking - planning - action -effect cycle with consistency and predictability are excellent at maintaining business growth momentum and achieving higher-than-expected business results.

2 Exert lots of intelligence, look for insights, use the imagination, but make validation, predictability.

3 Reciprocity is an important part of building trust, improving learning agility, and allows predictability and stability in the relationship.

4 Running a stable business doesn’t mean to stand still or stagnate; It’s about planning and taking the logical steps for achieving well-defined goals to move forward with predictability.

5 Engaging in creativity inevitably creates tension, conflict, and emotionally charged debates and disagreements because we need both control and predictability, creativity and change.

6 Running a stable business doesn’t mean to stand still, or stagnate; It’s about planning and taking the logical steps for achieving well-defined goals to move forward with predictability.

7 Information Management makes information available and useful, exert lots of intelligence, do analytics, look for insights, leverage imagination, but make validation and predictability.

8 Organizations that thrive on consistency and predictability are excellent at maintaining business growth momentum by taking integrated digital management practices which are based on interdisciplinarity, holism, and management innovation experimenting.

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The Competitive Differentiators of Digital Organization

Differentiation is not the end game, value creation, and forward vision are.

Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. Organizations today face overwhelming growth of information, continuous disruptions often driven by technology and fierce competition. It takes strategic differentiation which is one of the many strategic options in generic business strategies available to overcome challenges.

The potential competitive differentiator cannot be created without proactive planning, dedicated implementing, and deliberate orchestrating

Having one of the most invaluable business assets - information and a powerful Information Management System: Information is the lifeblood of the digital organization. Real-time information is important for responding to changes and empowering the organizations with critical business insight in ways never possible before to build a competitive advantage. In fact, the competitive differentiation provided by information technology usually is more long-lived than differentiation provided by marketing efforts that can be copied easily.

A powerful Information Management System ensures that accurate information is accessible and shared within relevant business units with accuracy, consistency, synchronicity, as well as make the continuous harmonization of information over time. It enables organizations to see the future clearly; re-imagine business growth, enhance enterprise competency, and innovate products/services to further elevate digital business maturity.

Having the broadest, deepest knowledge across the industry and the business ecosystem: Organizations become over-complex and interdependent, knowledge is power, the power of knowledge can be released only when it’s used to create value. Part of taking knowledge seriously as a corporate asset involves assigning responsibility for knowledge within the organization, maintaining and improving knowledge flow and ensuring knowledge coherence. You need to not only assimilate the existing knowledge, but you also have to keep updating knowledge, create new knowledge and become the knowledge value creator to benefit your organization.

To improve knowledge management effectiveness, more attention needs to be placed on the conditions that allow knowledge to flow and generate business value rather than try to control it; it requires an extraordinary Knowledge Management research, recording, or retrieval capability. The ecosystem partners need to communicate, participate, negotiate, and cooperate with each other to keep knowledge flow and reinvent a super-conscious business.

Having absolutely the best and well-trained people with high skills and professional competency: To compete, businesses rely so much on their people assets or human capital. As our society has progressed from agricultural to industrial to the digital-techno-logical world, the masses of workers have progressed from being farmers, then factory workers to being knowledge workers who have specialized knowledge in order to perform their jobs with their brainpower. It requires an extraordinary talent management approach with recruitment, training, and retaining capability.

The true value of people, especially today’s knowledge workforce includes many tangible and intangible factors. It’s important to build digital workforce competency via development, enhancement, and coaching, etc. Today’s digital professionals are innovative workers, hard workers, knowledge workers, and intelligent workers. Talent managers need to capture both the individual's and the organizational needs, develop their people and set the scene for a process to achieve organizational goals at a technical, behavioral and attitudinal level.

Having the most innovative products, services and solutions: Innovation is not only externally oriented (relative to markets, customers, etc.) but can also be focused on the operations side within a firm as well as industry structure. Innovation involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel. The highly innovative organizations across sectors depend heavily on their technological knowledge and market capabilities to develop and commercialize innovation.

Innovation, as an individual process or collective process, helps us adapt, improve, grow and integrate. Although there is no one size fits all scenario to innovate, lots of tools are available to help us think differently, assess problems and come to solutions in novel ways. A disruptive product over time weakens as it moves towards the eventual commodity status. Companies have to keep searching for new opportunities to disrupt, rather than being disrupted. Structural innovation management requires laying out different thought processes, structures, or cultures for bringing ideas into full fruity.

