The Best “Reciprocity” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar, 2020

Everyone has a voice and every voice carries weight. To have this happen reliably requires a bidirectional and reciprocal cycle of questions and answers.

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

1 Reciprocity is an important part of building trust and allows predictability and stability in the relationship.

2 Reciprocity works because of shared goals, which create less stress on the relationship.

3 Everyone has a voice and every voice carries weight. To have this happen reliably requires a bidirectional and reciprocal cycle of questions and answers.

4 IT should also shift the management style from command and control to become more reciprocal, collaborative, and holistic.

5 Asking questions, besides telling, is an important tool to practice reciprocal management and make a positive change.

6 Building a reciprocal digital IT organization is all about enforcing communication, enhancing collaboration, building trust, and bridging gaps.

7 Business agility is the reciprocal of the lag time between recognizing an emerging business opportunity and being able to act on that opportunity.

8 The architecture and design are locked in a reciprocal feedback loop, and therefore co-evolve and actual designs have a large emergent aspect.

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Innovation Architecture and Competency

 It requires an Innovation Architecture and some degree of a “hard-wired” innovation system with interdisciplinary knowledge to build innovation competency.

Innovation is a managed process of transforming novel ideas to achieve its business value and it is the development of a new combination of available resources in a way that solves real-world problems in a suitable way. This is especially true if you are looking at new sources of value that haven't been tapped before. Managing innovation to fit the market often requires strategies, architecture designs and product introductions that build towards the long-term perspective. You have to manage it in the right way with the right elements strategically and systematically to achieve consistent business results.

Innovation rules: Innovation follows fundamental principles or basic rules, which are adapted depending on the company's situation and ambition. Setting rules to keep the focus on managing innovation effectively is important to ensure that innovation efforts are steered in the right direction and reaping profit. The right set of rules is not for limiting your imagination, but for framing a structural management system to identify opportunities and mitigate risks. On the other side, innovation is about figuring out better ways to do things, often it has to break some outdated rule, but needs a level of guidance. Rule-breaking or rule-making demands insight, understanding, courage, persistence, among other things.

Innovation strategy: Highly innovative organizations usually have a good innovation strategy to frame effective constraints and facilitate digital communications to diagnose problems and generate fresh ideas by tapping the business ecosystem. A good innovation strategy allows you a number of things such as identifying interconnections and interdependencies, understanding flows or the lack of them, spotting business opportunities or risks, prioritizing and making choices, and formulating creative or unconventional solutions to solve problems. A well-defined innovation strategy helps to clarify: What should the innovation effort focus on - defending the core, penetrating the adjacencies, or entering the white space and how the resources will be balanced across these domains? How can the company make it - through internal development or organic growth?

Innovation process: The “hard” issues to stifle innovation is that the systems, processes or technology many organizations are using to capture innovation value are becoming inefficient in this rapidly changing world. An organization that has a lightweight innovation process which allows ideas to flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured; shields innovation teams from the organization’s dominant logic and established standard or operating procedures, supports both widespread incremental innovation as well as the rarer “step-change” innovation in products/services, will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process.

Innovation capability: Innovation happens at the intersection of market insight and technological know-how. Digital innovation has a broader spectrum with hybrid nature including incremental innovation, evolutionary innovation, and radical innovation. Often, organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. Build a focused but balanced innovation portfolio that maximizes the output from the innovation team, in terms of adding value to the organization by delivering solutions to the aforementioned attribute and building differentiated innovation capabilities. It is a strategic imperative to develop the organizational level innovation competency.

Innovation governance: Innovation cannot be separated from a specific business purpose and in a broad context, governance is critical for meaningful innovation to deliver business value. However, the problem with governance is that the people enforce governance normally have a frame of reference based on their own experiences, sometimes traditional governance restricts and even actively discourages innovation. Or sometimes governance "standards" can be taken too far and become their own bureaucracy. Innovation needs a level of guidance and the right kind of governance to thrive. Look at innovation and governance as a continuum. Governance isn’t just about putting restrictions on what you can do, it is also about monitoring and knowing when things are not going to plan so that you can take appropriate action at the right time to improve the innovation success rate.

Innovation is the essence of evolution. It takes vision, empathy, and understanding to drive innovation effort. It’s critical to look deeply into the future which can have a profound effect on where you go, and how you get there. Looking uphill can help to identify the real problems that matter, and on a scale that can make a difference. It requires an Innovation Architecture that involves strategy view, process view, capability view, governance view, etc, and some degree of a “hard-wired” innovation system with interdisciplinary knowledge such as technology, economy, psychology, sociology, law, etc, to build innovation competency and achieve sustainable innovation results.

