The Monthly Insight of Information Management: The Characteristics of Information Management System Sep. 2019

Information Management is a system with interdependent processes, technologies, and a set of interdisciplinary practices for moving the business to a dynamic, iterative, integral and interactive digital flow.

The aim of modern Information Management has often been described as getting the right information to the right person, in the right format and medium, at the right time, in order to make the right decisions. The value of information is qualitative, measurable, and defined uniquely by an organization.

An Influential Corporate Board

Highly influential corporate boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential. 

People tend to make leadership very complex, but in its most simple form, leadership is an influence. With rapid changes and exponential growth of information, the command control style of management is gradually losing its steam. Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and influential, to lead through influence, but brute force. The corporate board as one of the top leadership pillars must influence and exemplify progressive leadership and help to shape an ultra-modern digital organization effortlessly.

Influential Intelligence: A mindset could be called influential intelligence if it can discover the patterns of inter-relationship among different disciplines, understand the mindsets of all members of the group. The insightful board leaders has the ability to influence peers or management team as they undertake a broad range of crucial decisions involving issues such as strategy, performance, branding, technological vision, finance, talent management, etc. They do not dominate discussions, instead, they encourage open critical debates, encourage fresh perspectives, and appreciate the collective insight from peer board directors as well as various stakeholders. To "influence" means to be able to shape other people's views or opinions towards one's own views or perspectives. With influential intelligence, the contemporary corporate board can inspire, innovate, improve, interact, interpret, exemplify, encourage, and orchestrate change. The corporate board leaders with influential intelligence have adaptability, consistency, profundity, and empathy to steer the business in the right directions under business dynamic and lead the business forward smoothly.

Expertise influence: Top board leaders need to have broader business acumen, deep expertise, transdisciplinary knowledge, cross-functional experience, and leadership skills. As a senior leadership role, corporate board directors should be the specialized generalists with “T” shaped expertise, and they are able to embrace the seemingly paradoxical point of views in order to gain a deep understanding of varying strategic topics holistically. Most of the board directors are top seasoned executives with decades of experience. Collectively, the digital board with a blend of expertise and capabilities can foster a culture of innovation and improve boardroom decision effectiveness and leadership maturity. To reach the state of knowledge proficiency and spread expertise influence, it is also important to identify and close the gap between knowledge and insight in the boardroom. Board directors are not just the follower to chase the tidal waves blindly, but able to capture the invaluable business insight to make sound judgments and effective decisions in a consistent way.

World class leadership influence: The ultimate criterion of "high-influential leadership," is the ability to create more leaders, to spread leadership, or more precisely, to groom more authentic leaders with the ability to think differently, independently, and innovatively. To amplify leadership influence, digital leaders including corporate board directors need to be constantly visible by sharing vision and enabling others to share it. Their leadership influence is made based on the leadership substances such as vision and purpose with effective digital leadership styles such as participation, coaching or delegation. The corporate board’s global leadership influence is based on their world-class leadership competencies such as self-regulation, social judgment skills, empathy, motivation to work in a global environment, cultural cognition, acceptance of complexity and its contradictions, the tolerance of ambiguity, flexibility, and learning agility. Their leadership influence must be built on the foundation of the moral competencies such as wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.

Highly influential corporate boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential. Open leadership, humble attitude, adaptability, creativity, sound judgment, inclusiveness, and fact-driven communication, are digital leadership traits to make profound leadership influence. Highly influential leaders understand themselves and have a story to tell, they develop an authentic leadership brand, and encourage others to do the same.

The Enterprise’s Innovation Appetite, Attitude, Aptitude

With the right innovation appetite, attitude, and aptitude, the organization is on the right track of developing innovation as a business-wide unique competency.

Digital is the age of innovation, Innovation is always a tough journey, not a flat road. Digital innovation is coming at seemingly much faster paces, and there are more potential disruptions, with a broader scope, scale, and impact on the business’s long term surviving and thriving. Companies have to be prepared to lose some to gain more for the longer term. They need to make an objective assessment of their innovation appetite, attitude, and aptitude, and manage an innovation portfolio strategically and systematically to achieve great business results for the long term.

