Informationconnectivity

Information management systems play a fundamental role in deploying and continuously opening new information from the dynamic business environment, circulating information within the ecosystem seamlessly and responding to changes continuously.

 Information brings about business ideas; business ideas generate lots of information. In the digital era, information potential directly impacts the potentiality of the company. 

Information is the gold mine of business, the quality of intelligence depends greatly on the quality of information and the effectiveness of information management.

Information accuracy: Data can be accurate, consistent, timely, but data can also be shared among many different business groups. From a science and engineering perspective, there is a change of emphasis, especially because of the Variety dimension of data such as velocity, variety, or value. Classification = Relevance. You might have very clean data on your customer profiles, but necessarily that data is incomplete or irrelevant. The accuracy and compromise will continue to coexist across the span of information management. Data quality doesn't mean you pursue the perfect data, but the good enough data being transformed into useful information to achieve its value.

By “quality data,” it means clean, organized, actionable data from which to extract relevant information and insight. Blending data from multiple sources has always been challenging, and in the information-exponential world, there is quality data, but there’s no “perfect” data. If you want high-quality information, it has to be standardized and consistent. The better the classification and structure of your data, the better your search and analytical capabilities will be. Real information systems are business-oriented to integrate different pieces of components, with how people leverage quality information for accomplishing business goals and objectives, and unleashing organizational potential.

Information interpretation and presentation: Data is critical. But it's just a first step, the data is a very important base, but the interpretation of those data is of equal importance. Just like the same story can be told with different points of view by different readers. How information is interpreted based on the perception, knowledge and communication ability of the interpreters. The conversation will move beyond dashboards, scorecards, data visualization. It will be about merging big data and traditional sources of data into a single interactive experience for the business user so they will be able to view and test different outcomes to "their story."

Information visualization will change how you think about the world. Right now there is a significant knowledge gap between having the data, interpreting it, and finally being about to visualize it. Information visualization can be big enough to show executives the big picture but needs to be nimble enough to stay focused. Get from 'big picture' initiatives down to how individual efforts contribute to corporate goals either strategically or tactically. It’s important to improve information reusability. The potential value of information depends on how the information will be used again in the future for either running a business or managing innovation in structural ways.

Information governance: Planning, staffing, undertaking and moderating are where data governance is being applied. More attention needs to be placed on the conditions that allow information to flow and generate value rather than try to manage or control information. Information governance doesn't always directly deal with information classification or taxonomy or categorization issues in most data deployments. It is most often a structure for what you are going to do, who is going to do it /how it is going to be done /and how it is going to be repeated, make sure you have architectures, standards, stewardship, compliance and all the other stuff covered.

Data Governance should be seen as a good habit, not a software package or an old solution. The end result is their "big data'' will be viewed as accurate and trustworthy. proper data governance is not a one time exercise but a constant review. Successful companies with great data governance have set up governance committees that include representatives from various parts of the business and agree on how the data will look, be deployed to create value. Big Data does not need a big governance, but it takes agile governance practice to orchestrate an organization's information strategy, to ensure the big value can be achieved from the abundance of data and information flow.

Information is the gold mine all forward-thinking organizations dig through to capture business foresight and customer insight. Information management systems play a fundamental role in deploying and continuously opening new information from the dynamic business environment, circulating information within the ecosystem seamlessly and responding to changes continuously.

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Innerstrategyconnectivity

Strategy implementation is a change management problem and people are the center of strategy management success.

Strategy management is about diagnosing the critical business problems, making choices, taking actions to solve them smoothly. Strategic planning and execution are a continuous cycle of organizational adaptation to a changing world. It's not just about strategic planning, but making the strategy a living thing. 

When strategy execution fails to achieve desired results, the management needs to ponder: Why does strategy execution unravel and how to improve strategy execution success rate? How to ensure the organization knows the tasks and knowledge required to sustain itself and create an environment and business systems to support those tasks being done and build the organizational competency.

Leadership character is a decisive factor for strategy execution: Statistically, strategy management has a very low success rate. Would a solid strategy still be plausible or does strategy suffer too where the character is flawed and trust is lost? Successful strategy execution is directly related to leadership character and capability from the top down. Without integrity of character, the best strategy will fail to inspire confidence to decide and courage to act. Leaders and managers should guide, direct, own the strategy they hold themselves accountable for; listen, communicate, and rally the team for the cause. So a leader of character has to have the courage to act; take the action that is right versus the one that is popular. Productivity can triple via authentic communication and organizational focus.

In practice though, the strategy is often sabotaged by lack of character and ineffective organizational culture; as it is the attention to the "soft stuff" that has a huge positive influence on productivity. Character distinguishes a person from others who don't demonstrate excellent and virtuous behaviors. Without character, the strategy is just a style without substance; a shelf-ware without actions; some casual behaviors without consistency. Authenticity, courage, consistency, etc, are all crucial elements of character. The character is a great beginning when the strategy is lacking. The strategy is how that state is realized externally. Character sustains leaders about who they really are; so they can envision with clarity and present their authentic self to make influence. Strategy pushes the business to concern where they want to go. It starts with a vision of the leaders, then developing a plan to achieve it. Without character, no strategy can save you.

Leadership inquisitiveness helps to dig through the root cause and improve strategy effectiveness: We live in the age of exponential information growth; command & control management style is out of steam. However, many executives who don't understand change management, or the nonlinear logic behind it, believe they can 'execute Strategy' by just telling their team to 'get on with it,' it usually fails due to misinterpretation, misalignment, or lack of effective performance management systems. Simply put, strategy execution unravels because of poor leadership. In other words, lack of accountabilities, lack of decision rights and inter & intra-divisional tensions.

Lead by questioning. The superior execution requires the leaders’ inquisitiveness to ask insightful questions, and be skeptical of conventional ways to do things. By making inquiries, the leaders can leverage strategic thinking to clarify what they intend to do in the future for building high-performance and high mature business. It is far easier to proactively structure and manage execution than to deal reactively with the ravages of execution. To improve strategic thinking and critical thinking in strategy management, the biggest mind-shift in moving from operation-driven to strategic-oriented is to switch from focusing on activities and processes to thinking about outcomes, cause-effect, sequence and consequence.

