Initiatingpolicymaking

Generally speaking, the policy is a set of principles for decision making or guidelines to drive behaviors.

Contemporary organizations are always on, inter-dependent and hyper connected, people are always the most important asset in any organization before, today, and future. By setting and following a right set of policies with flexible management disciplines, the digital workplace can be provocative, passionate, from letting go of the current reality to allowing an unknown future state to emerge, and solve problems at both strategic and tactical level proactively.

Do the policies say, and update policies to encourage desired changes. The more effortlessly you can align, integrate, and optimize the important business factors inside an organization, the closer you can solve crucial problems and accelerate performance.

Policy Making

 

Initiatingpolicymaking A set of good policies define why we make a decision one way or another or the scenario behind problem-solving. Policies need to serve a purpose and they are mandatory to follow through. However, in reality, in many organizations, just because a policy exists, it doesn't mean they will be effective or followed - that takes leadership maturity and peoples’ commitment.

Good Policy Making The policy as a compass will guide all levels of the organization to function more as the human body operates with the cells and organs in a cohesive way. It is a set of principles for decision making or guidelines to drive behaviors. Good policies make good things easy to do, and inspire progressive change. Forward thinking business leaders experiment with policies and practices that create a favorable and sustainable outcome.

Initiatives to Communicate Well and Make Good Policies The purpose of the board of directors is to direct the organization in the right direction and monitor its performance. The modern digital board has many responsibilities, such as leadership advising, strategy oversight, governance practices, performance monitor, and resource provision. The board directors as senior directorial roles have both privilege and responsibility to “talk the walk,” communicate thoroughly via multiple channels, abstract the insight from the variety of experiences, multidisciplinary knowledge and all sorts of feedback, set digital principles and make good policies to guide digital transformation smoothly. 

InitiatePositivePoliciesLookLike? Generally speaking, the policy is a set of principles for decision making or guidelines to drive behaviors. A policy is implemented via a protocol, process or practice, etc. When having positive policies, what do they look like, and how do they affect organizational performance and maturity?

Initiateovernancepractices  If corporate management is about what and how to run a successful organization for solving a set of problems; then corporate governance is about how well an organization is being run, whether it is in the right direction, as well as its overall problem-solving competency. The possible governance principles, methods, techniques, structures, etc., is based on the design of a management system which generally has a strong process element and the manner in which those management systems mesh with the governance arrangements and practices. 

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8300th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. 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 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.

Read More

Innovativeviapeoplecentricinvestment

People-centric management capability is built via the top executive's generous sponsorship, the middle-management dedicated execution, and the bottom line employees’ full support.

Organizations across the vertical sectors put dedicated efforts on building people centric organizations. Employee Satisfaction is a company’s ability to fulfill the physical, emotional, and psychological needs of its employees; whereas customer satisfaction is a company’s ability to fulfill emotional, and psychological needs of its customers. These two sources of information, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction should be linked. 

From the outside-in viewpoint, the customer is the focal point; from the inside-out, employees are the key to executing strategy. Organizations should look at both lenses, and leverage management practices in exploring cause & effect, and build truly people-centric business. What are the great questions to ask for improving people-centricity from a business investment perspective?

What investments can we make that lead to both staff and customer satisfaction? If you think you have employees as internal customers and clients as end customers, Customer Experience is the sum of all thoughts, experiences, feelings, reactions. Having a strong sense of investment and developing customer-centric app programs within the business means to build an integral and unique set of business capabilities to engage employees or delight customers and build a people-centric organization. To produce hassle free solutions, the management needs to collect feedback from customers: How is the customer going to use your solution? Does the new solution help users do things better than the current solution? What’s the adoption rate? Can it improve productivity or spur creativity? Is it intuitive, easy to use?

 Put emphasis on investing customer-centric innovation and deliver “no-nonsense” solutions. Point out that customer inquiries are not only support related, but can also foster better ways to solve problems. Customer centricity is built upon rigorous business’s capabilities and processes to shorten the customer-centric solution delivery cycles and satisfy customers consistently. For all critical business investments, it’s important to generate business cases and look for investments to be justified and governed on the basis of benefit delivery, return on investment and contribution to innovation

Should investments focus on staff satisfaction and capability as a means to deliver customer satisfaction: We are experiencing rapid change and exponential knowledge growth. People are human assets and capital. The employee can greatly influence the customer's perception of the company and its products or services. Talent analytics is crucial to put the right people in the right position, build a highly competitive digital workforce, and shape high-intelligent business. Talent analytics will bring business leaders together across the organization to share their experience and insight wherever there is a gap in the business system, identify competency gaps, and make wise investments.

Employee Experience itself has layers of optimization - work environment related and employment-related. Excellent employee experience directly influences exceptional customer experience, and great customer experience management is a differentiator for companies. Business value is often measured by consumption of the organizational assets and optimization of corporate investment in support of the business solutions that are identified within the organization's revenue producing stream by engaging employees to delight customers.

Does an investment directly focused on improving customer satisfaction, lead naturally to more satisfied staff? Customer Experience is the broad umbrella that you deliver from purchase throughout the full "journey." Customers need all of these areas to be a focus of the business if you want them to continue to buy and recommend your products/services to others. Customer-facing solutions are critical as at the end of the day, they generate revenue for the business, and they are the building blocks of business competency. There is a distinction between reactive (Customer Service) and Proactive (Customer Success). Together it defines the Customer Experience (interactive). Being proactive means by using data and feedback, a company can show agility in providing what the customer is looking for in products and services. If done well, this leads to customer success. People-centric success is proactive, identifying ways to help customers gain value from the product or service you provide.

Customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction are mutually reinforcing with each other. So when customers are happy with their experience, the staff’s job is well done, they also feel satisfied. When an organization has the capability of doing Customer Journey Mapping, they can use this to map Employee Journeys. The value a product or service has for a customer can be influenced by an employee he or she is in contact with. Employee engagement mirrors customer experience levels. Customer-interface employees such as CX designers are complex problem-solvers who can blend business objectives, technology capabilities and a rich understanding of users into innovative and compelling digital products and services.