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innateadaptability

Adaptability is to be understood as the ability of systems or people to adapt themselves smoothly and fast to changed circumstances. 

From one generation to the next, the substance of leadership does not change, it’s about the future, change, and influence. However, digital leadership trends will continue to emerge. 

Here is a set of featured blogs to dig into the “keywords” of the 21st century to brainstorm the future of digital leadership and business transformation.

    

 Adaptability

Design for Adaptability Digital means fast-paced changes, continuous disruptions, overwhelming growth of information, and shortened business life cycle. Companies need to have an in-depth understanding of organizational design and development to improve business maturity. Compared to traditional organizations with an overly rigid hierarchy or strictly pyramidal structure, digital organizations today are flatter, hybrid and more responsive to changes. Organizational adaptation is the ability to be highly responsive to the fast-changing business environment. High mature companies are designed for change and designed for innovating.

Adaptability is not just a soft skill, but a hard Capability Self-adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational flow with the consciousness to change. While turbulence is not new, and uncertainty is the new normal. Adaptability is to be understood as the ability of systems or people to adapt themselves smoothly and fast to changed circumstances. Adaptation is an inherent characteristic of humans to survive.

Building a Self-adaptive Digital Organization? Structure and behavior are two elements co-working in every organism in nature and in every system designed by human culture. Digital means flow; digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes and business dynamic in striving as a digital master. Within system engineering, self-adaptive concepts are applied in order to control system risks that evolve due to dynamics and variation

Three Aspects of Running Highly Adaptive Digital Organization The shift to digital cuts across sectors, geographies and leadership roles and the digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. But dealing with challenges and tough problems facing today’s business requires an accelerated digital mindset and open leadership style. To thrive in the exponential digital era, business leaders can see possibilities before others, and they can also tackle great challenges with grand consequences over long time spans. Here are digital leadership psychology, philosophy, and methodology.

Which is Better Strategy: Adapt to Change or Mitigate the Change? Change is inevitable,the speed of change is expedited. There are too many different types of change management initiatives, so there is no one size fits all approach to successfully managing change. Organizations today are more dynamic than ever, there are Big’C’ changes such as digital transformation, merging organizations with overlapping or duplicate functions, and little ‘c’changes such as implementing a new software tool, reorganizing a department, improving a new process to do things more efficiently. But too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crises, and demands. Which one is the better strategy: Adapting to a changing climate, or taking logical steps to mitigate the changes that are already underway?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6500 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The “Impartial” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar. 2020

Set common principles for looking beyond the surface, and continue to improve your ability to lead with an impartial mind.

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

1 Learning to be impartial means adjective neutral, objective, detached, just, fair, equal, open-minded, equitable, disinterested, unbiased, even-handed, nonpartisan, unprejudiced, without fear or favor.

2 An impartial and holistic perspective can help business leaders identify and close blind spots by looking around the corner and beneath the surface, solve real problems, not just fix symptoms.

3 Set common principles for looking beyond the surface, and continue to improve your ability to lead with an impartial mind.

4 What is needed are lots more impartial and independent hybrid talents (either specialized generalists or generalized specialists) who can help businesses define a robust and rigorous set of needs, and work with technologists to deliver innovative solutions.

5 Sometimes the board directors receive information from the company executives who do not have an impartial view on their function and, therefore, cannot be seen to be objective.

6 Wisdom in the workplace means to have work ethics and a positive mindset, dealing with the situation intelligently, wisely and be impartial.

7 From inner transformation via contemplation and reflection to intercommunication via empathy and understanding, you can consciously discover and change your unconscious bias, to set common principles for looking beyond the surface, and continue to improve your ability to lead with an impartial mind or with such positive bias to doing more fair things for the people and human society.

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The Development Sequence and Cycle of Digital Business

To avoid fast obsolescence and gain long term business advantage, business management needs to have a very clear understanding of their organizational strengths and weaknesses, the business development sequence and cycle.

With frequent disruptions and unprecedented levels of complexity and uncertainty, organizations need to switch from the classic management style to the digital management flavor by having an in-depth understanding of gains and pains of business development sequence:

Value Proposition -> Business Model -> Business Strategy -> Business Architecture -> Operating Model. 

Value Proposition: Businesses value is multi-faceted and it’s interesting to see how business value is in the eye of the beholder. Not all business value is directly related to ROI. It expands the concept of the value of the firm beyond economic value or shareholder value, to include other forms of value such as employee value, customer value, supplier value, channel partner value, alliance partner value, managerial value, and societal value, etc.

Some business development activities may deliver little to no ROI financial value for the short term, but it helps to build a strong business reputation or brand in the long run. Identify stories on the basis of the "strategic" or "tactical" value, as opposed to the "business" or "customer" value components. In order to show value, first, all parties need to agree on the common value proposition, then, you need to be able to measure it.