Leadership adaptability enhances an iterative strategy execution continuum and improves risk intelligence: The pace of change is increasing, the management challenge is in finding the appropriate balance between stability and adaptability, and managing strategy in a more dynamic and proactive mode. It is clear that in many cases, often the strategy that is eventually realized, in many cases, differs from the original plan. It's tough to make changes, particularly in large organizations with vested resources and cultures supporting "the way things have always been done." It’s the work of the business management to inspire and motivate, adapt to dynamic business environments, help people navigate through difficult changes and achieve their goals, deliberately make the close alignment among the company’s strategic direction, its most distinctive capabilities – people, process, technology to executive capability-based strategy smoothly.

A business system gains more and more energy until it crosses the point of system resilience. To improve business resilience, organizations should investigate hidden risks or uncover gray areas, and manage them well to improve their business maturity. There is a grey area between risk avoidance and risk-tolerance, the key is balance, give enough autonomy to the business management for making its own decisions on taking or avoiding risks, put in place a mandated risk tolerance structure via escalation requirements based on current risk ratings. It's crucial to provide information to the assurance lines that evaluate the business risk profile for analytical breakthroughs and managing the “shade of gray” effectively. 

The characteristic of the digital era is the increasing rate of change and continuous disruption, and this isn’t going to change. Preparing a strategic plan is important because it points the organization in a direction where it can maximize its value and reap as many benefits as possible. But without solid execution, strategy will fail to achieve expected results. As long as people approach strategy and execution as two sets of activities, they will continue to fail in achieving the expected benefit. Without character-based leadership, simply there is a lack of inspiration, passion, motivation, and engagement to implement the strategy. Without inquisitiveness, strategy becomes outdated sooner than what you think; without adaptability, the strategy execution cannot make proper adjustment, increase risk to fail and impede business performance. Hence, strategy implementation is a change management problem and people are the center of strategy management success.

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Innovativecommunication

Communication is the bridge to keep people evolving at the same page to understand things or co-solve problems.

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?

                             Innovative Communication 

Innovatecommunication Communication is the bridge between thoughts and the word. Communication is soft, but it’s one of the most critical factors for building trust and harnessing collaboration. Communication is complicated because there are differences in goals and contexts. These contexts can shift. Effective communicators are able to clarify why they communicate, what is the key message, as well as how to express and spread that out across the boundaries, in a diverse set of activities with mixed communication styles. Sometimes, they have to be fluent in multiple business/regional dialects, with contextual intelligence; and keep communication flow with verification.

Innovativecommunicationpersonas Communication is the bridge between thoughts and acts. Communication could happen anywhere, anytime. Communication has occurred when the message is received and understood. Communication is complex because there are different goals and contexts. Ineffective communication creates friction, conflicts, tensions. Without effective communication, human society simply cannot function smoothly.

Initiatevaryingcommunication Communication is the bridge to keep people evolving at the same page to understand things or co-solve problems. Miscommunication enlarges cognitive gaps and decelerates the speed of changes. Communication as a soft success factor is complicated and fuzzy” because there are differences in goals and contexts; varying formats and styles.

Innercommunicateeffectivelytoenablingchanges Change is inevitable, but the majority of organizational change initiatives fail to achieve the expected result. Communication is the key, but how to communicate more effectively to enable changes? Which methods connect best with organizations to support leadership and change? The more virtual your organization is through distance, location or shift, the more time you have to think about messages. What are they? How are they delivered? How do I make sure everyone gets the same message?

Leveragecommunicationinharnessinginnovation Digital is the age of co-creation. Communication is the mechanism that we use to think and learn - without others to communicate with, learning doesn't happen. When we think alone, we are using internalized speech and thus talking to ourselves. When we communicate with others, we are talking to each other to shape our ideas around problem-solving. However, there are no one-size-fits-all communication styles.

“Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to 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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Interdisicplinaryproblemprevention

Preventing problems logically, technically or psychologically is an interdisciplinary approach to improve risk resilience of the organization, improve business agility and maturity.

In today's interdependent global economy with high levels of unpredictability, uncertainty, and unrepeatability, problems become over-complex and interdependent. If the average problem-solvers fix symptoms, good problem-solvers diagnose the root causes and solve problems more effectively; then great problem-solvers can predict and prevent problems from happening. 

It’s important to set right principles, make information based analysis without ignoring gut-feelings, and take a logical problem-solving scenario.

Logically, simplifying complicated issues is an optimal choice for preventing problems or errors: Running a business is an iterative problem-solving continuum. There is a coherent relationship between simplicity and clarity. When an organization becomes overly complex and people get frustrated and annoyed by not being able to accomplish things easily; when there are varying confusions or tensions between different teams or divisions, problems or chains of problems are generated, silo created and the speed of business is decelerated. It drives the search for simpler concepts and methods to handle problems both at strategic and tactical level for reducing errors and if possible, preventing serious problems from happening.

People complicate the simple things when they don't have the answers. Great problem-solvers deepen their understanding of complexity, clarify the logic behind issues by putting themselves in a self-awareness position of experiencing, listening, or hearing all sides of problems/challenges, decode complexity and make it simple but purposeful in order to deal with conflicts or arguments thoughtfully. They develop their own level of skills to read between lines, untangle multi-thread logic behind issues, find common ground and initiate relevant dialogues, turn around the tough situations, avoid unnecessary pains, to prevent or handle problems mindfully.

Technically, preventing problems, managing risks and enabling continuous improvement require the power of information, leadership support: In order to prevent or solve a problem, you have to get an agreement that a problem or risk exists. In order to prevent a problem in a timely manner, it’s about applying quality data to forecast what will happen in the business and develop a predicting model based on the information you have. Know your information, then see what it predicts. The quality of your data defines the quality of your prediction, the effectiveness of risk management and problem-solving efficiency.