People-centric management capability is built via the top executive's generous sponsorship, the middle-management dedicated execution, and the bottom line employees’ full support. Either mapping the behavior value chain or linking the workforce metrics to customer satisfaction, If the management accepts that sustainable business success requires satisfied customers, and that satisfied staff is more likely to satisfy customers, then they are exploring cause and effect rather than trade-offs and priorities. They can pull resources or talent together, harness cross-functional collaboration to work in the same direction for achieving people-centricity and long term business success.

Read More

Understandcomplexity

People should spend time to step back from undesired complexity or old routine to do the things, focus on things that are needed and eliminate those that are no longer required to be done.

Due to the “VUCA” digital new normal, change is unavoidable and digital disruption is inevitable. Businesses become complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of interdependent relationships, nonlinear interactions with un-repetitive activities and behavior, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability. 

As a matter of fact, complexity has increased exponentially and has become the part of digital new normal. There are unknown interactions and very high inner dynamics in complexity. Complexity management is both art and science.

Keep complexity transparent: Complexity is part of business new normal, complex organizations don’t always behave in a linear way, altering cultural, organizational, and operating systems can, therefore, have unintended consequences that may generate even more complexity. There is needed complexity and undesired complexity. Over-complexity in a business may be hiding simple and innovative ways to achieve premium outcomes because people involved just usually get the time to step back from the complexity. People continue to leverage conventional thinking and follow the old routine to do their work. Trust for transparent performance is only possible if the cultural grain, dictated formally or informally, by the leaders at the top support an open and trusting work environment to improve quality and improve business results.,

To deal with complexity as the growth pain, making business processes more transparent is the first step in order for people to understand and optimize complexity. besides consolidation. As organizational transparency will enable effective communication, build trust, enforce collaboration, manage change smoothly. Beside consolidation or modernization, integrate the loosely coupled functions into integrated business competency; integrate - integrate sub-strategy into a holistic corporate strategy; integrate organizational capabilities into core competencies; integrate best/next practices into innovative management disciplines.

Keep complexity coherent: There are many ways that cause complexity, and there are different angles that you can see through complexity. Look at complexity from a business impact perspective as well as from a solution perspective. problem-solving is the process to pursue simplicity and improve quality. Removing complexity (assumptions & dependencies) more clearly reveals the intentions of quality refinement and design maturity. The more complex the situation is; the more different approaches are needed to reach for understanding and keep complexity coherent. To break down silos and handle complex problems thoughtfully, digital leaders and professionals today need to be in a continuous learning mode with multidimensional thought processes, interdisciplinary knowledge, and apply interdisciplinary logic to deal with complexity in a structural way.

Logically, pay more attention to redundancy and eliminate waste. Simplifying the complicated thing is an optimal and smart choice to improve products/service quality and solving problems optimally. When problems or organizations become overly complex, people get frustrated by not being able to achieve their tasks easily. They start to clarify issues, search for better concepts, methods, technologies, or practices to optimize, find out the complexities within the system and break them down to simplify so that they can focus on things that are needed and eliminate those that are no longer required to be done. A healthy complexity management cycle is to optimize, simplify unnecessary complexity, retire legacy systems; reassess any systems that suck too much resource, budget, energy or require too much IT effort, look for what is common for maximum reuse and keep the complexity management coherent.

Keep complexity lubricate: As the saying is going, simplicity is the optimal level of complexity. Soft overcomes hard; keep things flowing to avoid getting stuck. From a design perspective, external simplicity is directly proportional to internal complexity. Optimized complexity can be revealed in information fluidity, relationship harmony; data/process coherence, and strategy management dynamism. Certain aspects of the problem space may be inherently complex. Keeping things simple and optimizing businesses is all about leveraging technologies to lower costs, improve operation, lubricate business relationships, increase revenue, and enhance complexity-simplicity optimization cycle. With optimized complexity, what we are adding is clarity, fluidity, quality and purpose.

When problems or organizations become overly complex, people get frustrated by not being able to achieve their tasks easily, they get stuck in their comfort zone, the business gets stagnated. To keep things moving forward, simplicity is the building blocks. Logically, simplifying complicated things, either business processes or methodologies is an optimal and smart choice to make progress. High performance companies follow the “Simplicity” principles, start to clarify issues, search for simpler concepts, methods, technologies, or practices to lubricate and innovate business. An organization can approach such a flow zone when it builds digital multipliers to improve business fluidity; to eliminate unnecessary complications, lower cost, fine-tune processes or structures, and leverage trade-offs to improve organizational flexibility, dexterity, and agility.

Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity are the new normal. People should spend time to step back from undesired complexity or old routine to do the things, focus on things that are needed and eliminate those that are no longer required to be done. “Less is more” needs to become the digital principle for tuning modern enterprise structure and design, optimizing complexity, improving business adaptability, responsiveness, flexibility, speed, and equilibrium.

Read More

Innovativenessiv

Being innovative is about overcoming the “we always do things like that” mentality and figuring out different ways to do things.

Being innovative means you need to get used to stepping outside the old box into unfamiliar territory, you discover and explore your own path. Innovators find more viewing spots than the rest. They discover angles to wiggle through where most are unable to even envision a place where there is an angle. They have the ability to connect unusual dots and see things via the broader lens.

Innovation & Intrapreneurship: Intrapreneurship has been recognized as a potentially viable and innovative exploring activity. With an increasing pace of changes and frequent disruptions, the existing business models or best practices are outdated sooner than ever and the “commonly known” method is no longer working anymore when the circumstances change. Advocating intrapreneurship in the "corporate" world has a lot to do with fostering an innovative environment to disrupt outdated mindsets, processes, cultures, business models, or practices, advocate changes, inspire innovation and accelerate the speed of changes.

Being entrepreneurial is first the mindset, then an attitude and skills are the easier part to be developed. Intrapreneurs demonstrate a willingness to “not know” and be able to source new possibilities; ask tough questions, channel energy, enthusiasm, and ideas, break the rules if necessary, propose and deploy new ideas, new processes, new adventures to adapt to change. Intrepreneur leaders have an open mind, balanced viewpoints to perceive success and failure objectively, show flexibility, break outdated rules, and present resilience. They do not get stuck at “we always do things like that” mentality, but leverage creativity tools (exploring, divergence, convergence) to arrive at a useful new box and figure out an alternative solution. Such mental toughness will help an organization become more resilient to gain benefit by thinking and doing things differently.