The innovation appetite: There are always risks involved in managing innovation. The innovation appetite of the business directly impact on how aggressively the company can manage innovation and the time-frame they focus on. Breakthrough innovation has greater ROI but with much bigger risks and often takes longer time to achieve. The variety of research identifies innovation initiatives that ultimately break new ground frequently are fraught with uncertain on many dimensions such as technical, market, resource, and organizational uncertainties abound. Innovation is risky because money and resource spent on R&D is not necessarily a good indicator of future innovation performance. Therefore, innovation leaders with the right dose of innovation appetite can manage a healthy innovation portfolio with the right mix of incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation, to reap the short-term gain and long-term innovation benefits. The shareholders who highly value innovation would value organizations with bigger innovation appetite and devote more resources towards future breakthrough innovation more than those that only manage short-term incremental innovation.

The innovation attitude: Innovation is high-risky because more often you are doing something that hasn't been done before. Innovation risk would broadly need to consider both endogenous and exogenous drivers. It is the common knowledge that innovation management requires the highest risk taking at a strategic value chain, including organization, investments, and assets. From a financial management perspective, consider what capital you are prepared to risk in making the innovation- never let this be too much that losing it will cripple your business. The differentiation between a good innovation and bad innovation is the innovation leader’s attitude toward risk. The job of innovation management is to help when a failure happens to turn it around as a team. The good innovation leaders have excellent attitude toward innovation, demonstrate rational risk management skills and are able to shift from “risk-avoidance” to “risk-intelligence” mentality. The great attitude towards innovation is about taking calculated risks to inspire good innovation initiatives for capturing growth opportunities, being cautious about obstacles or pitfalls, staying focused, weighing risks and rewards, taking prudent risks and discovering better ways to mitigate risks rather than eliminate it. De-risk the introduction of innovations into the market, protecting existing operations and brands and establishing clear proof-of-concept before making investments to launch and scale.

The innovation aptitude: The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s aptitude to manage innovation. And the innovation aptitude is based on the overall business competency to manage innovation with a set of tools, structures, and talent. Highly innovative organizations are better equipped to manage innovation by allocating time and resources to the people in charge. Innovation fails because many organizations lack a cohesive strategy or a systematic approach to manage both opportunities and risks in a structural way. Innovation success depends on many factors. From budget management perspective, since part of innovation is not knowing how and for what you will use the budget; and some innovation needs to be fed with resources while others get better by starving them. It’s important to design a flexible strategy as a compass to help innovation management adapt quickly and cost effectively to unpredictable changes in the environment, with the goal to manage a healthy innovation portfolio and build innovation competency to reap higher-than-expected business benefits.

With the right innovation appetite, attitude, and aptitude, the organization is on the right track of developing innovation as a business-wide unique competency. A leading digital organization with innovation competency can handle innovation streams for different goals and different time frames and manage a balanced portfolio including both radical innovation and incremental innovation, hard innovation and soft innovation seamlessly.

The Monthly “Dot Connections”: The Vision Dot Connection Sep. 2019

Vision is where or who you want to be and strategy is how you can achieve or reach your goal. 


The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Organization of the Future is an organization designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of the strategic imperatives of the digital era. The work is not the place you go, but a live organization and an experiment lab you can connect the dots to explore the art of possibility.

The Best “Flexibility” Quotes of “Digital Master” Sep. 2019

Flexibility means less rigid processes, well-known practices, or “right vs. wrong” polarity.

"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 “Flexibility” quotes in “Digital Master.”


1 Technically, flexibility is about figuring out alternative ways to solve problems; psychologically, being flexible is simply an ability to learn and adapt to changes, an intelligence to explore new possibilities, take further responsibilities but also and above all, in the effectiveness of its initiatives.

2 Though the meaning of the word flexibility, in general, more refers to physical movement capable of being bent without breaking. Flexibility is a mental process which results in an action that tests a possible solution.

3 Flexibility means less rigid processes, well-known practices, or “right vs. wrong” polarity.

4 A flexible mind loves choices, enjoys making differences; feels comfortable to be unique and innovative, and welcomes the diversity of thoughts as a fountain of creativity.