Information is the means to the end. It’s all in what you do with the information that ultimately matters. To predict and prevent problems, it’s important to integrate information -based insight into the business processes for identifying, assessing, preventing, and resolving problems as well as reporting the status to ensure business effectiveness. Broadly speaking, to prevent risks or problem from happening, it’s important to harness leadership, enhance information-based decision-making, cultivate an open culture, ask for feedback from others on what they believe the problem to be, or be prepared to hear something you might not like or agree with, for increasing digital awareness and prevent risks smoothly.

Psychologically, understanding the emotion cycle behind issues enables the management to prevent or manage problems smoothly: People are usually problem-creators; their behaviors are the trigger to problems, their negative psychology is usually the root cause to certain social problems. Thus, seeing through people via psychological lens helps to understand problems cognitively; sociologically, or historically. Even though you couldn’t predict anything beforehand, you can always imagine different scenarios based on “lessons learned” with many experiences involved in current or in the past. By understanding the proving psychological concepts and practicing them, businesses can instill positive psychology in their workforce, focusing on learning and problem-solving.

What is more interesting is what drives people’s emotions or perspectives from a problem management perspective? Great problem preventers understand how to influence the emotions of people and instill positive psychology, so people won’t create new problems. Actually they are empowered, intrinsically motivated to take initiatives; they are well trained and supported to solve problems large or small without causing further issues. Predicting and shaping human mindset and behavior is hard and there is always going to be an error. It is an interdisciplinary effort to awaken constructive thinking, possibilities in people to shape a great culture for psychological problem-prevention and innovative problem-solving.

Although not everything is predictable, information is still one of the most important assets of the company. It is a complex domain and information becomes meaningful when being sorted through and processed to make sure of its coherence. People are still the center of problem-solving; preventing problems logically, technically or psychologically is an interdisciplinary approach to improve risk resilience of the organization, improve business agility and maturity.

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Innernicheparameters

Seek uniqueness in everything; discovering and embracing talent in one another brings the full circle of connectedness, interdependence, and collective intelligence.

The digital era upon us is about authenticity, choice, empathy. To discover the uniqueness of people, it’s important to look at all aspects of individual traits, influences, creativity, experience, capability, achievements and hidden potential. 

The authenticity and niche of business leaders and professionals depend on a number of parameters, such as their unique mindset, the mix of knowledge and experience, the core professional competency, versatility, or their participation styles to make differences.

Unique thinking: The authenticity of people is based on the original thinking and cognitive ability first. People are different not because we look differently, but because we think differently. What might be the traits, dispositions, and motivational orientations that help people become unique in their thinking? The professional authenticity is based on their set of thought processes to decide, influence to motivate changes. Recognize talent by quality, authenticity, integrity, and appropriateness for purpose of thought or overall professional maturity.

A human's mind is the most invaluable thing to shape every progress, but also the root cause of many of mankind's problems. Cognitive competency refers to a growth mindset, logic, innovative thinking, or creativity, etc. Therefore, mindset advancement is one of the important parameters for selecting leaders or talent, putting them in the right position to solve the right issues. The power of the mind is the force to change the business or even the world for better. Societal progress is made through the work of progressive and foreseeable minds and responsible behaviors.

Interdisciplinary knowledge: The border of knowledge domains has a blurred scope, and knowledge is expanded in the continual base. To build the niche competency, talented people need to keep learning, share their fresh perspectives, understand new topics and get access to knowledge effortlessly. They should become more strategic and tactical for gaining new knowledge, developing cross disciplinary professional skills, integrating learning capacity into their professional competency, and building transferable professional capabilities.

Information nowadays is only a click away and the knowledge cycle is shortened significantly. Every individual, including the leader, has limited knowledge or viewpoint. To develop talent and cultivate a culture of learning, organizations today need to have an integral information and knowledge management approach, to shape the digital workforce and workplace in the way people can relate to themselves and to their experience of their environment and others around them, their unique voice can be heard and their contribution can be recognized.

Core competency: Every professional has their own journey of growth either personally or professionally based on their own perception, knowledge, talent, life experience, training, and refinement. With fierce competitions and frequent disruptions, they have to keep building dynamic capabilities by which talented professionals achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, collide, split, evolve, etc, as well as integrating different capabilities into core professional competencies.

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, business professionals have to build core competencies as a combination of capabilities with a focus: Each of these same capabilities may be combined in different fashions to yield multiple competencies. They are unique, not easy to replicate; to adapt to rapid changes; to be resilient when getting a setback, and to be focused on the long-term vision and strategy execution.

Versatile talent: Being authentic means to be who you are; being unique means you develop yourself in your own way to differentiate yourself from others. Versatility is not always the same as how many hobbies you have or how many activities you participate, to just keep your hands busy. Without focus, it’s harder to build a set of robust and coherent professional capabilities for making progressive career advancement. solving complex problems or deepening professional influence.

Being versatile means you are open to discover and develop new talent, being concentrated implies autonomy and self- management, develop talent, have your own filters to gain quality information; have discernment to make sound judgement about people and situations, and have great time to keep exploring new opportunities for growth. Dedicated people have the right dose of gravitas, better time management skills, with the intention to discover who they are, where they are going to be, whatever the state of awareness they arrive at, to develop niche talent continually.

Anticipated styles: Authenticity is not the product of pure manipulation. It should accurately reflect aspects of the professional’s inner self and outlook. Both substance and style are important to make the expression of authentic self and amplify unique professional influence. Substance is about why and what of, style is the way how something is presented as distinguished from its substance. People have different working and living anticipation styles, some are busy with saturated plans for all different activities and hobbies; others may concentrate on a few important things that matter to them. Every digital professional needs to shape their own unique style, figure out what to communicate and how to communicate ideas, and develop best practices to deepen their influences.

The new generation of professionals understand the difference between influence and authority, and, therefore, are completely at ease in influencing and participating in the team. They do not focus on hierarchy but on ideas, knowledge sharing and co-solving problems. Open-mindedness, inquisitiveness, collaboration, persuasiveness, flexibility, listening, empathy, inclusiveness, mentorship, entrepreneurship, etc., are the fitting style to anticipate and develop niche professional competency.