Innovation & Integration: Innovation is how to transform novel ideas to achieve its business value. Innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature, often, organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation, but a cross-domain collaboration. It’s important to bring a more integral, holistic perspective that can fix the misperception by integrating quality information, exploring multiple thought processes and varying opinions, willing to listen to the diverse viewpoints for understanding things as the whole, with interconnected parts and interdependent relations for managing and scaling up innovation systematically.

Being innovative is all about disrupting outdated thinking and old ways to do things, such as silo, dysfunction, complication, rigidity, etc, and pursuing an alternative way to solve problems. Information is an intensive piece of innovation nowadays. In terms of information-based problem-solving, people filter the information that comes their way, it often needs to refine information into business insight, integrate different stereotyped or mechanistic viewpoints, and search for fresh viewpoints that holistically examine a situation in order to solve the problem innovatively.

Innovation is a unique competency. Integration as a core business capability to enable the transition from a small innovation initiative to demonstrate value to a completely integrated solution. In many organizations, the overly rigid hierarchy and functional gaps create bottlenecks that prevent information flow and slow down business speed. Thus, organizations should consolidate, modernize, integrate, innovate, and optimize business processes, products, services, and capabilities all the time. And business management should pay specific attention to integration, quality, standards, regulations, etc, for improving the overall innovation manageability of the organization.

Innovation & Intuition: Uncertainty and risk-taking are the natural part of innovation, that’s why gut feeling or intuition plays a role for moving forward. Being intuitive is when you have a gut feeling about something. It is when there isn’t an exact answer to the puzzle because you don’t have all the pieces. Innovators are able to leverage their gut feelings for making bold decisions and taking actions promptly. Chaos needs to be navigated by intuition, but great innovators know how to put things together, and figure out innovative solutions.

Not every intuitor is an innovator, but many innovations have intuition in it. Cognitively, intuition is not about the emotional side of the mind only; sometimes it’s an inner calling. There's a critical link between innovation and intuition. Maybe creativity is more a process like flow. It starts somewhere, it is thought over, it is brought into relation and it is worked out. Intuition can help you "think fast," spur innovation, and avoid pitfalls on the way. To assess the effectiveness of intuitiveness, it’s important to clarify: Have you had an opportunity to learn, do you have sufficient knowledge? In learning, did you get good feedback? Are you truly an expert? As intuition is sort of fluency based on your knowledge or expertise, sometimes it can help you make better decisions about innovation, as well as take actions courageously.

Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment. Being innovative is about overcoming the “we always do things like that” mentality and figuring out different ways to do things. Innovators need to rise above the status quo and take on a new set of activities that have them involved in creative problem-solving and transformative changes.

Read More

Innovators & Innovativeness

To awaken innovation in the well-established organization, business leaders and professionals should think as an intrapreneur and act as a startup manager.

Digital is the age of innovation. And innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. 

The purpose of the book “Unpuzzling Innovation - Mastering Innovation Management in a Structural Way“ is to demystify innovation puzzles in a structural way.

Innovators & Innovativeness

Innovativenessiii Due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. True innovation always spurs certain disruption otherwise it is not innovation. People don't know how to react in front of something new, in front of something unknown. Innovators whose work continues to move forward, and lead breakthrough changes, are the ones who demonstrate curiosity to ask insightful questions and connect right dots, courage to challenge conventional thinking and concentration to solve critical problems creatively.

Innovativenessii Ceativity is an innate ability to think and produce, connect the dots to generate novel ideas. Innovativeness is a state of mind that requires the proper psychological level of mental balance, inner security, positive attitude, and genuine autonomy. Innovators show creative energy, proactive attitudes, and the blend of knowledge and ingenuity. The right dose of intellectual curiosity, confidence, and humility are all valid within the context of his or her creative intelligence.

Innovativeness Being innovative is a state of mind. Indeed, it’s all about how to disrupt the outdated thinking and the old way to do things. As innovators are people who can let their mind "free" of constraints in the environment in which they can stimulate the "invisible" by spurring creativity through a sounding board resonance or vibration. Innovativeness and insight mutually reinforce each other. Intelligence is the word we use to describe mental ability to recognize patterns; being innovative implies an ability to identify patterns or make unusual connections. Innovators can amplify their influence by connecting wider dots and bringing fresh perspectives.

Innovatorpersonas Innovation is about the future, without it, you lose sight of tomorrow. Innovation is an exceptional, exclusive, and realistic idea that separates you from others without a second thought. Innovation can happen anywhere in the organization and its ecosystem. Digital innovation has a broader spectrum, hybrid nature, and deep context. You have to systematically develop the business competency to execute it successfully, and that is something you do not accomplish overnight.

Innovativenessasastateofmind Innovation is simply about solving problems in alternative ways. There are a variety of cognitive thought processes that go into problem identification as well as solution discovery! Innovators are often unconventional thinkers who can identify hidden patterns, see things differently and do things in a unique way. Because you need to have the level of curiosity, desire to learn, observe deeply, with the natural ability to maintain an open and inquisitive mind. Innovation requires thinking beyond, as opposed to outside the box, altering or changing the frame of reference to create previously unconsidered solutions.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about 8300+ blog postings 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 to human progression.



"Unpuzzling Innovation" Amazon Order Link

"Unpuzzling Innovation" B&N Order Link

"Unpuzzling Innovation" iBook Order Link

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Slideshare Presentation

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 1 Innovation Classification

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 2 Innovation Principles

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 3 Digital Innovators

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 4 Connecting Innovation Dots

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 5 Digital Innovation Best & Next Practices

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 6 Innovation Paradox

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 7 Innovation Gaps and Pitfalls

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 8 Innovation Measurement

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Conclusion Mastering Innovation in a Structural Way

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection I

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection II

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection III

Read More

Innovatingviaperformancepotentialcontinuum

Reimagining the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different paths for unlocking business performance and potential needs to take a holistic approach.