Business Model: Business Model is a model of how the business intends to make a profit, creates and delivers “customer value.” More specifically, it is a construct of value proposition, products and services, customer channels, partnerships, cost structures, revenue structures, and required capabilities. Business Model is not a strategy, but a simulation of different strategy scenarios. It is an entire frame of elements that describe the intents and constraints of an organization. The business designers should methodologically review a list of levers for business model components, and generate a list of potential business model options systematically

Organizations exist to enable one or more business models to function. Central to a business model is the ‘value proposition’ which describes the ‘business value’ being offered. There are mapping relationships between the business model and capability model, between the capability model and process model. A strong business model is hard to copy because it focuses attention on how all the critical internal and external business elements of the system fit into a working whole to make it differentiated in the marketplace.

Business Strategy: Most businesses start with a vision and establish a set of strategies to achieve it. A business strategy is conceptual and usually consists of a set of choices about what to do. The strategy is nothing but the answer to the questions such as what are critical business issues or top organizational priorities, where should the capital and resources be allocated to get the max leverage for the business advancement.

Any organization that develops a strategy at the function level independent of direct and specific dependencies on corporate strategy perhaps does a disservice to the entire company. The executive team needs to co-develop a clear vision and cohesive corporate strategy, share the differentiating recipe for how their strategic approach will accomplish strategic goals that exceed those of their competitors, allocate capital and resources scientifically, and implement the strategy smoothly.

Business Architecture: Business Architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and transformation via gaining a systematic understanding of relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the organizational interrelationship between people and processes.

Business Architecture has the visual ability to see an idea and express it in visual terms via interactive ways. It keeps the priorities in balance and facilitates the strategic planning and communicating of business initiatives, translating the abstract concept back into the real world example. It helps to blueprint the future of business and highlight changes with standardization, coherence, and visualization of business improvement initiatives.

Operating Model: The Business Model is concerned with “what,” and the Operating Model with “how.” Generally speaking, the Business Model and Operating Model are at different ends of the business development sequence; business model creation is close to the start of the process, and the operating model is at the end of the process. The business management should understand every island of operation and every workflow process to keep optimizing the business capacity, operational model, and overall organizational competency.

With today’s business dynamic, the business operation should be refined to the point that it can adapt to changing business demands in a timely fashion, it can be adjusted to meet the business priority, and be effective with the little down curve, fine-tune the premium operational model and ensure that operational business ecosystems not only function as expected but also achieve operation proficiency via continuous consolidation, modernization, rationalization, integration, and optimization.

Organizations across industrial sectors face hyper-competition and shortened business life cycles. To avoid fast obsolescence and gain long term business advantage, business management needs to have a very clear understanding of their organizational strengths and weaknesses, the business development sequence and cycle, practice entrepreneurship, explore different paths and take the alternative value creation approach to accelerate performance and unleash business potential.

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The Monthly “Digital Gaps” Book Tuning: Identify and Close Problem-Solving Gap Mar. 2020

Many business managers today still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing, creating a multitude of gaps blocking the way of the radical digital transformation.

"Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business” is a guidebook to help digital leaders and professionals today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps with multidisciplinary insight and a holistic understanding. Today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still., bridging the gap of opportunity between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge, it is important to identify and strengthen the weakest link and take a stepwise approach to make a leap of digital transformation.

             Identify and Close Problem-Solving Gap

Closing the Multitude of Digital Gaps? We are at the age of digital dawn, hyper-connectivity is the most critical digital characteristic. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that simply adopting new digital technology may be insufficient. You have to transform the company's underlying functions and organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed. Otherwise, companies may begin a decline from its previous good performance. However, many business managers today still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing, creating a multitude of gaps blocking the way of the radical digital transformation. Being divided by so many gaps across leadership, management, and innovation, etc, organizations lose their collaborative advantage as they are being over-managed and under led, remain disconnected, hoard knowledge, decrease effectiveness, and do not have the competence to collaborate in the long term.

Minding Gaps for Building Superior Problem-Solving Capability? "To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks the real advance in science." — Albert Einstein  Problem-solving is both art and science. Fundamentally, every job is to deal with problems big or small both from a long term perspective or on a daily basis. We all develop reputations for being problem creators, problem definers or problem solvers.

The Gaps Between Knowledge and Insight Insight is perception through multidimensional cognizance. If knowledge is manpower, wisdom is nature power, then insight is perhaps the bridge between manpower and nature power. There are multi-layer meanings upon insight. The gaps between knowledge and insight are existing, and how to dive into the depth of the knowledge sea and climb the insight-wisdom pyramid?

