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CIOs need to be great visionary first and good communicator second: Digital CIOs are business leaders first, and IT managers the second. They are able envision the emerging technology trends, identify and blend the ways that information technology can assist and shape the future of business by lining all digital components together to enforce business value creation. They have the right mix of hard competencies such as leadership vision, mentorship and management skills as well as soft communication and delegation skills to make leadership influence across the company and even the industry. To keep IT relevant as a strategic partner, IT leaders today have to to not only articulate their vision but also communicate it in various forms to different audiences, such as board directors, investors, C-level executives, business partners, or IT staff, etc. Because different stakeholders of the business have different concerns about IT for meeting their specific needs, thus, CIOs should be flexible and adjust the lingo to suit the audience, drop technical jargon and use common business language, to ensure all parties involved are at the same page of change and strategy implementation.

CIOs need to leverage Systems Thinking to make effective decisions in IT management: Systems Thinking is about understanding the interconnectivity between parts and the whole. In Systems Thinking, typically processes fall within the system. IT shouldn’t be an isolated support function, but an integral part of the digital business which is a living system. IT is in the unique position to oversee the underlying business functions and processes, Systems Thinking helps IT leaders discover the interconnectivity and interdependence of the digital business ecosystem. CIOs with Systems Intelligence have both a bigger picture perspective and technical understanding for making effective decisions in IT management. They are able to articulate clear messages on how IT can bridge the gap between the current state and the future state of the business by integrating all critical business components into differentiated business competencies. Systems Thinking applies at both the level of technology artifacts in the resource category and IT effect at the enterprise level across all business functions for driving changes in a structural way.

CIOs shouldn’t classify creativity and logic as two completely different disciplines, IT management is both art and science: IT continues to grow in importance both for achieving operational excellence and building business competitive advantage. Thus, IT management is part science, part art, often creative, always professional and occasionally magic. Thus, IT leaders should be creative enough to dream bigger and realistic enough to make a dream come true. They are adventurous to experiment with new things, but also logical enough to solve problems systematically and demonstrate the experience of delivering value on time and on budget. The emerging digital technologies and IT consumerization provides IT leaders the opportunity to think of a new way to do things. It forces IT leaders to be proactive and get really creative in how they architect and implement change, to ensuring IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next.

CIOs should follow the “balance” principle to run IT in transformational mode and transactional mode accordingly: “Transactional" refers to operational activities to keep the lights on. "Transformational" means redesigning existing transactions to something new, being innovative, creative and also introducing completely new transactions with a strategy that serves the organization well. It requires IT leader being both strategic and hands on. It is crucial to delivering the mundane to accomplish the strategic vision. It also means you need to keep the business running forward with steadfast speed and know when to “rock the boat” accordingly. From a problem-solving perspective, the transactional ability of IT helps to accomplish the daily tasks for solving tactical issues; while the transformational IT capability is the ability to work across business disciplines to solve complex, often strategic problems with contextual understanding and long term perspectives.

IT is a unique leverage to create business synergy, unlock performance, and unleash digital potential: The digital organization is a dynamic business system concentrated on the cultural system, moral system, social system, IT system, other functional system and the holistic digital ecosystem. More and more organizations realize that they have to renew themselves periodically to cope with change effectively and take adaptive management discipline. IT is an effective leverage to streamline information flow and allow people across the business ecosystem to share knowledge and work collaboratively for solving problems and achieving strategic business goals. It all requires profound leadership and cohesive ITmanagement practices. IT leaders need to have multidisciplinary knowledge and in-depth understanding of the business in order to lead change effortlessly. If you don't understand the business, you can't deliver relevant results except using slow or clumsy processes. If you don't know the architecture, you can't easily decide whether a business request maps to your technical capabilities and agility can result in chaos.

In its best form, leadership is about creating a powerful future that is compelling in the present. CIO is not the status quo, but the position power does help IT leaders amplify their leadership influence in the hierarchical business environment. The top CIOs today are able to enforce a set of well-defined IT management principles, utilize the best talents, capabilities, and resources of their people and organization to run strategic IT and produce meaningful and valuable long-term results.