Performance keeps the business lights on, churning the number; potential can lift up the business to the next cycle of growth. Forward-looking organizations explore emerging possibilities and unlock the organizational potential to perform in the future so that the business does not only “earn enough from today,” but “thrive in the future. 

A high potential organization can grow, innovate and transform by taking a systematic approach to identify and develop potentiality into a more solid form and transform it into differentiated business competency.

Performance is accumulated daily achievement; potential is about future performance worthy investment: Performance is an achievement made by business operation; potentiality is the worthy investment and hidden dimension to explore the emerging opportunities. There is performance at strategic and tactical level; there’s individual performance, team performance, and corporate performance. When performance is below their expectations, the management needs to make reasonable inquiries and connect all critical dots for diagnosing the problems and fine-tuning performance smoothly. When performance is under expectation, the management needs to ponder: Is it caused by a lagging mindset, immature capabilities or soft factors such as poor communication or inertia culture? Is it caused by a disconnected or distant layer of management hierarchy or disengaged employees? Is it caused by unclear priorities, bureaucracy, misaligned processes, or lack of clarity or direction, trust, or teamwork? Etc. It’s important to balance a diverse viewpoint of performance management and well define the right “outcome.” It’s strategic imperative to unlock potential – the future performance for accelerating business growth.

Business potentiality includes the overall organizational ability to perform in the future by discovering their strength and building their core competency. It is the worthy investment and hidden dimension to explore the emerging opportunities, explore new business models, and investigate different paths for growth. The potential portfolio investment needs to enhance the strategic objective alignment and accelerate future growth of the business. Performance exploitation is a crucial component of strategy management and potential exploration is an integral part of organizational transformation effort in a structural way. The purpose of performance management is to make continuous improvement. The importance of potentiality management really depends on how and what the organization is utilizing the potential for and how to invest collective potential for building the business competency.

Business intelligence provides clues on performance acceleration and potential maximization: Performance is about crunching data, but goes beyond it. Organizations can harness the power of data to provide the business with a more fact-based performance oversight. All forward thinking companies across the vertical industries are doing data mining to gain in-depth understanding of customers and employees, integrating business intelligence and corporate performance features to run a high performance business. Business Intelligence-led performance management implies the ability to make inferences or predictions from the performance data for making continuous performance improvement. Workforce analytics tools could be diagnostic, or prescriptive, when productivity is low, further analytics is needed for an understanding of the cause. Data based workforce intelligence can unlock collective human potential by leveraging the right talent to solve problems effectively.

Business intelligence with the visualized forms such as reports, dashboards etc, can help business managers understand the business operations from a historical, current and future perspective, in a succinct and visually understandable format. Identifying and exploring talent potentiality is both art and science. There are resources of the individuals who comprise the firm, such as knowledge, education, training, insights, experience, etc. Now with analytical intelligence capabilities combined with social pulse, the organization has more visibility of people's sentiments; they can work to make a motivating environment to increase employee values and optimize employee experiences.

Successful capacity planning and resource management unlock performance and unleash potential: Organizations and their leaders often become so preoccupied with bottom line performance that they lose sight of the human factors that account for it as well as the long term vision on how to unlock future performance. Organizations have limited assets, resources, talent, and time, capacity planning needs to be part of the corporate initiatives around continuous improvement. Corporate resource management needs to be integrated for not only producing high performance results today, but unleashing corporate potentiality.

In many organizations, resources management becomes a bottleneck for digital transformation success. How resource allocation is determined should be understood by all important parties. Create liaison and business partnership, figure out what the business needs, share unique business insight as to what capacity can provide, retool management to model powerful collaboration. Successful capacity planning and resource management are critical to ensure that resources are available before they are needed. The resource allocation scenario needs to be transparent, take advantage of resources effectively, optimize cost, set the right priority, and ensure that the business capacity plans are in line with the corporate direction to achieve the well-defined business goals.

Reimagining the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different paths for unlocking business performance and potential needs to take a holistic approach. Most organizations fail to manage performance effectively because they only focus on assessing past performance, improving processes or crunching numbers only. Performance Management is more as planning than tools, a robust performance management system needs to be more future-oriented, people-centric, output-driven, not process-driven, etc, to enhance a performance improvement-potential discovery continuum.

Read More

Innerlevelsofgovernance

Besides principles, processes, and practice enhancement, innovation, engagement, motivation, etc, are all crucial soft success factors of strong governance.

The organizational ecosystem environment is constantly changing, forcing the business to keep adjusting and streamline flow. There are natural frictions between different functions of the organization. In many companies, much of GRC management is reactive in the sense that there is a lot of rushing around trying to fix problems instead of preventing risks. Fundamentally, governance needs to focus on business effectiveness - doing the right thing, it has a direct link to each business and its processes. Not only from the financial results, but also from the involvement and signs being displayed about what guidance, values, and principles governing the company's commercial activities. Here are different levels of governance.

The demand/initiative level: Corporate governance is where resources are allocated to turning the strategy into a reality, from “as is” into “to be” state of the company. It’s important to optimize Demand Management Process – Implement an end to end demand management process which takes care of new business initiative validation, business case approval, development and design, user training and rollout, user adoption and change management and benefits realization. In a high mature organization, governance must be viewed and assessed at the enterprise level, by checkup: What is the best approach to begin implementing formal governance specifically aimed at improving the quality of demand? How can the "competition" for finite dollars be structured so that the end game, best benefit for the enterprise, is achieved? How much of a decision-making body and how do they make those decisions? as well as how to improve decision effectiveness and consistency at the different layers of the organizational hierarchy.

Although the governance structure is independent of the management structure, the governance process/mechanism can be embedded into the business process seamlessly. Governance is a sophisticated process that if well executed at the demand/initiative level, will lead to better decisions. It should be understood via multidimensional lenses such as innovation, people, process, technology, and multidimensional value perspectives, and be enforced holistically. Businesses need to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form

Governance at the architecture level is about optimization: Uncertainties and complexity are a common occurrence in any walk of our progress, be it social, professional. Solid governance discipline will allow not only to protect the existing value but also to create new value for its shareholders. Governance as components of the business architecture, includes business rules, legal requirements, operational requirements rules, financial compliance - so governance in this instance is items that influence the architecture relationships or other components options. In practice, the governance at the architectural level can be used to raise visibility and awareness for many business issues that are captured at the different levels of the organization, focusing on optimization and agility.