5 Unlike the closed mechanical system, digital organization are like the living system, spontaneously self-organizes, generates patterns, forms structures, initiates business activities, and above all, creates novelty over time. Achieve strategic flexibility by developing the proper module design architecture, with reusability and process flow:

6 A flexible workplace is open, inclusive, and innovative for coming up with best business solutions all the time.

7 The culture of flexibility advocated by effective leadership is about bringing out the best in others, to make people feel comfortable with being who they are and taking the necessary risks to solve tough problems.

8 Flexible leadership means the vision to foresee the future trend ahead, and the creativity to solving the problem on the way.

9 A flexible organization is a complex social system starting to appreciate such attributes as 'readiness,’ 'ownership,' ‘integration,’ 'full open communication,’ customized structuring as well as developing 'partnerships.’

Create Digital Indexes to Improve IT Management Maturity

 IT management needs to create important digital indexes, leverage good mechanisms, and discover both the art and science of holistic digital management discipline.

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 leaders need to manage various conflicts between classic style and digital style of management. The Digital Index is a collection of digital policies and initiatives to enforce digital management disciplines. IT leaders can create digital management indexes to improve the management maturity and reinvent IT as an energetic business partner to delight customers and lead digital transformation seamlessly.

 IT value index: Each organization has a set of capabilities that enable it to achieve successful business outcomes, whether financial, brand or double bottom line, IT is like a linchpin for integrating all different business elements into a unique set of business capabilities. IT is the means to an end, not the end itself. It’s important to triangulate IT value from the business lens such as a strategic competency, operational excellence, and business agility, create an IT value index in building a more comprehensive IT value proposition. IT is the steward of one of the most important business assets - information. The information that IT delivers is what gives executives, managers and staff details every employee needs to make the right decisions in their position at the right time, for improving overall business speed and competency. There are tangible (cost savings, efficiency, etc.) and intangible (brand equity, sales enablement, etc.) components of IT value. To improve IT organizational maturity from a support center to a strategic business partner, IT investment is more effective in improving business profitability by increasing revenue than by decreasing operating expenses. The well-run IT organizations can demonstrate agility by being responsive to tactical business opportunities to the degree possible while remaining focused on developing and executing a longer-term strategy. The better integration between business and IT, the higher level of agility for both will be achieved.

Personal Innovation-index (PÏ): Forward-thinking organizations introduce the Personal Innovation-index (PÏ) to drive growth, catalyze creativity and innovation within a company.the PÏ index will indicate the contributed economic value of each employee, including both executive/management and professional/expert, in relation to their innovative initiatives and personal activities, commitment, influences, impact, and contributions. More specifically, the Personal Innovation Index represents the innovation maturity level of employees based on their personal impact and influences on innovation-their ability to innovate, their ability to network externally, their ability to collaborate and facilitate innovation success. Generally speaking, the more innovative the employees are, the less tolerant of structure (policies, rules, and paradigms) and less respectful of consensus one is. Innovators often prefer to “do things differently.” Therefore, select for empowerment, select for curiosity, select for learning agile, and select for breakthrough.

The Barrett Values Index: It is a quantitative, qualitative and inclusive measurement tool for gauging organizational culture. The variety of industry research clearly indicated that the carefully crafted and well-intended strategy fail in the execution phase if culture is weak because the shared value and buy-in at all levels of the organization are misaligned. A good culture can perhaps make an average strategy working, but a bad culture will fail a good strategy. The strategic alignment happens as a by-product of culture tuning. The Barrett Value Index center on three questions that all employees should ask themselves:

(1) what are your personal values

(2) what do you see as the company's current values

(3) what do you believe the future company values should be

Directing energy and attention at measuring and improving culture will yield synergistic results in desired change. Or use the synthesis of Socio-Technical Systems (STS) Analysis to measure change-readiness against the contexts of goals, people, processes, procedures, infrastructure, technology, and culture.

Digital IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the very driver of business change. With emerging lightweight digital technologies and overwhelming growth of information, IT management shouldn't just practice transactional activities, it needs to create important digital indexes, leverage good mechanisms, and discover both the art and science of holistic digital management discipline.