Digital Modernist: To run a high-mature digital organization, CIOs need to have better senses to capture technology trends, articulate a clear vision of what’s possible, gain insight to understand things holistically, and explore the premium path of digital transformation. Information Technology is permeating into every corner of the business nowadays. As the modern CIO, you have the most influential position in the business. Don’t waste the opportunity, seize it. The digital modernist CIOs should focus on information management, and ensure that information can be refined into valuable business insight and be actively used to shape a high-intelligent business. At the higher level of organizational maturity, IT is an innovation hub and change agent. The digital modernist CIOs can step out of conventional IT box and disrupt linear management disciplines, discover the creative side of IT, leverage the latest digital technologies and exponential growth of information to fuel innovation, and reinvent IT as the growth engine of the business.

Business Model architect: It’s not sufficient to run IT as a support function only. IT can become known as a revenue rainmaker by associating its efforts directly with sources of income. IT should invest in and leverage appropriate technologies and solutions to generate valuable insights and help the business open up new channels of revenue and monetization within the enterprise and their ecosystem. In fact, in today’s digital economy, Information Technology becomes an important element in developing the new business model or renovating existing business model. The strategic CIOs like the business model architect, run IT as the linchpin to connect all important building blocks of a strong business model such as revenue streams, resources, key activities, partnerships, cost structures, marketing channels or customer relationship management, etc. IT applications blended with emerging digital technologies can make continuously creative disruptions, rejuvenate business models, and deliver significant business benefits.

Savvy venture capitalist: IT is one of the most critical business assets besides people. IT investment is often costly. In fact, IT investment in the business can often become the decisive factor to run a high-performance organization with a long-term perspective. Many organizations across vertical sectors make huge investment in sophisticated IT, but unfortunately, IT portfolio management has considerably lower level of success rate compared to many other types of business investment. Because often, IT investment and management is not just the work of IT, but the responsibility of the entire company. CIOs should think and act like venture capitalist, make wise decisions and manage a successful IT investment portfolio to improve the overall strategic management effectiveness and business competency.

Skillful business solutionist: With rapid changes, the disruptions come almost overnight. Technology is a significant component in almost all critical business processes and capabilities. Information is often one of the most time-intensive pieces of complex problem-solving. Thus, modern CIOs need to be skillful business solutionists, assign their talent, resource and time carefully to solve problems really matter. They should leverage the enterprise's strategy and business objectives to set the right priority and decide which problems to solve and strike the right balance of IT transaction and transformation. IT needs to be influential enough to offer customers premium solutions in the right manner at the right cost. They won’t just wait for the customers’ requests to solve their issues; but work closely and proactively with the business to identify and frame the real problems, as well as leverage information and technology to solve them effectively.

Innovative culture influencer: A healthy corporate culture is very important as a determinant of business performance for the long term. IT plays a threshold competency role in building a culture of innovation. CIOs as “innovative culture influencer” should encourage out of the box thinking, have the vision and leadership competency to stimulate creative energy and maximize innovation at all levels in the organization. Change the culture is the mindset, it’s important to empower innovators, hire, retain, and recognize innovators who can help the organization shape the culture of creativity and develop an open and optimal environment for innovation. The art of innovation is that it involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel. It takes systematic effort within a company to embrace fresh thinking, leverage powerful digital information technologies, cultivate an innovative culture, and manage innovation in a structural way.

Being strategic means CIOs should always stay focused on the big picture of the business, value creation and strategic impact, to ensure doing right things before doing things right, leverage and prioritize, build long-term sustainable competitive advantage and take the organization to the next level of digital maturity.

CIO as Chief Improvement Officer The “I” in the CIO title is full of imagination; the "Chief Improvement Officer" is a right fit for the modern CIO role. CIOs need to have unique business insight, technological vision to understand the business not only from the inside-out viewpoint but through outside-in customer’s lens. With that knowledge, CIOs can drive innovation to improve the hard business process and soft organizational culture by implementing the technical solution and improve IT and overall business agility and maturity.