Bridging the Gaps of Accountability Digital transformation is all about shaping highly performing and highly innovative organizations. Lack of accountability is often one of the biggest obstacles to getting things done, or cause change inertia. Because people don’t feel “safe,” or run away from accountability because they had a personal experience or they have observed others being treated poorly or unfairly when being held accountable for results. So, how to bridge the accountability gaps and improve the business manageability to encourage responsible communication, decision-making, and action, with the intention to build on morale and real productivity? In detail, how do you drive workforce performance, whilst bridging gaps, and generating accountability for that performance?

Do we Handle Problems at the Level of the Mindset, or Shall We? We live in the rapidly changing digital era full of paradox: on the one side, the human world is running at internet speed, the physical distance is no longer the barrier to separate the world, the information is only a click away, the knowledge cycle is significantly shortened; on the other hand, people’s minds, mainly shaped in their early age, with change inertia, are far lagging behind the era we live in, they turn to be the true obstacle to distance the heart and stop human progress. And it is also the deep root cause for many business and societal problems. So would it be possible to handle the problems at the level of the mindset, but how?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6500th 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 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.

"Digital Gaps" B&N Order Link

"Digital Gaps" iBook Order Link

"Digital Gaps" Amazon Order Link

"Digital Gaps" Introduction, Slideshare

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 1 Cognitive Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 2  Leadership Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 3 Management Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 4 Capability Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 5 Professional Gaps

Conclusion: Bridging Gaps to Catalyze Digital Maturity

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The “Boundary” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar. 2020

Boundaries are indeed a very broad term that encompasses all sorts of things, strict or fluid; boundaries can be good, bad, or indifferent depending on the application.

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

1 Digital boundaries are not "sharp" lines; they are fluid to adapt to changes

2 To inspire creativity and drive change, digital organizations need to harness the cross-functional collaboration by expanding business boundaries and playing innovation oddball skillfully.

3 The expanded boundaries encourage open mind, open space and open leadership. The harmony is priceless.

4 Boundaries are indeed a very broad term that encompasses all sorts of things, strict or fluid; boundaries can be good, bad, or indifferent depending on the application.

5 The point is that too restrictive boundary setting will cause silo thinking, overly rigid business processes, and negative internal competition for limited resources, with ignorance of ultimate organizational goals as a whole.

6 From the management perspective, expand boundaries to allow cross-pollination of ideas, offer people ownership and responsibilities in what they do, with the ultimate goals of transforming ideas to achieve the business value.

7 Being creative is not just about "being knowledgeable" - because they are often at the edge of things and able to expand the boundaries of knowledge or conventional thinking, and through such expansions, the new knowledge is developed. So the expanded boundary amplifies the collective potential to innovate.

8 Anywhere in the world, the systems and procedures apply and impose boundaries between those who teach and those who learn, those who lead and those who follow, those who have power and those who are powerless.

9 The black and white boundaries continue to diminish in the 21st century due to the occurrence of increased economic integration among nations, characterized by the movement of people cultures across national and international borders, and the advanced digital technologies.

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A Customer Centric Architecture

The role of customer-centric Architecture in designing and planning future enterprise is both interesting and challenging for helping the organization make the transition from inside-out to outside-in.

The digital era upon us is about people-centricity. Being customer-centric is a transcendent digital trait and the core of corporate strategy in today’s digital organizations. To build the customer-centric business, the organization needs to think in terms of breaking down the functional silo and building business capabilities. Customer Centricity should always get reflected in organizational design or architecture.



Business requirements centric: Without customers, an organization cannot survive, and without profitability, an organization cannot grow. The organization has to continuously understand its customer needs and business requirements, develop a customer-centric architecture, and have a clear understanding of how customer-centric approaches enhance the business model and extend profitability. It starts with the business requirements definition and requirements. A formal business requirements initiative led by a capable architect performing (1) enterprise mission and stakeholder needs analysis, and (2) enterprise system requirements development and management, with the initiative backed up by executive sponsorship and commitment.

More specifically, what are the most effective vehicles for understanding business requirements? What are effective ways to ensure that varying stakeholders are engaged and performing their appropriate roles? Define the business requirements in a business language describing the organizational goals, customer needs, and personas, competitor offers current product “SWOT” and all identified opportunities. The customers, users and all stakeholders including suppliers, partners, and all internal functions hold a stake in the requirements. Facilitating requirements negotiations is very beneficial to keep everyone involved. As requirements are gathered and managed and discussed with executives and teams, focus on those requirements whose improvement has the most benefit to the business. Ensure the "traceability" of the transformation of these business requirements to make them handled by the proper functions (of processes) and its related information systems..