Seek uniqueness in everything; discovering and embracing talent in one another brings the full circle of connectedness, interdependence, and collective intelligence. Thus, people need to take a unique path at their own pace to stretch their strength and build their core competency. Collective progress can be accelerated when we follow the most advanced mindset, discover and develop talent, and participate in healthy, advanced activities and movement in a consistent way.

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Innovativesocietyii

There are many multinational businesses, but very few truly global organizations. There are a variety of human societies, but there is still a long way to go for shaping a harmonized global world.

Contemporary digital societies are organic, hybrid, interdependent, and living, constantly adapting to the ever-changing environment, compared to the industrial organizations and societies that were mechanical and overly hierarchical decades ago. Real societal progress is made through the work of progressive and foreseeable leaders and business professionals who can figure out how to trend the future, capture the great opportunities to unleash collective human potential and build a highly adaptive, intelligent and innovative society.

 

Process integration: Often, many organizations, or the society as a whole that get stuck at the low level of maturity function as a sum of pieces, rather than an integral whole. To run a coherent people-centric organization or society, integrating functional silos and customer experience with structural design should be a critical aspect of planning and architecting to improve organizational flexibility, sensitivity, and responsiveness. Process is one of the key factors in building business capability and executing organizational strategy. At the organizational level, businesses are always on and hyper-connected, there is no shortcut for developing a trustful workplace, transparency is a must. A business process is "smart" when it accommodates controlled excursions away from what would otherwise be a rigid sequence of steps. Build smart processes and improve process intelligence to ensure transparency and visibility, handle ad-hoc and exceptional matters smoothly

Effective processes improve organizational competency; efficient processes accelerate organizational speed. Consider the level of automation possible within the business process, as an additional parameter once the processes for improvement are identified. The purpose of process integration is to enforce collaboration and unification for creating business synergy and catalyze business growth continually. Those organizations that have better integration maturity outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to increasing pace of changes and develop long-term business competency. Process management is not a one time business initiative, but a tough journey of business improvement that the senior executives should understand and navigate through for building a highly adaptive society.

Products/services personalization: We are at the intersection of standardized industrial society and the personalized digital society. Personalization is the process of making a company's products and services extraordinarily relevant to the wants, needs or desires of customers, physically, spiritually or emotionally. It’s about gaining empathy to enforce design thinking and creativity to implement personalized solutions. Personalized solutions give customers an impression on how it can tailor their needs to solve their specific problems and achieve higher-than-expected results. It is a critical aspect of the future of societies and a significantly underutilized competitive advantage.

The inquiry of human nature - thinking, attitude, behavior, necessitates a personalized approach to delight customers and operate people-centric organizations. It helps us shift our thinking to a variety of perspectives and enables people to navigate a variety of cross-cultural situations and has greatly helped in developing tailored products and solutions. Make sure that the end user is getting maximum benefit from the products/services. In fact, providing personalized services or solutions to its customers has become the new normal to run a customer-centric organization and build an advanced society.

Cultural inclusion: Contemporary society has the right mix of information fluency, cultural diversity, and knowledge variety. Competitive advantage can be created by bringing together diverse groups of people whose mindsets, experiences, preferences, skills, and capabilities are additive to one another. With efficient collaboration platforms and tools, functional, industrial, geographical or societal territories are blurred, people can share knowledge and co-solve a variety of problems with common interest. However, our society is far away from fully digitized and globalized yet. In such a dynamic climate, those businesses or societies that are unwilling to genuinely embrace diversity, are unable to know how to tap their diverse resources, be inclusive and recognize merit and ideas, to unleash collective human potentiality.

The very characteristics of digital new normal are nonlinearity, adaptability, unrepeatability, unpredictability. We can learn a lot from different mindsets, cultures and positions, so the society as a whole can be competitive enough to keep surging further by encouraging thinking differently, by generating scenarios where there is no one solution to one problem, but many. Having an inclusive culture always helps us learn from diverse people, gain in-depth understanding of a variety of issues, develop an insight of fit vs. misfit, diversity vs. inclusiveness, inclusiveness vs. innovation. Inclusiveness needs to be well embedded in the business culture in a truly global society. The policy is still on the surface, it’s important to build an innovative and inclusive culture, this only happens when the inclusiveness mindset is available to the top leadership team and the processes become more integral to lubricate relationships and enhance knowledge-sharing and collaboration. .

There are many multinational businesses, but very few truly global organizations. There are a variety of human societies, but it is still a long way to go for shaping a harmonized global world. It’s important to infuse digital into every aspect of the organization. The society of the future will be organically developed and will be organized as an organic system which is self-adapting, self-renewing, generating patterns, creating novelty over time, building coherent competencies to keep reinventing itself and reach the next level of the organizational maturity.

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Initiateproblemsolvingscenario

Human progress is fundamentally achieved via an iterative problem-solving scenario.

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

  

Problem Solving Scenario

Initiate 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." The majority of organizations perhaps also lack a scientific framework or a set of methodologies or practices for effective problem-solving. It’s important to take multistage scenarios and select the right people for solving problems in the right way.

Innovativeproblemsolversparameters Problem-solving today has a very wide scope, intricate factors and multitude of perspectives. The main emphasis is in doing better pre-work, such as defining the situation and the "success criteria," taking consideration of the range of options, rather than the traditional "jump to solution" problem-solving method. The good scenario for problem-solving goes between flexibility and hard processes, with the ultimate goal to get higher than expected results.

Logical Problem-solving Scenario to Solve Problems Creatively? Creative problem-solving is about how to think unconventionally or from a new perspective for either defining or solving old or emergent problems. There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong. Problem-solving is both art and science. It is about seeing a problem, discovering the root cause, and actually finding a solution to that problem, not just the band-aid approach to fixing the symptom. Sometimes lack of creativity has become the problem. What’s the logical problem-solving scenario to solve problems creatively?.

Pitfalls in Problem-Solving Human progress is fundamentally achieved via an iterative problem-solving scenario. Either individuals or businesses will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their problem-solving capability. The art of problem-solving is that there are all sorts of problems and there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. The science of problem-solving is that there is the logic behind any problem, the more complex the problem is, the more important to leverage both analysis and synthesis for both breaking down the problems into smaller problems, as well as integrating different pieces of the puzzle to come up with a holistic solution without causing other problems or side effect. Here are three pitfalls in effective problem-solving.

