The CIO’s Digital Agenda: The Pitfalls in Digital IT Management Sep. 2016

With the increasing speed of changes, many organizations are inundated with tactical tasks and daily operational duties, they don’t spend enough time on scrutinizing the long term strategy and identify disastrous blind spots in order to make a smooth business transformation. To ride above the learning curve, how to identify and avoid those pitfalls in order to accelerate digital transformation?

         The Pitfalls in Digital IT Management

• Three Pitfalls in Running a Differentiated Digital IT? In the static industrial environment, many IT organizations only focus on the commodity level of services to “keep the lights on.” However, today’s digital business environment is unprecedentedly dynamic, complex and uncertain, the differentiation provided by innovative technology allows companies to reach the "long-tail" customer that previously was impossible or uneconomic. And technologies can push you out of business if you are not agile enough to change your business model or adapt to change timely. Either being different or being irrelevant, what are the pitfalls in running a differentiated digital IT?

• Five Pitfalls to Fail IT: IT plays a more significant role in leading changes and driving innovation in the organization than ever because  information is pervasive, permeating into everywhere in a contemporary business, and the speed of change is increasing nowadays. IT is also a critical element in improving business agility to adapt to changes. However, it doesn’t mean it's an easy job to run a high-performing IT organization. What are the pitfalls to fail IT, and how to overcome them in running a high mature digital IT?

• How to Avoid Pitfalls in Innovation Management: Innovation is both art and science. Innovation is a systematic way of applying creativity in the real life and business. In general, business innovation is a management discipline, and innovation management has overall very low success rate. The reasons why failure occurs vary widely, it is no wonder why many leaders are reluctant to act on bold ideas with good business potential due to the high likelihood of failure. So more specifically, what are the pitfalls in innovation management and how to manage innovation more effectively?
• Three Big Pitfalls in Digital Transformation? Digital makes a profound impact from specific function to business as a whole, the purpose of such radical digitalization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of customer delight and achieve high performing business result. High mature digital organizations have high-level digital capabilities not only to build digital innovations but also to drive enterprise-wide transformation. However, there are still many roadblocks on the way, and numerous pitfalls to fail the initiatives. Here are three huge barriers in digital transformation, and stop businesses from speeding up and improving agility and maturity?

• What are the Pitfalls in Measuring Innovative IT Effectively?  IT as an enterprise group is in a bigger identity crisis than ever, the industrial mode of IT running as a cost center no longer satisfies stakeholders and business partner anymore; the digital mode of IT means speed, agility, and innovation. IT needs to become business’s innovation engine, as the intersection of IT and people is where innovation happens! Companies need to invest in IT necessary to make the business advances through either incremental or radical innovation! However, what are the pitfalls in measuring such innovative IT effectively?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5+million page views with about #3100+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The New Book “Thinkingaire” Introduction Chapter 6 Highly Emotional Intelligent Minds

People with high EQ mind is more mature, maturity often refers to having a sound understanding of basics and making a fair judgment.

Emotional Intelligence in its simplest form is being aware of our emotions and managing them to get best out of the situation. EQ becomes more critical for leading in today’s digital dynamic with its characteristics of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. To dig deeper, is Emotional Intelligence fundamentally inherent, hardwired, can it be trained to some extent, or is it circumstantial?

The importance of Emotional Intelligence gains prominence as seniority increases: IQ is about the ability to use all the reasoning and cognitive skills that are important for digital professionals to solve complex problems today. When you move up and take more responsibility and accountability, EQ is important as well, because higher EQ helps you have an open mind, minimize biases, be cautiously optimistic, unpassionately examine the multitude of variables to make fair judgments or sound decisions, High EQ mind also helps you to be an effective listener and become more creative via taking calculated risks. All these qualities become critical when you are leading and have to realign constantly and motivate people to follow your direction when you deal with cross functional peers, where you do not have the authority and you have to be persuasive with other senior managers who have strong opinions about their own ways of doing things. The importance of EQ gains prominence as seniority increases, working with more people, getting more complicated tasks done and getting more relevance as you grow.