Simplification around silos: Despite the mountain of evidence pointing to the detrimental effects of silos, they still seem to be quite common in organizations. Are silos a mere product of organizational design? Or is their nature tied to a deeper level - the humankind's nature? A silo and disconnected organization could not deliver value effectively to its customers. People over time have created complexity by dividing functions and now need to get them back within the whole. The solution to breaking down silos is to apply architect thinking, follow the simplicity principle, implement an effective cross-silo strategy, better integral process, and collaborative communication.

Simplicity may either refer to an architectural constraint or to a business requirement. When people use the word "simplicity," they are really talking about a kind of transparency or clarity. Simplicity is the design of looking for what is common for maximum reuse. With simplicity, what you are adding is clarity and purpose. Removing complexity (assumptions & dependencies) more clearly reveals the intentions of the architecture and its purpose.

Organizational interrelationship orchestration: Customer-Centric Architecture is a great tool for business leaders to orchestrate the organizational interrelationship between people and process, customer and technology, etc. It brings the system's understanding of relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business units. It helps to figure out how you make structures, processes and strategy alignment around excellent customer experience to result in a profitable and evolving business; how you model different value propositions to different customer segments: as well as how you build recombinant business capabilities to develop and offer the quality product and services to delight customers.

Digital organizations need to manage multi-layer and multi-dimensional business relationships such as cross-functional relationships, customer relationships, vendor relationships, etc, effectively. By understanding customer goals, the digital organization could develop better interaction capabilities to enhance the customer experience. Guarantee the proper integration of the result of the transformation and the full consistency defined in the customer-centric architecture.

A customer-centric digital business is fluid, flexible and resilient in knitting all necessary elements together into great customer experience and drive a seamless paradigm shift. The role of customer-centric Architecture in designing and planning future enterprise is both interesting and challenging for helping the organization make the transition from inside-out to outside-in, from static to dynamic; from industrial-segregation to digital modularization and from functioning to delight.

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The Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Turning: Reinvent IT as Innovation Hub Mar. 2020

Forward-looking organizations are reinventing IT reputation from a cost center to a value creator, from a static support function to innovation hub; and from inside-out operation driven to outside-in customer-centric.

This book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. The important thing is that CIOs as the top leadership role must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth. Regardless of which personality they have, digital CIOs need to be both transformational and situational, innovative and tactical, business savvy and technology insightful, communication-effective and operation-efficient.

    Reinvent IT as Innovation Hub 

Running IT as an Innovation Hub IT is omnipresent and permeated into every corner of the organization. Forward-looking organizations are also reinventing IT reputation from a cost center to a value creator, from a static support function to a dynamic change agent; and from inside-out operation driven to outside-in customer-centric. To put simply, how can IT build differentiated capabilities to become an information power center and an innovation engine?

Five Digital Themes of High Mature Digital Organization With the increasing speed of changes and exponential growth of information, today’s companies need to be organized in running with quantum speed. It means that the organizations have to embed digital across the organization, expand to every dimension of the company, to emphasize communication, participation, relationships, and realize that they have to renew themselves periodically to cope with change effectively.

The New Book “IT Innovation” Introduction Chapter 1 Reinvent IT as an Innovation Hub Innovation is neither serendipity nor status quo, it needs to break some outdated rules but takes a systematic approach with clearly defined principles, robust, not overly rigid processes to implement it. There is no one size fits all formula to run a highly effective and highly innovative IT organization because different IT organizations and the enterprise as a whole are at the different stage of the business maturity.

The CIO as both Creative Theorist and Innovative Digital Practitioner Digitalization is the evolutionary business transformation that evolves production, adoption, assimilation, exploitation, and exploration of a value-added novelty in the business. The purpose of digital businesses today is to advocate better ways to do things, amplify collective human capability and business capacity in order to compete confidently and keep the business growth momentum.

Digital CIOs as Business Strategists and Artistic Technologist At the industrial age, CIOs are often perceived as the technology geek or the back office technician to keep the lights on, and most IT organizations are struggling to align with the business, get stuck at the lower level of maturity for keeping things functioning. Nowadays, lightweight digital technologies become more mature, IT is striving to integrate with the business, and IT has to move up its maturity from functioning to firm to delight. Thus, digital CIOs need to be the business strategist and artistic technologist for running high-innovative, high-performance, and high-mature digital organizations.

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talent. The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly. They need to lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to plumbing information and keep it flow smoothly; they also have to be like diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.

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The “Combination” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar. 2020

 A combination of conscious and unconscious factors allow us to follow through our initial creative impulse.

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

1 Creativity is a combination of something currently non-existent, thoughts, acts and with or without constraints.

2 Cognition can happen in many different ways and their combinations. It involves exploring varieties of meanings, thoughts, abandoning old connections, and establishing new relations to connect unusual dots for sparking creativity.