Governance evolves the leadership and organizational structures and processes that ensure the organization sustains and extends the enterprise strategies and objectives. Governance is an integral part of business strategy management. Corporations can select the effective business steering instrument which starts from the top of an organization (mission, vision, goals, and strategy) and handles every new business problem from all the relevant perspectives (IT, Finance, HR, Operations, etc.,). Governance principles need to be assessed, evaluated, and modified to address the latest technology trend as well as enforce business manageability via collaborating their geographically dispersed structures and talents. Sometimes governance standards can be taken too far and become their own bureaucracy. In that case, innovation would be stifled. Effective governance today needs to be people-centric, including engagement and motivation. Therefore, the right level of guidance and process from a business architecture perspective is important for optimization, innovation, and people-centricity.

At solution level, governance enforcement makes complex things less complex: The governance/oversight at solution level ensures that solution development maintains conformance to business needs, and the application development being carried out is well aligned with the business needs and the change that is taking place accordingly. The governance managers can walk through the scenario from generalization to specification by leveraging solution architecture to clarify: Where do we need framework and guidance? What are optimized processes, practical methodologies and best practices to optimize management? How to handle different stages of problem-solving with attention and proficiency to ensure success?

Keep in mind, there is no such thing as governance by dictate, governance might be the conception, development, and deployment of business solutions and exploration. Governance is a concept that applies to making decisions where multiple stakeholders need to be taken into account at the solution level. There needs to be a good mix of sourcing solutions, vendor management, and control so that employees, customers, management, and varying shareholders can safely meet together over short path decisions. To keep perfecting governance disciplines through solution architecture, you can take an existing or proposed solution and extract from it, by abstraction and generalization, to come up with an optimal set of guidelines, policies, processes or the next practices.

Besides principles, processes, and practice enhancement, innovation, engagement, motivation, etc, are all crucial soft success factors of strong governance. Organizations should identify patterns with soft human touch for good governance that sponsors and promotes engagement, motivation, and innovation as these are vital aspects of top-performing enterprises in the modern knowledge economy. It’s important to instill governance philosophy in organizational culture, as extrinsic reflection of culture is your business brand. With strong GRC guidelines, authorities, disciplines, roles and responsibilities and clearly defined processes are in place to improve organizational transparency, lubricate corporate relationships, and improve business effectiveness and maturity.

Read More

Innovateleadershipviacognitivepersonas

Leadership is more about the future but starts at today. Understanding cognitive intelligence and keeping cognitive fit help to improve leadership maturity and management effectiveness.

Modern society is a dynamic continuum with collective human progress being made through the work of foreseeable minds with cognitive competency which refers to growth mindset, clarified logic, and creativity. Organizational leaders with cognitive competency can make more objective perception, integrate thoughts to address ignorance, minimize assumptions for making sound judgments, develop creativity, and reinvent new knowledge, in order to drive changes smoothly, and move forward confidently.

Cognitive Progressor: Progress represents change. Without change, one cannot even stagnate. Without changing mindset, progress is only lip service. To bridge the leadership effectiveness gap, Business leaders need to understand the level of cognitive differences, keep learning and sharpen their thinking ability to improve cognitive competency. People with strong cognitive abilities continue expanding their cognitive threshold by learning and deepening understanding, sharpening leadership discipline in more profound and effective ways. It is important to build heterogeneous teams with the cognitive difference and complementary skills/capabilities/ background/ experience, to broaden the vision, and deepen understanding for amplifying innovation influence.

One of the most critical responsibilities for leaders is to make decisions, especially at the strategic level. It’s very important to avoid another pitfall – group thinking, which is often caused by the homogeneous team setting with cognitive gaps, describing a phenomenon that a group of people can make a more extreme decision than an individual. Cognitive understanding requires a person's ability to grasp or comprehend information and make logical reasoning. When you judge something, you form a critical opinion of it based on facts, discerned data, or preconceived notions. Heterogeneous team setting with cognitive differences improves collective decision effectiveness by complementing each other’s mindset, competency and harnessing the power of teamwork.

Cognitive innovator: Creativity is about thinking beyond conventional wisdom, or the “Out of Box” thinking. It is a sort of cognitive activity involving different dimensions of thinking and the multitude of thought processes such as association, perspective shifting, divergent thinking, etc. To be innovative, the mind needs to be open enough to embrace other minds’ perception, understand things from different angles, identify the leverage points of the system and connect the wider dots, in an attempt to come up with creative ideas and catalyze the culture of creativity.

Great leaders are cognitive innovators who present cognitive differences, capabilities, and experiences in multiple dimensions. They can build a high-innovative team composed of people who can generate lots of original ideas, as well as people who can navigate innovation strategy, implement these ideas, and evaluate innovation performance. To bridge cognitive gaps and maximize collective innovation potential, the inclusive team is more innovative, as good ideas are multidimensional, they take root in unsuspected places, they evolve with time and by unexpected connections for keeping great ideas flowing and reaping the benefits from them.

Cognitive influencer: Leadership is about the future and influence, we are inextricably linked today, in real time and in ways far more imminent than most realize. Organizational leaders need to make a profound influence by connecting the minds and touching the hearts all the time. It starts from the mindset level, great leaders demonstrate advanced thinking skills such as independent thinking, critical thinking, creative thinking, or systems thinking, etc, by analyzing and synthesizing information, digging deeper to gain contextual understanding by sensing the tones and embracing holism. They also show strong ethics, responsibility, integrity, and empathy.

The very goal of leadership influence is to inspire change and motivate actions, realizing corporate vision. You must be open minded, upward-focused, and demonstrate high levels of cognitive intelligence and various skills to drive changes you want to see. Strategic intelligence enables you to diagnose the problems; paradoxical intelligence helps to strike the right balance; system intelligence allows you to understand the interrelationship between parts and the whole; judgmental intelligence ensures sound judgments. Great leaders as cognitive influencers present empathy to understand others deep at the mindset level, being nonjudgmental, active listening, putting the right people in the right positions to solve right problems at the right timing.