The Monthly Organizational Structure Tuning: Fine-Tuning a Vital Digital Organization Sep. 2019

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 business changeability and maturity,

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. From an organizational structure perspective, how can you fine-tune the digital dimension of your organizational development to harness innovation and build a vital digital organization?

Fine-Tuning a Vital Digital Organization 

Fine-Tune a Vital Digital Organization The digital transformation means that companies need to infuse digital into every aspect of the business, expand to every dimension of the organization. Forward-thinking organizations today aim to move into a more advanced stage of digital deployment by tailoring their own unique strength and business maturity. They need to have both interdisciplinary knowledge and in-depth understanding of the organizational hyperconnectivity and interdependence in order to optimize organizational structures, improve business strategic responsiveness and fine-tune a vital digital organization.

Fair Reasons to Fine-Tune the Organizational Structure The digital organization is an integral business system with policies, cultures, work climates, people (employees, customers, partners, etc.) and processes. To keep digital fit, the organization has to keep optimizing its functional or structural design and management pyramid to achieve a high level of autonomy and the state of digital equilibrium. The whole business ecosystem needs to communicate, negotiate and cooperate with each other for catalyzing changes and harnessing innovation. Here are some fair reasons to fine-tune the organizational structure for streamlining digital flow and improving the organizational maturity.

Three Aspects of Designing a Viable Digital Organization Digital organizations are the complex ecosystem with the blurring line between functions and geographic locations. Going digital is a long journey with all sorts of barriers and pitfalls on the way. You have to strike the right balance between order and chaos, change and stability, innovation and standardization. Viability is one of the very characteristics of the digital organization. You may leverage design thinking to reinvent an organization which can enforce collaboration and harness innovation by creating business synergy, maintaining viability, and making strategic effects.

Heralding an Ecological Digital Organization Digitalization makes a profound impact from a specific function to the business as a whole, building an organization of the future is not too far away. Digital organizations are hyperconnected and interdependent. They need to have an in-depth understanding of gains and pains of organizational design and development. They should also renew themselves periodically to cope with the change effectively to the best of their ability. Heralding an ecological digital organization need to emphasize participation, relationships, communication, and collaboration and unlock business performance and potential continually.

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 the 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.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6000+ 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.

The Best “Learning Agility” Quotes of “Digital Master” Sep. 2019

Learning agility means to learn, de-learn and relearn all the times; and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations.

"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 “Learning Agility” quotes in “Digital Master.”


1 The mind with learning agility likes to experiment and comfortable with change.

2 Learning agility can help a digital professional to move out of his or her comfort zone, take risks, learn from mistakes, and grow to a lifetime learner.

3 Leaders and digital talent who are learning agile continuously seek new challenges, solicit direct feedback, self-reflect, self-motivated, and get jobs done resourcefully.

4 An individual’s learning agility is a fundamental digital capability block through which she or he can further build more advanced professional capabilities and better fit in the digital dynamic we live in.

5 Learning agility means to learn, de-learn and relearn all the times; and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations.

6 Learning agility is not only the very quality of digital leaders but also the fundamental requirement for all digital professionals, in order to keep the mind open; make the skills updated and continue to build the dynamic digital capabilities to compete for the future.

7 Learning agility will directly impact the speed of digital transformation, the effectiveness of digital leadership, the creativity of the workforce, and the overall organizational maturity.

8 At the individual level, learning agility differentiates high potential from mediocre; at the organizational level, learning agility directly impacts on the top line business growth and the strategic capabilities such as change and innovation.

9 It is important to cultivate the learning agile culture that has awareness and understanding the importance of learning in order to build a high-innovative and high-mature digital organization.

What are Key Differentiators between Top Performers and the Rest in the Digital Organization?

Top performers are perceived as modern, open-minded, informative, creative digital leaders and professionals.

People are always the most invaluable assets in organizations but often the weakest link as well. Due to the fast update of technology and the accelerating speed of business changes, among the most pervasive and persistent concerns from organizational leaders are talent gaps. The true value of people, especially today’s knowledge workforce includes many tangible and intangible factors, It's a total of what the employee brings to a business (quality, creativity, and productivity), Either individually or collectively, what are the key differentiators between top performers and the rest? And how to unleash collective human potential to unlock business performance?