Interdisciplinary Problem Solving The digital world is dynamic, nonlinear, uncertain, and volatile, emergence becomes apparent, for adapting to changes. Technically, running a business is an iterative problem-solving continuum. Problems today become much more complex than ever, oftentimes, problem-solving must be both systematic and innovative via multidimensional thought processes and cross-disciplinary knowledge and expertise. Organizations today need to achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, build dynamic business capabilities to implement strategy smoothly.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about 8500+ 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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Innerconnectionincapabilityarchitecture

To improve organizational capability maturity, architecture is a practical tool to communicate and facilitate, and sets up the ever-evolving environment for building business capability and accelerating value-added deliveries.

The exponential growth of information and the probability of surprising emergent properties bring both unprecedented opportunities and risks to organizations across industrial sectors today. Organization is at different stages of the business growth cycle, it perhaps requires diverse flows and differentiated business manageability. 

The architecture is used as an instrument to assess, design, and orchestrate capabilities, avoid implementation of redundancy, complexity, and duplicity, to improve overall business competency and maturity.

Are you getting the right Architectural oversight for business capabilities? Business capability develops organizational competency and enables business strategy implementation. There is a requirement of architectural oversight of business capability to understand the interdependence of capabilities and what level of transitions are required in future based on business strategic priorities, and also make an objective assessment of which level of maturity your organizations have arrived at. In specific, an objective assessment of capability includes the importance of each capability to the enterprise; different weighting may be applied to the capabilities of shaping organizational competency.

The architectural oversight of capability development allows budget, resources, and talent aligned with the business strategies/objectives scientifically. With architecture as an effective capability oversight tool, those business capabilities with gaps are evaluated deeply, it helps the management categorize capabilities into competitive necessities and competitive differentiators; design, build, and preserve core competency even as management expands and redefines the business.

How new capabilities are developed and existing capabilities are getting enhanced using Architecture: There is a variety of complexity in capability development. Architecture is used as a collaboration instrument to create a decent business capability map to identify capability patterns, analyze capability gaps in the context of future need, capability dependency or business capability reliance on technology capability, investment calculation, etc, and offer insight to senior management in making holistic investment decisions. Capability mapping can be an enormous help in understanding problems; allowing you to prioritize and focus on the “bigger picture,” also helping others figure out capability wise figures.

Due to the complexity of modern society with dynamic changes, capability development moves from fixed to dynamic, transactional to transformational, linear to nonlinear to solve more complex problems or thorny issues effectively. Business architecture as a “big picture” capability instrument tool produces a list of remediation work that needs completing to improve differentiated business capabilities. The capability development evolves and moves from the fundamental level to differentiated level between categories based on the technology evolution, business driver, or business model evolution etc.

Should organizations work backwards? Work on an opportunity and then figure out what is the capability/architecture existing out there: Organizational capabilities today are the result of its history which constrains what capabilities the firm can perform in the future. An effective capability architecture brings a structural view for business executives to keep track of their business capability development cycle, think outside the current constraints, look at the transition and state transformation of the enterprise for allowing an unknown future state to emerge.

Technically, enterprise capability architecture is an effective tool that performs “As-Is” & “To-be' ' outlines with gap analysis and risk assessment. Business capabilities are path-dependent, organizations should assess their current capabilities -how they impact the business performance, agility, and maturity. Then, which capabilities the future of the organization should sharpen in order to design the future of business. The management can reimagine the future needs of the company, then work backwards with retrospective, providing visual understanding of business logic, building needed capability to realize the “to-be” state of the organization.

Business architecture becomes a lens through which the management can understand multifaceted business relationships, optimize organizational functions and structures, and harness transformative changes through balancing generalization, specialization, and classification in the right way. To improve organizational capability maturity, architecture is a practical tool to communicate and facilitate, sets up the ever-evolving environment for building business capability and accelerating value-added deliveries that make the organization different and competitive.

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Innovativenewyear

Providing personalized services or solutions to its customers has become the new normal to run a people-centric organization.

 

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. 

Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most desired trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? How to lead toward the digital future effortlessly?

    Innovative New Year 

Innovativenewyeartime  Isn’t the New Year Day - a moment; we determine - our mind, dare to try -something, we are always like? Isn't New Year Day, a time, we hold on-the hope, with new perspective, build courage, to turn around? It is -another new year, approaching; standing- in front of us, abruptly…Old days were passing by ;out of dated thinking is-broken down; it is the time to -empty our mind, recharge energy proactively. Look inside of -ourselves, look back of -the history...

Innovativenewyear New Year's Day is the moment to slow down the daily busyness, learn from the past, live in today and look forward to the future.It’s almost the end of year, and the new year is only a few hours away. It’s the time to reflect on what we did; recharge energy and rejuvenate the passion for opening the new chapter of the life journey. The past is a time beyond reach; the present is when we have the time to think and make accomplishments;

Innovativeleadership Organizations not only need good managers to take care of today’s business; but also have to grow visionary leaders to lift their companies for long-term prosperity. The business is complex, the world is complex, and leadership is complex, leadership is about the future and change, innovation, and progress. Leadership differs by level, the type of organization, the stage of organizational evolution, the mindset of stakeholders, the complexity of the...

Unhealthycompetitions It’s the beginning of the new year, it’s also the great time to overcome shadow thinking and rejuvenate positive energy for moving forward confidently. In reality, the workplace competition is not always positive, it is the energy behind the competition that matters sometimes. The goals or motivation behind competition can be unhealthy and the competitive arena can produce a myriad of unwise mentality and negative externalities. How to encourage professionalism and healthy competitions for innovative problems-solving and transformative changes?

Identifyconstraintsofproblemsolving Quite many problems today are complex due to exponential growth of information and interdependent pieces of varying issues. There is a shortage of effective problem-solving management which could be translated to the capacity shortage for both defining and solving the right problems. It’s important to identify a variety of constraints, build a comprehensive problem-solving framework to integrate all important components for designing and developing innovative solutions and optimizing problem-solving management.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8500th 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.