Leadership is really a character and personal development for inspiring and leading progressive changes. It is the ability to influence with or without authority. The purpose of leadership is to awaken the possibility in people to deliver extraordinary results. You have to understand there are leadership keys you can master as a leader - your thinking, your emotions, your behavior and the actions you take. Understanding cognitive intelligence and keeping cognitive fit help to improve leadership maturity and management effectiveness.

Read More

Uniquecorproatecompetency

If business laggards only try to emulate, there is a risk that when you emulate your competitor, you start looking like them, perhaps you lose your authenticity and forget your business purpose.

There is no doubt we are moving from a static and linear business world to a hyper-connected, and interdependent digital era. In today’s business dynamic, there are always players starting with different resources and competitive positions; and there are always different complexities at a different time. Business leaders today need to identify the variety of capability gaps for strategy management; look ahead and be proactively looking for opportunities to improve; also compare your set of capabilities with competitors' to ensure that you are developing differentiated capabilities to gain unique business competency and build long term business advantage.

Portfolio management capability: Portfolio management is essential to successful corporate governance and as such, a comprehensive fusing of a firm's strategic capabilities. When a new initiative comes up, the senior stakeholders must be able to rate its importance, strengthen the strategic alignment of programs to prevent initiatives being undertaken that do not support the enterprise strategy. If the management focuses on short term value too much, this might not support long term strategy and vision in the end. If the management puts too much focus on long-term value, there may be a loss of momentum and engagement. The goal of portfolio management is to implement strategy with continuous deliveries, focus on value generation and competency building.

In order to make the portfolio executable, an organization needs to make sure that enough resources are available, the skill gaps have been closed, the teams can deliver programs on value, on cost, and on time. There needs to be a well-defined portfolio prioritization and governance process with business partners. Portfolio management standardization intends to generalize or figure out a “common formula” with varying management practices such as budget planning, capacity/resource management, talent management, and quality management, etc. Portfolio Management plays a significant role in portfolio prioritization, integration, and optimization, as well as successful corporate governance and as such, a comprehensive fusing of a firm's strategic capabilities.

Information management capability: Information is the lifeblood of digital business, to make an impact upon all different aspects of business. Managing information and the information position of an organization is what ought to be called Information Management is a scientific management discipline for enhancing information fluidity, interdependent processes, technologies updating, and a set of interdisciplinary management practices for moving the business to a dynamic, iterative, integral, and interactive business ecosystem. IT leaders need to break down the conventional thinking box and clarify information management goals from outside in business perspectives. They should go out and talk with varying shareholders, business executives and customers to know their pains and gains and understand their tastes as well as current and future needs, in order to deliver solutions fitting for customers’ wants and needs.

Information is one of the most critical puzzle pieces in innovation management. With abundant information permeating into every part of the organization, anyone with common sense can perceive that forward-thinking companies across the vertical sectors claim they are in the information technology business regardless of the sector and nature of the business. Innovative businesses integrate Information Technology as a value-added component of innovative solutions that meet customers’ needs, while reducing cost to market. Information technology systems play a fundamental role in building innovation hubs and clusters, deploying and operating the new ecosystems for harnessing collaborative innovation.

People management capability: People are always the weakest link in organizations. The manager needs to accomplish the goals through their people. They need to integrate talent management, change management, and performance management, build a strong incentive system to develop, motivate, and reward their people. They must also offer constructive advice when necessary; as well as collect feedback from their staff. High-effective managers gain an in-depth understanding of human traits such as empathy, humor, and creativity, so they can communicate, coach, and develop their people accordingly.

Traditional people management focuses on performance to keep the business lights on, and measure productivity of people quantitatively. But that is only part of people management. The workplace needs to be designed to help employees at all levels within an organization understand and develop their creative capacity to solve problems and explore opportunities in new and innovative ways. Humans are a complex asset and invaluable capital, including all the talent, competencies, and experience of your employees and managers. The combination of elements in a holistic people management approach enables the business not only to perform well today but also to maximize their potential for gaining long term business advantage. The maturity of a business capability would be based on the business ability to deliver on customer needs or to achieve the desired capability outcome, as the digital era is the age of customers.

Organizational capabilities have business outcomes; they collaborate with each other and are enabled by processes to integrate into differentiated business competency for successful strategy management. If business laggards only try to emulate, there is a risk that when you emulate your competitor, you start looking like them, perhaps you lose your authenticity and forget your business purpose. They need to ensure that their companies not only have “me too” type competitive necessity but also keep developing core competencies based on multilayered and integral business capabilities to gain the first mover advantage and develop unique corporate competencies.

Read More

Uncoverpathdependentfactors

The more effortlessly you can align, optimize, integrate, the closer you can accelerate performance and lead changes consistently.

Organizations all face fierce competitions, frequent disruptions, and an ambiguous digital environment. The paradigm shift is multidimensional expansion, whether the business can make strategic movement smoothly depends on the nature and culture of the organization and at which stage of maturity the business is. Dependency, interdependency is the natural relationship of today’s hyper-connected business. It is important to identify path-dependent enterprise factors, strengthen weak links, clarify business rules and logic, to improve the overall organizational maturity.

Knowledge is path-dependent: Everything exists in a constant state of change and knowledge of an evolving thing must keep updated. With the exponential growth of information, the boundary of knowledge domains has a blurred scope, knowledge does not stand still, it is path-dependent, and expanded in the continual base. Knowledge can either enhance cognitive understanding, but sometimes outdated knowledge misleads or causes distraction. Knowledge is not an isolated fact but needs to flow and transfer for achieving its business value. That means to discover an opportunity, you should have previous knowledge in the field to be able to deepen understanding and keep updating knowledge for capturing fresh insight for enabling effective problem-solving.

Managing information and knowledge is not just a technological problem, but a human problem, the knowledge path dependence can be traced back from historical or sociological perspective. 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 also have to keep updating knowledge, generate new knowledge and become the knowledge value creator to benefit your organization. The effectiveness of knowledge management directly impacts on the performance, responsiveness, and maturity of the business.