A self-disciplined mind: People with high EQ often has better self-discipline as well, because self-discipline is nothing but self-consciousness. They have better clarity of thoughts, and therefore do not get carried by the herd mentality. Without discipline, you do not manage to transform negative habits, and you do not create a new state of awareness where the self is nourished through the experience of positivity. Self-disciplined people are influential because they can harmonize their mind more often, to put it simply, walk the talk. People are drawn toward highly disciplined people because people like the stability of knowing that a person they are following is consistent and reliable. Hence, self-discipline reflects one’s EQ and it’s a crucial leadership quality.

A “Grit” Mind: Grit is the raw endurance, perseverance, and passion that keep you going despite obstacles. Grit and Emotional Intelligence are similar characteristics. A grit mind involves persistence, it involves a large tolerance for gratification, being able to hand adverse and negative feedback, push through, and stay focus. A grit mind strengthens all of your strengths, it aligns with one’s purpose beyond oneself. Grit comes with practice. The gritter you are, the grittier you can become. Grit can be the linchpin to connect four “D”s: First, you have the DESIRE to achieve something, and then with grit as a choice, you have the DETERMINATION to the end, To do this, you also need “DEDICATION,” and this means, to give your time systematically. And to do that takes one more fundamental thing: DISCIPLINE.

People with high EQ mind is more mature, maturity often refers to having a sound understanding of basics and making a fair judgment. Maturity is clarity of thoughts along with self-control, which helps in choosing the most appropriate reaction to any given situation. Maturity in a person can be defined as the ability to react, behave and respond appropriately to the situation encountered, or how he or she applies the thought process in managing the situation with respect to timeframe and thereby coming to the best possible solutions towards it. When a person knows the rules of life and has trained his or her mind to great levels of capability or skill, the person becomes fully developed with high EQ and thus has achieved maturity in the role.

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Thinkingaire" Book Chapter 6 High EQ Minds Introduction

Thinkingaire" Book Chapter 7 Paradoxical Minds Introduction

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The Management of IT is not just the “IT’s Business”

The management of IT is the integral management discipline to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

IT management is the management discipline and a set of practices that all of the information technology resources of the organization are managed in accordance with its priorities and needs. In fact, the management of IT is not just the IT department's business, it takes Board and top leadership team’s commitment, and the support from all level of the organization, in order to keep the information flow seamlessly across the functional border, and break down the silo walls through the latest digital technologies and collaboration tools.

Effective IT management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process smoothly: IT is not just an isolated support function or act as a controller only. With emergent digital technologies, the traditional functional boundaries are disappearing or at best becoming very murky. IT leaders are caught between "how do we adapt and leverage" and "how do we control." The worst thing to do is just putting the policy in place to mandate it comes through IT since business will perceive IT as not a real business partner. Hence, IT management effectiveness is not based on the inside-out IT operational lens, but through the outside-in business lens with the comprehensive understanding that a CIO would be able to identify true cost savings, workflow optimizations, and additional revenue opportunities for the entire company and improve its competency. The management of IT goes beyond IT because often information has to flow across functionally with the business ecosystem in order to capture the real business insight in a comprehensive way. It takes organizational-scope support to manage business information lifecycle. In some cases, IT organizations lag behind the LOB counterparts and no standard system of record. In fact, IT seldom has standard processes across all of the different teams. To improve IT management effectiveness, IT needs to address the underlying disparate tools and approaches to understanding holistic information in order to improve management capabilities. For all of these aspects, the management of IT is not just within IT.

IT failure is caused by the management of IT rather than just IT management: IT is the means to the end, not the end. That said, IT is not for its own sake, IT is about using technology to lower costs, improve operations, and increase revenue. It is not a function that can be handled only inside the IT department or by IT managers. The responsibility for evaluating the performance of IT investment lies squarely with the C-Level/board leadership team. Without full support from both top-down and bottom-up across the organizational scope, IT does not have all the information needed, IT staffs do not have all mechanism and authority to collect that information and they do not have all the skills necessary to evaluate the information. Without effective guidance/support from the board, the managers in the IT department are perhaps working in the dark - with the mushroom style management. An effective IT management can be achieved not only via the strong IT leadership but also needs to have the collaboration and fully support from the top leadership team.