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Innovationconnectivity

Businesses need people who are passionate about exploring new opportunities to awaken innovation and build competitive business advantage

Innovation is about thinking creatively and discovering alternative ways to solve problems. Digital is the age of innovation. Innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation.

To be an innovator of tomorrow, people or businesses have to keep learning, reflecting, updating their mindsets, knowledge, methodology, and approaches, becoming more adaptive, creating alternative ways of working, solving problems, and leading breakthrough transformation.

Innovation & reflection: Being innovative is a state of mind to keep coming up with great ideas and fresh viewpoints. It is, by nature, unique to each person. A self-reflecting mind continues to practice reflective thinking; understand yourselves and how to know who you are and your own style of thinking, responding, and interacting with surroundings. The process of reflection is the foundation of growth, learning, improvement, refinement and progress. Innovators present creatively disruptive traits, disrupt old ways, and inspire better ways to do things. Self-reflection and self-awareness provides clarity, gives you directional opportunities for personal growth and helps you focus on creative thinking and improvement.

There are many thought processes in creativity, but being mindful doesn’t mean you make your brain saturated or keep your hands always busy, on the contrary, you need to take time for being quiet, doing self-awareness and self-reflection. In order to be innovative, it’s critical to open your mind, expand your lens to understand things, people, as well as the interconnectivity between them. The world we see is dependent on the lens of proximity, the openness of mind and the perception of eyes. Some perceive the world as black and white, others see the full spectrum of color. It further reflects into our inner world, to discern and shape our viewpoints. Innovators demonstrate the very characteristics of vision, character, authenticity, creativity, empathy, humility, and wisdom. The world they perceive is more diversified, dynamic and hyper-connected for connecting dots and nurturing creativity.

Innovation & paradox: Innovation has the characteristic of paradox, the paradox is the result of two opposing truths existing side by side, which can be both right. There is a paradox in innovation management. Standardization is inside-the-box, and innovation is outside-the-box. Hence, organizations indeed need both, and in fact, cannot really exist without healthy leverage of both. Dealing with innovation paradox is also about how to strike the right balance of pushing and pulling, quick win and long term perspective.

Innovation is the process that can be managed, thus, it needs a set of principles and practices. The paradox is that all creative activities are subversive in questioning the status quo. Thinking outside the box is all about "rule breaking"; the more "unruly" you are, the more creative you are. Setting rules and goals for creativity goes against the very nature of creativity and innovation. Thus, it’s important to balance order and chaos, think critically, independently and in an out-of-box way. But also develop innovation principles in association with practices in a field of innovation activities and forming its content as an intellectual management discipline.

Innovation & adaptability: Adaptive thinking is an open mind that is able to adjust its thinking processes according to changes in its environment, or a learning mind to absorb all necessary knowledge and abstract it into insight and come up with creativity. Develop adaptability through openness, be able to seek ways and means of adjusting your perspective and those around you. Innovators have more balanced or adaptive personalities to fit in different circumstances by absorbing new knowledge-gain true understanding-capture insight-create new ideas.

Self-adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational flow with the consciousness to change and get ideas all the time. It is possible to see what enables a self-adaptive organism is an information-driven process feeding and sustaining it. So collectively, the digital organizations can self-discover, self-adaptive, self-organize. and self-renew, act intelligently and nimble enough to become more innovative.

Businesses need people who are passionate about exploring new opportunities to awaken innovation and build competitive business advantage. Hence, they should spot and recognize their innovators who can rise above the status quo, take on a new set of activities that have them involved in the strategy development process, and maximize the full potential of the digital organization.

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Incoherentpseudo

To overcome “pseudo” effects in business management, it is important to do deep analysis, gain empathy, and improve people-centricity.

The speed of change is accelerated, organizations large or small spend significant time and resources to deal with radical transformation or small changes such as adopting a new software application. 

There are many views to understand change, and there is no one size fits all formula to pursue it. Incoherent management approaches with following symptoms cause friction and business stagnation.

Pseudo planning: With the faster pace of changes and continuous disruptions, planning and forecasting become challenging because companies are still trying to “feel their way” through these economically stressful times. The management keeps busy, any strategic thinking seems to be taking a back seat to simply keeping things together, planning fallacy turns to be a business reality. One of the causes of planning fallacy is lack of information-based communication between varying shareholders. Often, objectives are not actionable because they have not been communicated properly to the people who are responsible for their delivery across organizational hierarchy.

Pseudo-planning is sometimes caused by pseudo-intelligence. It’s important to leverage information-based analytics to do the planning. Good planning is goal-directed, purposeful, and intelligent, and all intelligent activities are planned to reach well-set goals. The dynamic planning process is the continual attention to current changes in the organization and its external environment, and how this affects the future of the organization. It is important to get you off the ground and running, to ensure that there is sufficient time to prepare the stakeholders for the changes on the way.

Pseudo involvement: It’s the reality that people dislike change, prefer to do things that they always do. In many companies that get stuck at the low level of maturity, the challenges of stakeholder involvement are real for change management efforts. Pseudo-involvement" (a pretense of engagement) is the symptom that the management pushes for change; though employees may change their behavior for a while, their mindsets and attitude stay the same. The "button" that gets pushed is that leaders often assume they can pretend to involve people but actually do not intend to pay attention to their input at all. So over the long run this pseudo-involvement fails to engage employees and overcome resistance.

We should recognize that a lot of changes are unpleasant for those impacted. In change management, the resistance that delays more than anticipated often comes from these areas of the organization where employees were informed rather than involved. The goal of change management is to transform staff emotion from pseudo to enthusiastic, from reactive to proactive; enhance a healthy psychological cycle from denials-to-resistance to exploration to commitment.