Strategic thinking: ”Strategic Thinking is about getting the best information you could and continuously update, uncovering options, thinking long term, not just immediate goals. To put simply, Strategic Thinking is about “keeping the end in mind. Top performers today are usually great strategic thinkers because strategic thinking means change. While most people don’t like change, but top performers often have high adaptability to thrive in the digital dynamic. Either individually or at the organizational level, the biggest mind-shift in moving from operation-driven to strategic-oriented is to switch from focusing on activities to thinking about outcomes. Top performers with strategic thinking are able to gain an understanding of the past and the perception of the future. They are able to view the complete business as an ecosystem with all its dependencies and interconnections. They are also able to tie all important things together in order to develop actionable plans and sustain actions over an extended period of time.

Digital literacy: Digital is fluid and also complex. It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interaction, you can't separate things properly, and you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. The top performers present multidimensional intelligence, interdisciplinary knowledge and show the digital literacy to understand business context, read between the lines, and demonstrate the ability to effectively navigate, evaluate, and create information using a range of digital technologies and abundant information. At an enterprise level, the linear business perception needs to be replaced by the adaptive digital system viewpoint. Digital literacy requires cross-functional communication, collaboration and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing. It requires information management capabilities, business learning, growth, and innovation competencies, etc, of the company to manage their strategy smoothly.

Collaborative problem-solving and team-working: Many of today’s business problems are complex, and solving complex business problems requires deep thinking, multidisciplinary knowledge, and collaborating. Top performers have both open and growth mindset, enjoy both independent thinking and teamwork, keep updating their knowledge, have intellectual curiosity to dig into the root cause, also show the flexibility to pursue alternative solutions. Complex problem-solving requires collaboration. Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual harmony between humans. Collaboration is a fundamental part of what ultimately fuels inspiration, imagination, and innovation, and create a sense of belonging enjoys understanding the complexity and guides people through it. Top performers have a collaborative spirit to initiate digital dialogues, brainstorm ideas, turn around the tough situations, and skillfully assign their talent, resource and time carefully to solve problems really matter.

Entrepreneurship: Top performers demonstrate entrepreneurial traits such as open-mindedness, creativity, self-adaptation, flexibility, and resilience, etc.They can break down outdated rules, present accountability which is a type of cognitive fitness to show the ownership mentality, deploy new ideas, new processes, new adventures to adapt to change, doing things innovatively and wish to make great achievement as well. Top performers with entrepreneurial traits can bring optimism to influence the organization’s culture, break down the negative thinking box, linear knowledge, and mono-color culture. At the organizational level, entrepreneurship has been recognized as a potentially viable means for promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and corporate competitiveness. Corporate Entrepreneurship is embodying risk taking, proactiveness and radical changes.

Customer-centricity: Top performers won’t just wait for the customers’ requests to solve their issues; but work closely and proactively with users and customers, to identify the real problems and solve them effectively. They are willing to listen, ask questions, and probe to identify the goal of the customer experience improvement, constantly looking at the business through the lens of a target customers. At the business level, it is very easy for an organization to become inwardly focused and fall into an operational mindset, get so focused on internal components and forget about the very reason a business exists in the first place. Top performers sincerely care about customers, and keep building differentiated business competencies to create value for them and build a customer-centric business.

Top performers are perceived as modern, open-minded, informative, creative digital leaders and professionals. They can broaden their outlook, envision the bigger picture, build differentiated professional competencies, inspire creativity, improve professionalism, and unleash their full talent potential.

The Monthly “Change Agent CIO” Book Tuning: IT Led Digital Transformation Sep. 2019

 To run a high performance business for the long term, companies must learn how to master information technology, make proactive preparation for dealing with continuous digital disruptions. 

Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. A digital transformation is achieved via dynamic Strategy-Execution-Change lifecycle management, though it is not all linear steps, but an iterative, ongoing and upgoing change continuum. What are digital CIO’s profiles and how to reboot IT to get digital ready and cultivate the culture of learning and innovating?