Business capability is path-dependent: Business capability is the ability to do things and achieve certain results. Capabilities may include dependencies; one is part of another or depends on another. A firm's capabilities today are the result of its history and this history constrains what capabilities the firm can perform in the future. It involves corporate learning and acting continuum. Thus, such business capabilities cannot be bought in the marketplace completely. A value stream view should allow you to demonstrate the capabilities necessary to deliver each and every product/service and then the capabilities that are necessary to support them, highlight the value of having a good understanding of current and future capabilities, and develop and improve the overall organizational competency.

The value of capability maps is to provide a useful tool to visualize the end-to-end enterprise, understand relationship/dependency between different capabilities, and make an objective assessment of their business capability maturity. Building an extensive and real-time digital organization is about developing the lego-like modular capability, and crafting scalable capabilities with quality and reusability. The strong capability mapping includes capability dependency identification, gap identification to ensure seamless capability integration and portfolio coherence, with the ultimate goal to implement a capability-based strategy.

The organizational design is path-dependent: Given “VUCA” digital new normal, today’s business is often operational in crisis and conflict environments. To improve the organizational maturity from functioning to firm to delight, organizational design should be part of the digital strategy management. The overly rigid organizational hierarchy will stifle changes and decelerate business flow. The organizational structure carries inherent business capabilities as to what can be achieved within its frame to enable a well-defined business strategy. It also reveals the corporate culture – how the decisions get made, as well as how the work gets done across the organization. At the business level, silo creates barriers that surface between different departments within the organization, it further causes miscommunication between varying shareholders, between top management and the rest of the organization, as well as between various business functions.

Fundamentally, the “organizational design problem” would be to build a great mix of organizational elements that enable the organizational interdependence, enhance cross-functional communication and collaboration, and harness a culture of learning and innovation. What works and what doesn´t, depends on the nature of the organizational interdependence. Organizational designs, culture, process are all correlated. The successful process improvement initiatives should have representation and input from organizational design management. You have to make sure that the organizational design is not only in alignment with the organizational culture, but also helps to cultivate a desired culture and improve business effectiveness, so collaborative interdependent organizations can reach a higher state of business maturity.

Many companies may be in business for many years but have not matured in their management disciplines. Surviving and thriving in today’s business dynamic requires structural flexibility, cross-functional collaboration, inter-relational process to reduce business frictions and deal with conflicts or disruptions that arise. Discovering interdependent business elements and tracking path-dependent factors are all crucial steps in leading business success in the long run. The more effortlessly you can align, optimize, integrate, the closer you can accelerate performance and lead changes consistently.

Read More

Innovativeboardleadership

Boards can contribute to both innovation management and management innovation. Innovation governance at the board level is critical to improving the overall innovation management success.

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 innovative boardroom with digital acumen.

  Innovative Board Leadership 

Innovateboardleadership Due to the “VUCA” new normal, leadership becomes more informative and situational as driving the business forward is extremely difficult. There are many blind spots clouding the vision and there are numerous roadblocks or hidden pitfalls on the way. That means you have to look into an unknown future and attempt to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities, pay attention to the myriad of internal, external, national or global forces that define and influence the way we do business these days.

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.

Innovation Gap-Minding in the BoardRoom With today's emphasis on innovation per se and its importance to corporate survival, it is common knowledge that innovation management requires the highest risk-taking at a strategic value chain; including organization, investments, and assets. The board can contribute to both innovation management and management innovation. Innovation governance at the board level is critical to improving the overall innovation management success.

Innovativeleadershipadvocacy We live in an era, full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. Corporate board directors have to keep evolving and gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between the business and its rich environment for shaping the future of business collaboratively. Leadership influence at the board level is important because the board directors play a significant role in setting good policies, advocating innovation and people-centricity, and improving organizational effectiveness and maturity.

Innovate Governance Upon the digital paradigm shift, we are experiencing at the moment, with the new characteristics such as hyper-connectivity and interdependence of the digital world we live in. The shift of governance is to focus on enterprise change. More organizations will make a bold step—reengineer or redesign the old fashioned governance control, focus on encouraging meaningful changes and nurturing innovation in a structural way. Top leaders should ask insightful questions and embrace multiple perspectives.


The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 8300+ blog postings 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.

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Slideshare Presentation
The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Amazon Order Link
The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" B& N Order Link
The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" IBook Order Link
The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Lulu Order Link
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

Read More

Innovativenessiii

Innovator is often an inspirational, inclusive, and interactive visionary and pathfinder.

Due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. True innovation always spurs certain disruption otherwise it is not innovation. 

People don't know how to react in front of something new, in front of something unknown. Innovators whose work continues to move forward, and lead breakthrough changes, are the ones who demonstrate curiosity to ask insightful questions and connect right dots, courage to challenge conventional thinking and concentration to solve critical problems creatively.

Innovation & Inclusiveness: Inclusive mindset embraces the full spectrum of diversity, facilitates and orchestrates a variety of differences such as cognitive differences, value differences, knowledge differences, cultural differences, etc, clarify the opportunity and articulate the vision. Includers are able to embrace multitude of viewpoints and the wealth of ideas since the value lies in the contributions of the individual to the organization. Innovators advocate inclusiveness; and inclusiveness nurtures innovation.

In the organizational setting, companies need to build an innovative and inclusive culture, spot includes who can build a compelling team and complement each other’s expertise to solve problems creatively; identify innovators who can look for complementary capabilities and skills, confront new ideas, and possibly embrace a fresh concept that you may have never imagined. This only happens when the ‘inclusiveness mindset’ is available with top management, and the focal point of management is to harness innovation and encourage creativity.

Innovation & Interaction: Innovation happens at the intersection of customers and organizations, people and technology. Quality interaction is the bridge between idea generation and implementation. Many good ideas do not get implemented because innovators fail in interesting others or in adapting to their input. Individually, the interaction between what is within us and how we project to the outside world is the bridge to trigger an innovative mindset. Collectively, to achieve the digital breakthrough, it’s important to build an innovative workforce which continues to depoliticize working culture, dismantle bureaucracy, and harness group interaction for sparking creativity.