Pseudo agile: Everything is in a constant state of flux. Agile is about iterative communication and iteration, continuous delivery and improvement. Agile is not only a software development methodology, but it is also a set of philosophy and principles. Agile transformation is not an easy journey. The best way to fail in agile transformation is to think that you will implement agile inside a business unit without taking into account the whole enterprise. Because it’s about to integrate. Take any agile software development method and think about all the business units and people who have to engage to create the product. It is a corporate management philosophy.

There is lots of confusion about agile. Often “Agile" is used as a near synonym for "unprofessionalism"; "pleasing selves"; failing to realize a business requirement "; we don't do estimates, we're agile"; "there is no documentation, we're agile." Every situation is different, every business is different and you have to fit the solution to the problem. In order to make a smooth agile transformation, you need wise decision makers, who can bear the risk, and drive everyone towards the common goals. From doing agile to being agile, it is the transformation from methodology adoption to mind shift, from process toning to culture refining to improve organizational agility.

With “VUCA” as a new normal, we cannot predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in current or in the past. To overcome “pseudo” effects in business management, it is important to gain empathy, improve people-centricity, making the seamless paradigm shift from information scarcity in the industrial age to knowledge abundance in the digital era; knitting all necessary elements together into competitive business advantage. Either individually or at the organizational level, it’s important to manage uncertainty and fill opportunities gaps, accelerate business growth and reach the next level of maturity.

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Innovativeleadershipix

The substances of leadership are all about vision, change, influence, fairness, and progression.

It is nevertheless true that the change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary. There are many things that need to be changed. There are many drivers behind changes. There is often no shortcut for change, but there are undiscovered paths to changes. Effective leaders have a very high comfort level with change and understand standing still is not an option in today's dynamic world. 

It’s crucial to build a culture that willingly confronts varying conflicts, tensions, and makes changes because the organizational leaders understand the driver of change and the psychology behind changes; people are empowered, intrinsically motivated, creative to take initiative and self-confident to explore the better way.

Vision: Vision inspires; without vision, change could be confused. Leadership vision is the guide light to steer the organization in the right direction and make changes proactively. Visionary leaders can see connections, perceive the new paradigm, and predict the trend. Vision should be grand enough to unify; dynamic enough to be able to react to any change in business direction or context, and stable enough to make it worthwhile by taking concerted effort to attain it.

There is no universal formula for changes, there are many choices you need to make for changes, especially for the large scale business transformation. The information-driven forecast can complement the vision, helps to clarify what the possible outcomes of making a certain choice are, as well as how to handle different change scenarios, etc. Visionary leaders intuitively frame the fresh picture, draw on the timeless wisdom, dare to take calculated risks for overcoming challenges, developing the human capital in terms of capacity building and adapting to the dynamism of the frequent technological or turbulent socio-economic trend.

Consistent integrity & seamless coherence: You are what you continue thinking and doing in a consistent way. Leadership quality is based on credibility, integrity, which depends on the consistency of people’s thinking, attitude, and behavior. Consistency enhances trust, improves quality, increases credibility and integrity. To drive and sustain changes, not only do quality leaders keep consistent in themselves; but they also look for consistency in their teams, in their organization as well as in the ecosystem, as consistency harnesses leadership influence and harmonizes humanities.

"Consistency" is essential in earning and holding the trust of each other, and it remains a favorite mantra for change leadership, quality management and the ability to deliver a shared brand promise across boundaries. Logic plus consistency lead to coherence which improves frictionless information flow and optimizes process design for improving change management effectiveness. The coherent people-centric change management capability is built via high-influential leadership, top executive generous sponsorship, the middle-management dedicated execution, and the bottom line engagement and full support.

Congruent representation of executive authority: Leadership is influence, and it’s often a collaborative effort. It’s important to paint an excellent picture of the interaction and interdependence between the leadership team for leading change smoothly. Trends, business models, the marketplace, etc, all start to influence the actual adoption and the "degree" of direct leadership due to changing circumstances. The key is to recognize that transformative change is at a strategic level and the tactical elements involve many additional factors to take many accumulated steps with a few leapfrog.

Corporate leadership team should clarify the purpose, objectives, strategy, and policy of the organizational change management, identify the root cause of the issues on hand, encourage organizational cultural changes, constantly question the status-quo, and rock the boat when necessary. Change practices might be different across organizations; the key is “context.” If the best practice you want to adopt is to be implemented in the same context, it could be scaled up across the company, amplify and sustain change impact.

Inclusiveness: Embraces inclusiveness and diversity, including different thinking styles and cognitive difference: Change is a dance between the top management and the affected parts of the organization. Many times, change is difficult because it involves both the learning curve and the emotional cycle behind it. To lead progressive change, understanding psychology behind change via empathy is a critical step in leading organizational transformation. Thus, an inclusive leadership team with cognitive difference, diversified knowledge and experience helps to understand change related issues from different angles, bringing invaluable feedback to improve change management success rate. Orienting people and making them aware of the inclusiveness of their organization or team helps them understand the value of harnessing the unique competency of the company

Change Management should be an adequate, logical, and systematic effort to any environmental shift. Change leaders should be able to leverage quality information to envision not only where a company believes it is going but also how it will get there and how it might be missing out on opportunities. Being inclusive means that the organization should focus on learning new things and how to surge forward in creating success stories to catalyze change. It is about how to work in harmony to amplify collective skills and abilities. The business leaders must work with the right mindset to create an inclusive organization with every dip in the business lifecycle for building a highly adaptive and innovative organization.

Leadership is a continuous journey of professional development. The substances of leadership are all about vision, change, influence, fairness, and progression. Change is an ongoing and differentiated business competency nowadays. A digital organization with strong change capability is an environment of growth and letting go, possibilities, chaos, solutions, innovation, creativity, and change are interconnected. In fact, going digital is a journey rather than a destination by navigating through changes in a structural way, predicting and preparing the next level of business growth as an iterative learning and changing continuum.

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Innovativeinsight

It’s the beginning of the new year with an innovation theme; being innovative is a growth mindset and proactive attitude.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with 8500+ blog postings 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. Here is the weekly insight of innovation leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Innovativeness It’s the beginning of the new year with an innovation theme; being innovative is a growth mindset and proactive attitude. Organizations today have to make strategic choices all the time about where and when and how they innovate, putting emphasis on identifying, developing unique innovation capabilities. There is a paradigm shift that is taking place in accelerating innovation and building a scalable innovation ecosystem. It’s important to connect wider dots for spurring fresh ideas and catalyzing innovation.