Having customer engagement management capability which strengthens and binds the ties between the company and the customers: Assuming the company has a great product/service, creating meaningful, relevant, and compelling differentiation in the mind of customers is the challenge. From a customer perspective, if you are not different, you are a commodity. Customer expectations are based on the experience or reputation of delivering a specific capability as perceived by that customer's expectations.

People should be the center of innovation. The “Voice of the Customer" is a very important factor that you do research into what the customer really wants. The creation of "value" is always contextual depending on the situation the customer finds themselves in, personal - what the customer expects from the product or service, and intangible - culture. One of the critical issues is to focus on end-user need gaps even by looking beyond your current products/services categories. It requires re-thinking the way ‘engagements are managed’ so that customers are more willing to share insights, and develop customer-centric innovation competency.

Differentiation is not the end game, value creation, and forward vision are. A strategically competent organization has a deliberately close alignment among the company’s strategic direction and most distinctive capabilities, to create synergies in mobilizing change and driving digital transformation. So the end game is to maximize the multidimensional value of the company over the short, medium or long term, and make the vision rolling into reality.

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The Monthly “Problem-Solving Master” Book Tuning: The Aspect of Solving Complex Problems Apr. 2020

Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem,

The purpose of “Problem-Solving Master - Frame Problems Systematically and Solve Problems Creatively“ is to throw some light on how to understand, frame, and solve today’s multilayer, interdependent, and over-complex business problems effortlessly.

Digital leaders and professionals should self-aware of their role in problems, show professional maturity, and develop a good reputation as the problem-solver.

         The Aspect of Solving Complex Problems 

The Aspect of Complex Problem Solving Running a business is fundamentally an iterative problem-solving continuum. Given the complexity and uncertainty of the digital business world and given the challenges of hyper-connected and interdependent dynamic ecosystems, problem-solving today has a very wide scope, intricate factors, more often than not, lack of knowledge and scarcity of insight leads to poor problem-solving for the long run.

Apply Business Architecture to Solve Wild Problems? As we learn and understand more about this interdependent and hyper-connected digital world, which is a lot more complex than we realize, there’s an imperative need for systematic problem-solving. Fundamentally, running a business is an iterative problem-solving continuum. Problem-solving has a very wide scope today, digital leaders and professionals can leverage Business Architecture (BA) as a problem-solving framework and practical tool for taking multifaceted disciplines to solve problems effectively.

The Multistage Problem-Solving Scenario Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem, In the real world, problem-solving in the majority of organizations today is woefully inadequate, people lacking the right cognitive abilities and skills, usually never question what is exactly the problem because "it's the way things should be."

How to Create Multiple Pathways for Problem-Solving? Fundamentally, business or societal progress is made via a healthy cycle of problem-framing and problem-solving continuum. There is no magic formula for problem-solving, With the increasing pace of changes and shortened knowledge cycle, the best practices are outdated sooner than ever and “commonly known” methodology could be no longer working anymore when the circumstances change dramatically. You can't always wait for the "best" solution to emerge. It is important to experiment, explore, engage, and create multiple pathways to solve problems creatively.

Systems Thinking and Problem-Solving Systems Thinking is about understanding interconnected relationships between parts and the whole. The business problems today usually have many causes and can be very complex. Leveraging Systems Thinking to problem-solving includes framing the right problems, understanding the interconnected relationship between different problems, as well as figuring out potential solutions.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about 6600+ blogs 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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The Best “Consequence” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

 Forward-thinking digital businesses today should look for and advocate critical thinking and encourage independent thinking, appreciate thinkers of consequence, not thinkers of convenience.

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

1 When a problem occurs, it is an unintended consequence of the design. If a problem occurs due to the construction, not the design of the system, that particular problem is not an unintended consequence of the design. It is a consequence of the construction.

2 One possible cause of the blind spot in performance measurement is the fact that many organizations can neither sufficiently measure the value nor, as a consequence, articulate their value.

3 The purpose of assessing risk against consequence criteria is to determine what risk must be managed, and who needs to be involved in that management.

4 Regret is a dwelling in the past, a fixation on the already-occurred consequence of one or more defects among assumptions, data collection, analyses, the interpolation of unknowns from what was known, or execution that is part of the professional record.

5 Regret occurs as a direct consequence of understanding and empathizing with the consequences of something. One must not dwell upon it, but learn from it and improve.