Innovation starts with a vision, it's primarily a journey through which the innovator has to interact with others upon sharing ideas, upon how to implement ideas; if you don't trust inputs from others, how do you innovate. Far-sighted and determined innovators can make their ideas succeed by breaking down outdated rules, connecting interdisciplinary dots, harnessing heterogeneous group interactions, or accelerating knowledge transfer innovation. The collective creativity depends on varying factors. What matters is how creative are the individuals, and how open is the working environment to harness the spontaneity of people's interactions, as well as how productively those interactions can bring great ideas and implement them to achieve their value.

 
Innovation & Inspiration: Inspiration shapes a high-level view; it involves a bigger perspective and a longer range view to reimagine the very possibilities, awakening people to new possibilities by allowing them to transcend their ordinary experiences and limitations to something great, provoke deep thinking and stimulate innovation. Inspiration is the result of moments of insight with a sudden flash of understanding which illuminates the pattern understanding, dot connections, ultimately leading to innovation.

We are at the most creative status when we get inspired. Inspiration is best thought of as a surprising interaction between current knowledge and the updated information we receive for shaping exciting thoughts and generating fresh concepts and knowledge. Inspiration brings courage to break down old ways, and rejuvenate new thinking and innovation. It's also the source of developing "ability" and with it comes the flow of energy to drive and accomplish which has inspired you. Inspiration propels a person from apathy to possibility; from sympathy to empathy. Inspiration creates synergy in strengthening positive thinking, innovation, and influencing.

An innovator is often an inspirational, inclusive, and interactive visionary and a pathfinder, as being innovative means you need to get used to stepping outside that old box to unfamiliar territory, discover and explore your own path, be inclusive for embracing diverse viewpoints and interact with others to share and implement great ideas. Collectively, a highly innovative team is composed of complementary mindsets, competencies, has inclusive and progressive traits, embraces diverse viewpoints and maximizes the collective potential.

Read More

Indepthunderstandingofbusinessarchitecture

Business Architecture's role in designing and planning future enterprise is to gain the long term strategic-choreography perspectives, understand business complexity and its dynamic ecosystem.

Business Architecture is a series of methods and industry-standard practices to describe what you do, why, how, where, and who derives or how to do it. It can be very valuable for performing a wide array of services such as strategic positioning, communication facilitation, business process measurement and optimization, and other business functions. 

It is a practical tool for organizational leaders to blueprint the vision and recognize business transformation, have a very clear understanding of why their businesses exist, the value they bring to customers; seek strategic views of changes; work to perceive issues from multiple points of view, identify trade-offs; make choices, while continually remaining open to discovering errors in one’s reasoning. There are three characteristics of effective architecture.

Achieve excellence in delivery: Business Architecture role in designing and planning future enterprise helps to set up the environment for implementing business solutions such that it becomes hard to not do good design, and make a seamless shift from static to dynamic; from process-driven to capability-based, from inside-out operation driven to outside-in people centric. It aids in the transformation from strategy to plan and acts as an assurance of the quality of the strategy and contributes to improved quality of management. When people are at the center of organizational management, operational excellence, customer relationships, corporate brand reputation, and others are built on.

The real value of business architecture is to identify gaps, assumptions, risks, etc, balance multi-facet of facts and data, and keep the priorities in balance. Business Architecture is also a series of methods and industry-standard practices to describe what you do, why, how, where, and who derives or how to do it. As the stakeholders want to see value delivered, leverage business architecture to do gap analysis, identify current state, future state, compare the actual performance with the potential performance of the business; bring the new perspective to grow businesses and delight customers; capture opportunities and manage risks timely, and achieve excellence in delivery. It indicates the higher likelihood of success, lower risk of failure, earlier delivery of outcomes.

Deep technical perspective: It is true that technology grows exponentially and information thresholds business change and innovation. It is also true that the growth of technology may trigger a paradigm shift. Technology centrism becomes multidisciplinary. Increased use of technology is the most popular way that high performers seek to improve their flexibility and agility. Business Architecture helps to shape a longer view which is essential to make sure that the patterns and impacts the organization is going to provide in business solutions can be sustained not only in the "systems," but in the systems of people. It helps to achieve a situational balanced compromise or a trade-off. Architects suggest implementable solutions. There should not be any imbalance between the solution communicated and what the technical team understood it to be.


How the social and technical aspects of a workplace fit together directly impact the effectiveness and maturity of the company. Business architecture can be used as a collaboration instrument to create a decent capability map, help the management create an organizational strategy-capability mapping. Good business sense suggests that knowing an application's utilization and resource consumption are necessary to make good architecture decisions. Ideally, an architect and technical staff, coupled with each other, work well on IT enabled products/services development. It is about understanding the essential business requirements, why they're needed and what the benefits are. Only then, should the technological aspects come into play for implementing the tailored business solutions to either delight customers or build differentiated business competency.

Innovation withstanding market scrutiny: The world of business has never been more complex, as companies compete or collaborate as partners across ever-changing value chains to serve disparate and dynamic market segments. Business Architecture brings a systematic understanding of relationships, market dynamics, ecosystems, and the connections between related business functions. So the most innovative companies can take advantage of changes in the external environment, continually revamp their business models to achieve competitive advantage. Success comes to those who can bring the value that they create to the attention of their stakeholders by driving changes and innovation continually, to obtain specific business outcomes, such as increased agility, productivity, and profitability.

One of the problems with views in the enterprise today is that they are not integrated. There are different views of business evolution. The most commonly useful view includes influencers, drivers, business models, and initiatives for change, etc. Business Architecture is a useful tool to leverage a multitude of for integrating diverse views and harnessing a holistic management discipline. It is a practical tool to explore macro-environment critical success factors and navigate critical business activities to reduce uncertainty and deal with complexity. 

Business Architecture's role in designing and planning future enterprise is to gain the long term strategic-choreography perspectives, understand business complexity and its dynamic ecosystem. It enhances holistic and design thinking for innovative problem-solving. It is a master planner tool that can bring greater awareness of intricacies and value of the ever-evolving business systems, foster collaboration, build trust, keep rationalization and optimization, and ultimately lead to greater autonomy.

Read More