Innovativeperspectiveofcorporatebod? It’s the beginning of the year, corporate board directors make their resolution to shape a clear vision of their organizations, and share fresh perspectives on how to reinvent an innovative company. Driving digital paradigm shift is not a passive activity, it is a proactive pursuit. Corporate board directors are wise advisors and top leadership roles, able to ask insightful questions, look forward and actively position the business in the right place to take full advantage of opportunities and manage innovation in a structural way.

Innovativeleadership The business is complex, the world is complex, and leadership is complex, leadership is about the future and change, innovation, and progress. Leadership differs by level, the type of organization, the stage of organizational evolution, the mindset of stakeholders, the complexity of the business, and many other variables. The future of leaders has to deal with opposing views, cultures, constraints and competition across the global scope. At a high mature level, leaders change the course of the business by seeing beyond what all others see and by understanding issues from new perspectives.

Unhealthycompetitions It’s the beginning of the new year, it’s also the great time to overcome shadow thinking and rejuvenate positive energy for moving forward confidently. In reality, the workplace competition is not always positive, it is the energy behind the competition that matters sometimes. The goals or motivation behind competition can be unhealthy and the competitive arena can produce a myriad of unwise mentality and negative externalities. How to encourage professionalism and healthy competitions for innovative problems-solving and transformative changes?

Identifyconstraintsofproblemsolving Quite many problems today are complex due to exponential growth of information and interdependent pieces of varying issues. There is a shortage of effective problem-solving management which could be translated to the capacity shortage for both defining and solving the right problems. It’s important to identify a variety of constraints, build a comprehensive problem-solving framework to integrate all important components for designing and developing innovative solutions and optimizing problem-solving management.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking about the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes 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

Innovateorganizationviait

IT leaders need to practice inherently cross-functional leadership to ride emergent trends, bridge chasms, grasp opportunities and help the business achieve the “art of possible.”

Change is still the new year theme. Information Technology will continue to be the disruptive force behind transformative change. It was not so long ago when organizations did not see the opportunity for IT to enable the business strategy, let alone actually drive the business strategy. 

A value driven Information Technology organization needs to understand stakeholders’ expectations and propose a service/solution portfolio that corresponds to both demand and cost drivers with a focus on business priority and unlock the full potential of the company.

The guardian of information management makes information available and useful for growing the business and delighting customers: Things are changing faster than you think. Too long have you had silos for all the bits with so much resource and time and cost to pull it all together. IT has the “ownership & steward” role of information management to ensure information management integrity; Information quality – updated fact-based information, information assurance - information held is safe, secure and processes are legislatively compliant; information exploitation – enable and fully support business goals & objectives collaboratively. The information has to be approved and as up-to-date as practically possible in a system which can be accessed by people who need it to make better decisions.

Modern IT is an innovation engine of the company. Behind the scenes, information management is the crucial piece of solving the innovation puzzle by optimizing the value of information while minimizing risks. Information Management makes information available and useful for providing innovative ideas to either grow the business or delight customers. Information management systems play a fundamental role in deploying and continuously open to new information from the dynamic business environment, incorporating both ends and means, continuously open to new information from the dynamic business environment, and being able to circulate information within the ecosystem seamlessly and respond to changes continuously.

Continue to optimize business operation management capacity with a keen eye to grasp growth opportunities, manage risks, and improve operational efficiency by applying quality feedback and lightweight technologies seamlessly: With high expectations of customers, to keep IT relevant for the long run, IT shouldn’t spend all resources on gaining some short-term result. IT plays an important role in interpreting business issues into technology solutions, also, leveraging necessary resources to solve them for delivering multifaceted business value, enabling and catalyzing business innovation and beyond. IT leaders who are specialized generalists should have a balance of technology and business knowledge, and educate the business to understand multifaceted IT value. It’s critical to continue to optimize business operation management capacity, manage a healthy “run, grow, and transform” portfolio.

The complexity of running modern IT is due to business volatility, diversity, unpredictability, nonlinearity, rules and regulation, and increased business flux working and impacting together. IT shouldn’t act as a controller only, limit the business’s creativity. IT planning has to be steady and adaptive while coordinating different and sometimes competing for resources. To keep it relevant, IT has to shift its reputation from a cost center to a profit center. IT management that uses a structured approach will deliver results quicker; selecting the right tool to get the right result to improve quality; aligning the customer needs to meet the business goals will increase overall satisfaction.

IT leaders build a solid roadmap for managing a balanced “running, growing, and transforming” IT application portfolio: Some IT organizations are maintaining legacy apps at the most basic level, increasing business risk and their costs of maintenance. Often the disconnect part is the bigger issue that causes dysfunctional IT systems, enlarges IT-business speed, and slows down the business speed. IT organizations have finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectations. It’s important to align strategic goals with application portfolios, enforcing the ability for applications to integrate with each other and exchange messages/enable workflows between them as part of a business process value chain.

Nowadays, more and more new applications or new versions of the existing application will be delivered with on demand models. and making a strategic shift. IT Architecture is an important tool to deal with business initiatives, derived from strategy, improves visibility of applications, and maps the applications to the processes. IT vendor relationships are important to improve products/services reliability and innovativeness. As a trustworthy IT vendor focuses on process optimization, customer-tailored, and value deliveries, there's always an opportunity for improvement and to run IT as a value-added business partner.

IT leaders need to practice inherently cross-functional leadership to ride emergent trends, bridge chasms, grasp opportunities and help the business achieve the “art of possible.” IT is complex, IT investment is costly. Either at the strategic or operational level, IT leaders and professionals need to make better decisions regarding IT-enabled business initiatives, budgets, talent management, etc, to help their organization achieve either tangible value such cost savings efficiency, etc, or intangible business value such as brand equity, business growth enablement components of value. IT has to become the business optimizer for managing complexity and unlock organizational performance.

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