6 Forward-thinking digital businesses today should look for and advocate critical thinking and encourage independent thinking, appreciate thinkers of consequence, not thinkers of convenience.

7 The alignment process becomes an analytical ‘eharmony’ process in which the actual configuration of the organization's strategy is a consequence of design and implementation strategies.

8 'Persuasion' is related to the form of reasoning - the form of selectivity in the presentation of information; making a proposal to accept or do something by pointing out that doing so will have a consequence that also should be aimed for.

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The Root Causes of Unnecessary Complexity of IT Organization

High mature organizations are nimbler, innovative, and fast for adapting to the business dynamic by building trust, creating synergy, and shaping competency.

Due to the changing nature of technology and an abundance of information, the IT organization has to leverage design thinking for reinventing itself to get digital ready.

Not investing enough time in common IT design issues would cause more unnecessary complexity and make IT suffer from the busyness and lower customer satisfaction; even worse, create the disconnect between IT and the business, and decelerate organizational performance




Siloed IT thinking: Many IT organizations are overloaded and understaffed, spend most of their time and resources on “keeping the lights on” or fixing symptoms only. They get stuck at the low level of maturity as a support center, silo function, with bottom-up, controller’s mindset, and traditional change-adverse attitude. IT investment is costly, and often the most important reason for IT project failure is "not knowing what businesses want" due to silo mentality and misunderstanding. Frequent and early feedback will mitigate directional problems and ensure the solution delivered is meeting customers’ satisfaction.

In the industrial age, businesses value specialization so much that they don't set up systems to consistently facilitate cross-discipline management practices. The only way to solve this problem is "co-design and co-development" and the concept of "fail fast to succeed sooner." Good leaders above the silo are supposed to interface effectively, piece all the individual puzzle pieces together, keep them involved and invested in the greater purpose or vision.

Ineffective IT architecture: IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. IT cannot architecture itself in isolation because IT management is the business of the entire company. IT management takes an inconsistent approach to design or manage processes and procedures or focus on technology only. Poor design and the absence of IT planning for improvement could serve as the main indicator of complacent IT.

Usually, the root cause of unnecessary IT management is a lack of alignment with business needs, the architects need to propel the architecture in the direction to gain the oversight of business capabilities, capture the foresight of business growth opportunities, as well as perceive and manage risks seamlessly.

Non-modular design and implementation: Organizations inadvertently increase the overall cost of IT, non- modular design creates disjointed strategies, silos of data, and integration nightmares. The symptoms of poor design include Outdated & silos of technical knowledge, lack of resilience in design, etc. Put some thought on resiliency or reuse in the design of things to avoid reinventing wheels.

Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system, align the different parts of the digital ecosystem to adopt more points of integration with modular capabilities and processes and have standard open interfaces. Keep rationalizing and optimizing. High mature organizations treat customers, channel partners, suppliers, and industry ecosystem participants as active agents who have permission to combine the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new experiences and expand their impact.

Lack of standardization: Standardardization is a process of embodied technical knowledge accessible to businesses that enable effective and efficient product and process development. There are all sorts of standardization, such as vocabulary - industry-standard codes, language standards, engineering standards, or performance standards, etc. Lack of standardization causes unnecessary complexity and increases cost.

Ideally, standardization should provide benefits through reuse that accelerates solution implementation and reduces expenses and risks. Standardization should be done at the solution level and should only occur when the functional requirements for the different groups are the same or where there is a core set of functional requirements that all groups need and additional requirements are easily added for optimizing design and cost. The goal is to achieve strategic coherence and cost/risk management effectiveness.

Myopic IT application funding and budget assignment: IT faces the pressure to transform from a cost center to a value creator, corporate IT has no choice but to embrace transformational change or literally face extinction. IT investment is not just about keeping the business running today, it needs to invest in the future by maximizing the full business potential. Myopic IT application funding and budget assignment cause IT failures from the long term perspective.

An effective resource allocation scenario helps to take advantage of business resources effectively, optimize cost, set priority, etc, to ensure most of the budget is allocated to cost/value proven business initiatives. The wise investment of advanced technologies can be truly helpful to manage IT budget efficiently, adapt to local changes flexibly, achieve better quality, fewer security risks, and higher IT management maturity.

IT effectiveness and maturity are not based on how many years that IT organizations have been around to support the business, but about how well IT can design to become nimbler, more innovative and how fast IT can adapt to the business dynamic by building trust, creating synergy, and shaping competency.

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