  IT Led Digital Transformation 

Master IT to Lead Digital Transformation Today, the emerging technological trends and overwhelming growth of information make significant impact on how we think, live, and work; disrupt not only the business boundary but also the industrial boundary and geographical boundary. IT matters more not only because it’s pervasive but also because it continues to advance and its nature of the "constructive disruption.” To run a high performance business for the long term, companies must learn how to master information technology, make proactive preparation for dealing with continuous digital disruptions and adapting to the digital new normal with high velocity and fierce competitions.

Three Aspects of IT Led Digital Transformation Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing businesses, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. To stay competitive, companies must go beyond just experimenting with some digital technologies and commit to transforming themselves into a fully digital business powerhouse. IT also plays a pivotal role in leading a digital transformation in their organizations. Because IT oversees business processes, it can help to weave all these important business elements such as people, underlying processes, and functions into the building blocks of business capabilities and manage the business strategy effectively. Here are three aspects of IT led digital transformation.

The Promises and Perils of IT-Driven Digital Transformation In today's world, information & technology is driving the digital paradigm shift. Unlike previous eras during which business transformation was driven by business ideas. This is a golden opportunity for CIOs to lead the way by enabling change, optimizing business processes, catalyzing digital transformation, and governing risk management that's going viral in the enterprise. The journey will not be so smooth, there are many curves and bumps on the road, and here are the promises and perils of IT-driven digital transformation.

CIOs as Digital Leaders: Three IT-Led “Digital Charms” Digital transformation is the unstoppable trend. Digital charm is not based on the style (fancy web presence or fashionable gadgets) only float on the surface but based on the set of unique business capabilities. Because fashion will fade away, but the trend will turn into reality. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that simply adopting a new digital technology is insufficient. You have to transform the company's underlying functions and organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed. Because often technology is the disruptive force of digital innovation, and the information is the gold mine organizations need to dig for capturing the next business growth opportunities. Hence, Information Technology should be seen by any business as a “digital transformer” and strategy enabler. Here are three IT-led digital charms.

Shaping IT from a Change Laggard to Digital Trendsetter Traditional IT organizations are often inside-out operation-driven, mechanical and monolithic, it’s perceived by business as a controller and change laggard. Because in many cases, the business continues to evolve faster in grasping the market share and winning new customers, but sometimes failed due to lack of real-time information to capture business foresight and customer insight. With the exponential growth of information and often technology-led disruptions, IT has evolved significantly in running the business today, IT also faces an unprecedented opportunity to refine its reputation from a change laggard to the trendsetters of the digital organization.

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 #6000 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.

The Best “Sophistication” Quotes of “Digital Master” Sep. 2019

Sophistication often implies intelligence, profundity, uniqueness, urban fit, and multidimensional understanding.

"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 “Sophistication” quotes in “Digital Master.”

Take a Platform Innovation Approach

A well developed platform  plus a creative culture is critical to strengthen innovation efforts, manage innovation in a scalable and structural way and improve the overall innovation success rate.

The rapid changes,exponential growth of information, emerging digital technologies, and many other factors are creating new challenges and opportunities for enterprises to grow and mature. Forward-looking organizations take an evolutionary approach to manage innovation in a structural way. A platform innovation approach involves an external ecosystem of customers, business partners, or different stakeholders for generating novel ideas and creating unique business value.




Innovation and business model reinvention platform: Innovation is not just about technology, it’s about doing things better, differentiating yourself from competitors, and create great business value. Innovation management is about people, culture, partnership, and processes, etc. Innovation Management also includes policies, structures, and programs. Most good ideas emerge from interactions, not single individuals. Thus, an appropriately configured and well-developed digital platform needs to become the part of innovation management planning and implementation, to help bridge cognitive and knowledge gaps, share and build ideas across the business ecosystem, provide effective tools and feedback mechanism, and enforce governance discipline to improve innovation effectiveness. People-centricity is actually the very purpose of running a platform business. Look for providing innovative business solutions which will directly benefit the external end customers and improve business competency.