3 Systems Thinking provides an insight into the emergent and inherent properties, particularly due to unforeseen consequences of the combination of parts and the interaction within the system and between the system and its environment.

4 For a given solution is the combination of the inner forces acting on the system with the pattern language applied to solve that particular combination of forces.

5 A combination of conscious and unconscious factors allow us to follow through our initial creative impulse; the idea generation process is also the capacity to focus.

6 A pattern language is "about" the relationships between patterns - particularly the way you can navigate from pattern to pattern to learn about a problem space and to apply different solutions in combination.

7 Value is an overall measurement based on the combination of cost, schedule, quality, performance, and satisfaction of the customer, users, and stakeholders.

8 It’s important to deploy organizational assets in combination and disentangle dynamic capabilities in clusters of processes and managerial orchestration.

9 Any business practice today is always a combination of people, process, and technology to develop business competencies.

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IT Planning and Transformation

 Strategic IT leaders know how to drive an iterative planning and execution continuum, make a stride toward the future and lead their organization to reach the next level of organizational maturity.

Information and technology recharge the digital business with the power to respond to changes quickly and innovate relentlessly.

With the exponential growth of information and frequent disruptions, CIOs should play the strategic leadership role with broader leadership responsibilities, make proactive planning and IT transformation. The degree of IT planning has a positive correlation with the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability.

IT strategic planning of the potential portfolio: IT management is not just the business of the IT department, but the responsibility of the entire company. Thus, IT strategic planning requires collaboration among executives, IT managers and information professionals, users, etc, proactively push ideas on how to leverage IT to drive business revenue growth, improve organizational responsiveness, flexibility, and profitability. In a well-articulated IT strategic plan, establish IT statements of vision, mission, and values, define strategic goals to accomplish over the medium and long term period of time.

Nowadays due to the rapid change, strategic planning is a dynamic process. Planning well means that CIOs know how to leverage and prioritize, and they must consider the business-relevant factors in order to create effective strategic planning. It is a matter of figuring out "where are you now," and "where do you want to be" by navigating the full set of “Ws: Why, What, How, Who, When and Where, etc.” The strategic organizational goal must comport a vision for a better state, IT leaders should integrate disparate planning sources, access to and gain a better understanding of information, develop a potential IT portfolio and make the seamless alignment to ensure the long term success of IT.

Scenario planning would be a key feature to support the idealization process: With unprecedented levels of uncertainty and emerging business properties, the value of scenario planning is to uncover significant risks in the strategic plan. You can use the scenario planning to explore how your current strategies will or will not help you against possible disruption via establishing a set of What-if scenarios showing the potential scale of business benefit to be driven from the IT portfolio based on different mixes of programs and projects.

Scenarios can be very strong planning tools qualitatively, and get you the best time-value result. Usually, scenario planning is less formalized and can be used to make plans for qualitative patterns that show up in a wide variety of simulated events. When you think of scenario planning, think of risk management. Estimate a range of potential impacts for each scenario; then itemize the steps and costs required to create a detailed plan once the disruption appears to be certain. This gives immediate guidance and allows everyone to anticipate costs and effort when the market changes.

IT workforce planning: The dynamic IT workforce planning is important to implement strategic goals, motivate employees to achieve more, build high-performance teams, and create business synergy. The workforce planning is a continuous cycle that should be supported by robust processes, flexible and comprehensive set of tools and involves hard success factors, such as structure, process and technology, and soft factors such as leadership, communication, and culture, etc. Workforce management is a critical process to shape differentiated business competency.

Further, workforce planning and management today are far more than just putting a strategic label on the term. It’s an information-based approach that uses information technology tools and resources often weren’t available in the past. Keep in mind, the planning process is never done - it is a continuous cycle that is part of the management process itself.

IT planning is dynamic and multidimensional. To make IT more visible as the strategic business partner, strategic IT leaders know how to drive an iterative planning and execution continuum, make a stride toward the future and lead their organization to reach the next level of organizational maturity.

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The Monthly Connecting Dots: Organizational Design Dot Connection Mar 2020

 The purpose of organizational design is to improve the business maturity from functioning to firm to delight and ultimately achieve the high-performance business result.

A digital workplace is all about people-centricity, empathy, innovation, agility, and high-level business maturity. Digital organizations are always on, inter-dependent and hyper-connected, people are always the most important asset in any organization before, today, and future. In an ideal digital workplace, the organizational structure is solid enough to keep people or things in order; but fluid enough to keep information and ideas flow.

                Organizational Design Dot Connection

The Digital Organizational Design vs. Balance The purpose of organizational design is to improve the business maturity from functioning to firm to delight, and ultimately achieve the high-performance business result. High mature digital organizations integrate organizational design (OD) into the process design and organizational re-engineering for enabling employees to do their work productively and shape an interactive, dynamic, balanced and multidimensional ecosystem.