High influential IT leaders have to understand the “ three side of coin”: IT, business, as well the interaction between IT and business: Most of the executive peers do not have a deep understanding of technology/process while effective CIOs have to know both the business and the technology side of things. You cannot know only one piece of the equation. IT provides a nervous system to the business. If information based business insight built is poor or not managed in a proper way, it may lead to wrong decisions and hence impact on business survival. Hence, business needs IT to provide better information to achieve improved profitability. IT management effectiveness can be achieved when IT delivers precise, authentic and on-time information to the business for making right decisions at right time to make efficient use of all other resources, improve enterprise revenue through better customer loyalty. IT management maturity totally depends on a deep understanding of the business and implementing it using IT tools and techniques. From IT leadership perspective, IT leaders need to practice expert power (business and technical knowledge) for advising the business and building mutual trust. Business and technical knowledge would help a CIO understand business priorities, opportunities, and the strategic need for IT. IT leaders should also develop the prestige power (connections) to bridge gaps and enforce business-IT relationship via effectively communicating the strategic importance of IT to the executive team.

IT is the business. The management of IT is the integral management discipline to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces; it takes the collaborative effort across the entire business scope to streamline processes and keep information flow seamlessly. IT needs to take more resource to do innovation, not just an over-controlling support function to keep the light on; it has to transform from a cost center to a value creator.

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The Monthly Digital Management Insight: How to Avoid Blind Spots Sep. 2016

There’s knowing unknown, and here’s unknowing unknown, so it's not a new topic about “Blind Spots.

With the increasing speed of changes, many organizations are inundated with tactical tasks and daily operational duties, they don’t spend enough time on scrutinizing the long term strategy and identify disastrous blind spots in order to make a smooth business transformation. Indeed, there are both blind spots in strategy formulation and execution. So how to identify and close those blind spots in order to accelerate digital transformation.

How to Close Blind Spots

• How Does a Senior Leader Deal With Blind spots? There’s knowing unknown, there’s unknowing unknown, so it's not a new topic about “Blind Spots,” everyone perhaps has some, but as a senior business leader (or any kind of leader), the blind spots will cloud your vision, trigger your negative emotion, cause your decision ineffectiveness, and screw your leadership competency. So what're the causes of the blind spot, and how to deal with them logically?

• Make Digital Leap via Closing Three Blind Spots Digital means changes, it brings unprecedented opportunities and numerous risks. Being static is no longer a choice for today’s digital professionals or businesses. If you do not move fast enough to adapt to changes, you already lag behind. Furthermore, digital dynamic creates many blind spots and generates quite a few gaps because of its “VUCA” characteristics - Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, also because different individuals and organizations evolve digital in the different speed. So how to drive the business in the fast lane and take digital leap via closing those fatal blind spots?

• Three Questions to Assess a Person’s “Blind Spot”: The business and the world are moving into deep, deep digital dynamic with velocity, complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and rapid changes. It is increasingly difficult to either steer the individual toward a progressive career path or navigate the business to the right direction with the right strategy. It also becomes more challenging to make effective decisions or sound judgment on the daily basis for both digital leaders and professionals. So how to assess a person’s “blind spot” in order to predict his/her ability to think thoroughly and decide wisely?

• How Do You Deal With Blind Spots? Top business leaders have a significant responsibility to steer their organization in the right direction, however, what’re their management blind spots result in decreasing business productivity and lowering organizational maturity and how to deal with these blind spots more effectively?

• Seven Biggest IT Blind Spots : Many IT organizations still survive in dark back office, no wonder, there are both strategic and operational blind spots result in decreasing business productivity and lowering organizational maturity. What are those fatal blind spots and how to avoid them?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5+million page views with about #3100+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating 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.