A powerful innovation platform helps to nurture a culture of creativity: Highly innovative businesses provide excellent platforms for people to explore who they are, keep their creative energy flow and then, align the energy to work at hand and inspire a creative culture. The appropriately configured innovation platform creates a scalable means for brainstorming, designing and building ideas throughout the enterprise. As a result, innovation becomes a persistent, shared reality even across silos and geographies. The effectiveness of innovation platform can be evaluated on how it helps to reduce fear and encourage creativity across the organization; how it will effectively leverage the diversity of thoughts to create meaningfully unique ideas, as well as how it will effectively leverage the power of stimulus to generate and implement meaningfully unique ideas.You need to make sure that your company has a steady flow of fresh ideas floating in the innovation pipeline, more importantly, you need a methodological platform that allows you to do that in an efficient and structural way.

A highly effective innovation platform increases the speed in the innovation process, decrease risk in the innovation process: With dynamic changes and fierce competitions, the speed of innovation needs to be accelerated. In reality, the common barriers to speed up innovation include silos, rigid rules, inflexibility, static process, or bureaucracy, etc. A well-considered platform with a set of collaboration tools in the given culture, operating environment, and governance, can be an integral part of innovation management solution. A powerful innovation platform can streamline idea flow, reorganize, refocus, and re-balance resources to accelerate innovation speed, manage risks, harness interactions with external systems to improve innovation management effectiveness and maturity.

Keep in mind, relying on a magical platform or tool alone without a genuine commitment to shift culture or enforce governance as part of innovation strategy, still make innovation as serendipity. Regardless of the nature of the organization, there are some similarities in creative culture such as strong vision and leadership, outward-looking rather than insular, willing to accept a degree of risk and experimentation, etc. A well developed platform  plus a creative culture is critical to strengthen innovation efforts, manage innovation in a scalable and structural way and improve the overall innovation success rate.

The Monthly “Performance Master’ Book Tuning:The Performance Management Framework & Approach Sep. 2019

 A suitable Performance Management framework delivers the results the organization needs in a demonstrable or measurable way.

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

The purpose of the book “Performance Master: Take a Holistic Approach to Unlock Digital Performance “is to provide an in-depth understanding and share unique insight about how to take a holistic approach to measuring and managing enterprise digital performance.

   The Performance Management Framework & Approach

Three Aspects of Digital Performance Framework Performance Management is supposed to enable business achievement. A suitable Performance Management framework delivers the results the organization needs in a demonstrable or measurable way. A well-designed performance framework helps the management focus on measuring things really matter and facilitate answers to some key questions of performance management such as. (1) What are you trying to achieve? (2) How are you going to measure it? To put it another way: What are your performance goals? How will you know when you've achieved them?

Leverage ”PIICC“ Model to Assess IT Performance The art and science of Information Technology are to optimize its usage, achieve business value, develop long term organizational competency, and unleash the full potential of the digital organization. To improve IT performance and organizational maturity, the high mature IT organizations leverage “PIICC” model to identify what is right and wrong in the IT environment, make an objective assessment of IT effectiveness, efficiency, and overall competency, and provide data-based insight on how IT can bring success to the company for the long term.

How to Engage Top Management in Performance Management Performance Management is a significant management discipline in the business system. It’s the management practice that does not have hard coded programming like other business systems but directly drives corporate mindset, attitude, and behavior. What are success factors in Performance Management? How to engage top business executives in Performance Management? And how to build an effective framework of processes and guidelines dealing with dynamic, fluid, unpredictable pool of corporate mentality and behaviors?

From Performance Appraisals to Performance Optimization Managing performance is a wonderful idea! But too many companies ignore the difference between doing PA (Performance Appraisal) and actually being proactive in performance management. In fact, in performance management, much less time should be spent on evaluating past performance, but moving to removing barriers to future performance. You can ask yourself some questions to move in the right direction like how frequent feedback will add value to your organization and the employees, what are the organizational goals and what value can performance evaluation add to it? What rewards should be linked to performance evaluation and how these rewards will affect the productivity of your employees and contribute to the organizational goals?

Taking a Holistic Approach to Measure Up the Performance of Digital Organization The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital transformation is not a one-time project or a stand-alone initiative; it is a continuous journey to adapt to the new normal of the business world. Metrics are part of transparent visual management allowing pulling. So, how to measure the performance of the digital organization?

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 #6000 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.