Digital Organizational Design vs. Business Changeability The very characteristics of digital are the increasing speed of change and hyper-connectivity. Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business both horizontally and vertically. Forward-looking organizations leverage the latest technologies to fine-tune the organizational structure and improve business changeability. Organization design is the vehicle through which the business strategy is executed and defines the business environment in which the digital organization can reduce the organizational culture friction, improve the business changeability, maturity, and unleash its full potential.

Performance Management vs. Digital Organizational Design Performances are not just numbers with metrics, they are numbers in context, results related to your business goals both at the strategic and operational level. Measuring and managing performance means setting performance metrics, making objective assessments, understanding results, adjusting plans & structures, and making decisions to ensure great business results. The reality in most organizations though is the performance which is forcibly jammed within an existing organizational structure with silo functions and overly rigid hierarchy, and very few companies are truly leveraging organizational development (OD) resources wisely. But due to the digital nature of hyperconnectivity and interdependence, more often, the successful performance improvement initiatives should have representation and input from organizational structure management. Organizational Design vs. Performance Management: How to take an integrated approach, fine-tune OD and improve performance management effectiveness and maturity?

Business Process and Organizational Design in Digital Transformation An integrated approach is typically best because one without the other is less likely to be successful. Digital becomes the very fabric of modern business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-look digital organizations today. However, there are many tough challenges ahead, and numerous roadblocks around, such as how to digitize, optimize or innovate business processes, what’re the fresh perspectives of organizational.

Enterprise Architecture vs. Enterprise Design We elevate organizational maturity by design thinking; we elevate design by architectural thinking. Organizations are 'purposeful' systems. This means they have a purpose and work to achieve a goal. Not all systems are purposeful. Enterprise Architecture is the glue to connect such purpose (WHY), strategy (WHAT) and execution (HOW). Enterprise Design can elevate business from functioning, firm to delight.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6500th 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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The “Scrutinizing” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar. 2020

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


1 Not only should you know what is the digital transformation all about, but also the digital leaders should further contemplate and scrutinize.

2 SWOT Analysis is a good tool which provides a starting point to scrutinize strategy and helps to take a wide look around at what's going on outside the organization and how it might affect the organization (an environmental scan), and identify opportunities and threats.

3 To run indispensable IT, it’s critical to invest in and leverage appropriate technologies and solutions to generate invaluable insights, scrutinize IT effort from the business lens, and help their businesses open up new channels of revenue and monetization within the enterprise, their ecosystem, and the industry.

4 We are what we think, Scrutinize mindset. Mindset differentiates top talent from mediocrity.

5 The Board is responsible for contributing to both protecting the business values and creating the business value through effectively steering, strategizing, and scrutinizing.

6 It’s to experience what it is like to agree to disagree and still remain engaged; scrutinize your own perceptions, identify blind spots, recognize that you are responsible for promoting or dissolving your own thoughts, emotions, and actions, embrace the emerging changes and the new reality.

7 The CIO acts as a “Chief Investment Officer” to scrutinize business cases, master business language, and well prepare what if you have a seat at a big table, how you can present effectively.

8 Senior leadership teams should always scrutinize the effectiveness of the business. They play an important role in setting digital principles to ensure the right things are easy to do and encompass the business in the right direction.

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Gaining Insight of Solution Architecture

Problem-solving has a very wide scope and takes an interdisciplinary approach that involves multifaceted disciplines.

Today’s digital business ecosystem has become more complex and dynamic, interdependent and hyperconnected, business problems turn to be much more complex than ever. Solution architecture could be an effective tool to enable strategic and systematic problem-solving.

By definition, “solution architecture is the process of developing solutions based on predefined processes, guidelines and best practices with the objective that the developed solution fits within the enterprise architecture in terms of information architecture, system portfolios, integration requirements and many more. (Techpedia) More specifically, Solution Architecture has the following characteristics:

Solution architecture as a framework provides processes, guidelines and best practices with the goals and objectives: Solution architectures should be used or consumed in general business "solutions." It is the set of principles, guidelines, processes, etc, that describe how the components and standards of the business work cohesively to solve complex problems. The architecture is abstract. Think big picture done very quickly at a logical level; and then, push down towards solution specifics at the physical level, and driven by local needs.

Problem-solving is a multi-stepped process that includes both problem resolution and solution implementation. On the one hand, walk through the scenario from generalization to specification by leveraging solution architecture to clarify: Where do we need framework and guidance? What are optimized processes, practical methodologies and best practices to solve problems? How to handle different stages of problem-solving with attention and proficiency to ensure success? On the other side, to keep perfecting solution architecture, once in a while you might have to take an existing or proposed solution and extract from it, by abstraction and generalization, to come up with an optimal set of guidelines, processes or the next practices.