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The New Book “Thinkingaire” Introduction: Chapter 5 Intellectual Minds

Learning agility is the deepest quality of having an intellectual mind.

Intelligence is a cognitive process involving rational and abstract thinking. It’s goal-directed and purposeful, which means that all intelligent activities are planned to reach a self-determined goal. Intelligence is also the word we use to describe the potential ability. There are as many different ways to characterize intelligence as there are different types and forms of information impinging on our sense.

An understanding mind: There is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge by definition is “information, understanding, or skill that you get from experience or education. Intelligence is not just knowledge, it is a contextual understanding. You can’t truly have understanding without having knowledge and wisdom to guide you. In turn, we would realize the importance of questioning, examining, and challenging everything we think we know. Knowledge is having information, understanding is about knowing how different pieces of information relate to each other. Knowledge is transferable, but understanding is not transferable. It is impossible for another to experience something exactly the way you experience it. Attention and awareness are part of the process of transforming knowledge into understanding and understanding into wisdom.

A cognitive mind: In science, cognition is the set of mental abilities and processes related to knowledge, attention, memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language., etc. To put simply, it’s a mental process of acquiring knowledge through thought, experience, and senses. Cognition can happen in many different ways and combinations. The most important capability of cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge and address our ignorance and assumptions we make to minimize it. When we explore the mental process of acquiring new knowledge through thoughts, experiences, and senses, we realize that cognition involves exploring varieties of meanings or thoughts, removing old and establishing new relations. In neuronal terms, this involves disabling some of the old “wirings,” and making new connections. All of that requires a deliberate mental effort. A cognitive mind enables us o understand the different information we need to reach different conclusions and then consider the different tools or techniques available to gather, sort, organization and analyze information.

An insightful mind: Insight is the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of seeing intuitively. A person considered to be a visionary is someone who has insight into what others can’t see. Insight is thinking into the box after thinking out of the box, that means it integrates both creative thinking and analytical thinking, intuition and logic; the power of acute observation and deduction, questioning, connection, penetration, discernment, and perception. Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context, Insight is being able to identify the root cause of a problem or the core issues of the situation, which lead to understanding and resolution. To put briefly, insight is the ability to perceive clearly or in a deep way, and it’s a perception via multidimensional cognizance.

When things (including mind) are perceived intellectually, then they are looked at from the conscious mind and ordinary awareness, which means a quantifiable, logical, external perspective involving a lot of mental “doing” - envisioning, thinking, comparing, concluding, reasoning and planning, etc. Learning agility is the deepest quality of having an intellectual mind.

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Grease the Wheel of IT to Accelerate Digital Transformation

The role of IT today for many organizations is a business solutionary for information, automation, and innovation.

In the industrial age, traditional IT was running as an isolated support function with friction and perceived as a cost center. At the dawn of the Digital Era, with increasing speed of changes, IT needs to be reinvented to achieve its own potential and help the business maximize its overall performance as well. In practice, how to grease the wheel of IT to accelerate digital transformation.

Streamline information flow across functional boundaries: Information comes from the analysis of the data, technology allows for the storage, capture, manipulation, and presentation of data. Information and technology catalyze today's digital businesses. Information brings about business ideas and insight; business ideas generate lots of information. Information Systems are the backbone and provide valuable information for key decision making. In the organization with a lower level of maturity, the business is struggling with overly restrictive hierarchy and bureaucratic mentality, the silo walls and infighting are all the cause of business frictions. IT organization as the data steward of the organization has to overcome the functional barriers or office politics to keep information flow and manage the data lifecycle effectively. It is so critical to streamlining information flow across functional boundaries because fundamentally, Information Management is to make sure that the right information is in the right place at the right time and shared to the right persons.