The Best “Outlier” Quotes of “Digital Master” Sep. 2019

An outlier is creatively disruptive, break down silos, update digital rules, and create new knowledge.

"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 “Outlier” quotes in “Digital Master.”

The Organizational Fragility Caused by Imbalance

Growth, balance, and harmony are not fixed, they are flowing. 

The black and white boundaries continue to diminish in the 21st century due to the occurrence of increased economic integration, hyperconnected and interdependent nature of digital organization. Ad hoc business change is doomed to fail. The digital transformation is radical change, with all sorts of ups and downs, bumps and curves. It brings both opportunities for business growth and risks as pitfalls. From a business management perspective, the imbalance of any sort will cause change fatigue, decision ineffectiveness or business fragility, To lead change smoothly, how to identify problems and fix them smoothly?

Imbalanced cognitive skills: Hyperdiversity and superfluidity are the characteristics of the digital era. Change is a team effort, to harmonize and move forward, it’s important to embrace cognitive difference, be open to diverse viewpoints, enforce empathetic communication, and harness cross-functional or cross-regional collaboration. The imbalanced cognitive skills often create cognitive gaps, cause groupthinking, generate blindspots, and lead to ineffective decision-making. Therefore, cognitive performance is important for both problem-solving and creativity development. Individually, to develop multidimensional intelligence and sharpen cognitive skills, it’s critical to frame a bigger box of thinking, let the "out of the box" thought coming into your own thinking box, to think both broader and deeper, critically and creatively in order to make sound judgments and effective decisions. Collectively, talented people with the cognitive difference can understand things from different angles and bring new perspectives to the table. It’s important to set up a heterogeneous team with balanced cognitive skills, and its team members can proactively stimulate the creative energy and their collective psychology shapes the culture of innovation.

Imbalanced business priority: Nowadays there are so many things going on in the business, with so many distractions or disruptions. the organization has limited resources and they can’t chase all emerging opportunities or capture everything looks shiny. The imbalanced business priority will perhaps get the business stuck and make the business fragile, and cause the business falling into the “busyness” cycle without going anywhere. The high mature digital organization gives a balanced focus on achieving both short term and long term objectives. Therefore, the toughest part of the strategy is the trade-offs, organizations need to keep one eye on today’s performance and the other eye on the future performance of the business. It has to strike a right balance of exploration (planning, designing, developing, investing, innovating, monetizing and orchestrating) for pursuing growth opportunities and exploitation (consolidating, rationalizing, modernizing, integrating, securing, or optimizing) for achieving operational excellence. In practice, sometimes business managers focus on improving the processes or implementation of performance management or evaluation but fail to look into the system holistically or think long term to shape the future. Thus, the business leaders today must be able to prioritize well, switch confidently between strategic and tactical, transformational and transitional in order to run a high-performance digital business for the long run.

Imbalance of speed: Companies adapt to the “VUCA” digital new normal with varying speed. On one side, driving too slow will leave the business irrelevant and cause the business losing the game as the competitors will take over the market and win over customers. On the other side, driving too fast perhaps fail the business as well due to the unprecedented level of risks and uncertainty if the company is not well prepared for challenges. We live in an era in which every piece of information has the potential to plunge a company into a falling spiral or a global reputational crisis. The imbalance of speed will cause the business fragile and decrease their business effectiveness. Forward-looking organizations explore the new arena to speed up, but silo mentality, overly restrictive hierarchy or functional segmentation often create barriers that surface between different departments within a company, and limit the pace of their digital transformation. To strike the right balance of acceleration and stability, flexibility and standardization, creativity and process, some organizations run with a hybrid speed, separate the exploitation of the existing technologies, methods, and practices from the exploration of new ways to do things. Highly intelligent organizations can capture business insight almost at the real-time, in order to respond to changes promptly and run the business at the premium speed.

It’s important to understand that digital management is multifaceted and holistic. Striking the right digital balance is a never-ending business life cycle. Growth, balance, and harmony are not fixed, they are flowing. The digital organizations need to get away from letting things fall through, start creating “integrated wholes,” strike the multitude of digital balances which impact with each other in order to achieve such a state of dynamic equilibrium.