It is the instance of how the components (process, standard, IT, documents) of a solution architecture are applied in a specific solution situation: Generally speaking, Solution Architects need to have a view of the entire organization and the interaction between the entire business and IT, specify the constraints on problem-solving methodology and techniques; identify the information needed for decision-making and problem-solving, and determine how to collect relevant information for systematic problem-solving. Even though many Solution Architects are operating at a single business unit level and potentially even a single application level, solution practices might be different across organizations, across departments, divisions, and affiliates within an organization and can change over time, they need to enforce cross-functional communication and interaction.

A well-designed solution architecture helps to eliminate confusion, apply a holistic view, and take customized approaches to each problem, and make the continuous adjustment. With the guideline, process, standard, IT, or documents defined in solution architecture, an organization can focus on the deliverables of business solutions by which the scope and granularity of the models are created and improve problem-solving effectiveness and maturity.

Solution architecture provides a systematic view for design and development of applications and enforces the seamless integration: Many of today’s business problems are complex, and information technology is the linchpin of premium solutions. Solution Architecture helps to conform to the well defined industrial standards and make integration and communication easier, and make the tracking of emerging issues and inconsistencies between solutions easier. Many IT-enabled business solutions have tough issues such as integration. Integration has a set of costs and benefits that are determined by the situation on hand and what is integrated. It has to be done with a “big picture,” having the solution architecture in mind.

Solution Architecture provides the governance/oversight to guarantee that solution development maintains conformance to that business need, and ensure that the application development being carried out is well aligned with the business needs and the change that is taking place accordingly. It also helps to prioritize important factors such as requirement, quality, and cost when architecting solutions to make business more productive, collaborative, and smarter.

Problem-solving has a very wide scope and takes an interdisciplinary approach that involves multifaceted disciplines such as science, engineering, art, psychology, social norms, and group behavior. For complex problem solving, leveraging solution architecture to understand business problems is often the first and the most important step in gaining insight, creating the relevant business context to make a more lasting business solution.

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The Monthly “Digital Hybridity” Book Tuning: The Digital Hybrid Model & Organization Mar. 2020

 There are so many seemingly paradoxical, but indeed coherent elements in running a digital organization today.

The purpose of the book “Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift” is to shed some light on how to strike the right balance of stability and changes; being transactional to keep spinning and being transformational to leap forward for making a seamless digital paradigm shift. Digital organizations should apply the hybrid management approach, focus on building a diverse, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid organizational hierarchy, inspire idea-sharing and brainstorming, and engage employees and partners to achieve the high-performance result.

The Digital Hybrid Model & Organization

The Five Dimensional Hybrid Models for Going Digital The digital paradigm has many dimensions. Digital organizations today have the hybrid reality with both physical buildings and virtual platforms, the old way and the new way of doing things. It implies the “always-on” and hyper-connected business nature, exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity. Therefore, digital management needs to adopt a hybrid model and take the holistic discipline with mixed management styles for managing everything that is necessary to get digital ready

Leverage Design Thinking to Develop New Business Models Every corporate venture comes with a business model, it’s about how the business makes a profit. The fundamental purpose of an organization is to produce 'value' for its customers. The emergent digital technologies and abundant information provide the very clue for the business growth opportunity. How to leverage design thinking and creativity to develop new business models and unleash the growth potential of the company?

Running a Digital Organization with Impartial, Independent Hybrids With rapid change and exponential growth of information, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work. There are so many seemingly paradoxical, but indeed coherent elements in running a digital organization today. Forward-thinking organizations need to discover their own strength, find a niche and build a set of core and recombinant capabilities in order to become highly competitive and digital savvy.

The Hybrid Decision-Making Style The digital leaders and professionals spend a significant amount of time in making decisions. However, ineffective decision-making becomes one of the biggest root causes to fail businesses due to "VUCA" characteristics of the digital normality. Poor decision-making can cause business dysfunction, employee disengagement, or customer dissatisfaction; the short time loss or the long term pain in the organization. The point is that there is no one size fits all formula for all decision making, there are all sorts of decision-making styles depending on the decision maker's cognitive ability, knowledge, insight, or personality. With the increasing pace of change and overwhelming information, can the hybrid style help to improve decision-making maturity?

A Hybrid Organization With the fast pace of change and emerging digital technologies such as social, mobile and cloud, companies large or small are brainstorming the next generation of organizational design, how to take advantage of the new digital tools, how to improve productivity and enforce creativity & collaboration cross-enterprise ecosystem?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

Read More