Optimize business processes to keep ideas flow and implemented: Business frictions often stifle innovation and decrease organizational efficiency and productivity. Digital catalyzes the culture of innovation due to the convenience of learning and sharing. How these ideas are recognized, filtered and dealt with well become a crucial factor in an organization's success in producing digitized products and services. Traditional IT organizations have a controller’s mentality and sometimes lag behind the changes, as the result, the gaps between IT and business are enlarged, and the digital transformation is decelerated. To reinvent IT as an innovation engine means, IT needs to keep optimizing business processes, and reframing of business planning in order, build the appropriately configured innovation platform with scalability, for sharing and building ideas throughout the enterprise. As a result, innovation becomes a persistent, shared reality, even across silos and geographies. A well-considered tool/platform for innovation, in the given culture, operating environment, and governance could strengthen the innovation effort and success rate to the organization.

Grease the wheel of IT for the automation and delivery of product and service: Developing and delivering tools down to departments and users help those better do their job, is one of the most critical roles for IT. Automation is needed for efficiency to balance the demand and supply. The first stage in the journey to automation must be to examine every process and identify how it can be made more efficiently and how it connects to other processes, in order to run more streamlined and profitable operations. Many IT departments operate in silos with separate teams delivering separate functional task. Effective automation should first examine these functions and understand the connections and define any constraints in the system. Identify and remove the inefficiencies and rationalize the manual actions first. As this process goes along, see what can be automated by using the automation available natively within many of the tools you already have, but don’t use it because you don’t examine the processes from a holistic viewpoint on a regular basis.

The role of IT today for many organizations is a business solutionary for information, automation, and innovation. Although the real goal is, as the case with every part of the organization, helping the business become, stay, and increase profitability! The wheel of IT in the current business environment should be able to keep spinning to enabling business outcomes and accelerate digital transformation.

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“CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 6 Digital Strategy-Execution Continuum

"CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 5 Thirteen Digital Flavored IT

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The Monthly “Dot Connections” Vision vs. Leadership Sep. 2016

Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, and creativity is all about connecting the dots.

The effects of an increasingly digitalized 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 wanted trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Creativity is all about connecting the dots. Which dots shall you connect between vision and leadership in order  to accelerate digital transformation?

Vision vs. Leadership Sep. 2016

Vision vs. Strategy: Vision is where or who you want to be and strategy is how you can achieve or reach your goal. An unclear vision leads to defective strategy. Visions inspire; strategies compel; vision comes first, but sometimes vision appears and gets clear by working on the strategy. A vision describes the desired future position of the company. A strategy is an action or ways chosen to bring about the desired future, such as achievement of a goal.?

Vision vs. Insight? As businesses and the world move deeper and deeper into the digital world of VUCA -volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, one of the most desired traits for leaders is VISION, because leadership is all about direction, it shows people where to go; and the other equally important leadership trait is INSIGHT, because it brings up the big WHY - why do you go where you are going and how to get there. So more specifically, what are apple to apple comparisons between vision vs. insight?

The Future-Driven Leadership - Vision vs. Leadership  The substance of leadership never changes. It’s all about making the positive influence, and providing direction, both for oneself and others. Leadership is about CHANGE. It is a basic human ability to inspire self and others to look beyond limitations and make continuous improvement. This ability becomes a capability if we constantly nurture our basic human instincts of HUMILITY, CURIOSITY, and CREATIVITY. Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today.

Is Digital Leadership all about Vision - Vision vs. Digital Leadership? As businesses and the world move deeper and deeper into the digital world of VUCA -volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, leaders of any organization, large or small, must capture the foresight of digitalization, gain the insight upon globalization, and become knowledgeable about the terrain of the hyper-connected land out there. More specifically, leaders need to have a clear vision to zoom into the future and broadened knowledge to zoom out the reality, in order to guide the business through the digital transformation. However, is digital leadership all about vision?.

Leadership vs Vision: Leadership is about the future, leadership vision is not just about zooming in, but also stepping into the future, to bridge the gap between today and tomorrow; local and global, industrial age and digital era, the mind and the behavior. More specifically, what is leadership vision, do you have one?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with about #3100th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

Read More