Digital Maturity
Showing posts with label Digital Maturity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Digital Maturity. Show all posts

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.
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Apply Gestalt Principles to Design a Self-Adaptive Digital Organization

Gestalt theories, psychology, and principles provide an invaluable angle for the management to understand perceptions & cognitions, business patterns or interconnectivity, etc.

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism is interpreted in psychology as a "pattern" or "configuration." Gestalt Principles describe how the human eye perceives visual elements. it’s known as the "Law of Simplicity," which states that every stimulus is perceived in its most simple form. Gestalt theories followed the basic principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. From a business management perspective, how to apply Gestalt principles to design a self-adaptive and learning digital organization by discovering patterns and understanding the intrinsic interconnectivity between parts and whole,

Come up with meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world: Variety, complexity, diversification, nonlinearity, and interdependence, etc, are the very characteristics of the digital era. Gestalt psychology tries to understand the laws of our ability to acquire meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world, to discover useful patterns and detect signals, to manage order from chaos. In the world with high velocity and uncertainty, there is known known, known unknown, and unknown unknown, it’s no surprise that once a while, the chaos swallows the order in a moment, and the digital seems to go wild. Be paranoid to think forward, but don't panic. The creative mind continues to discover useful patterns and understand the underlying configurations, apply Gestalt principles to come up with meaningful perceptions from the seemingly chaotic circumstances, and actively seek out fresh ideas wherever you can discover them. If you look at patterns, you will find that they are containers for articulating relationships. You can navigate from patterns to patterns to learn about a problem space, peel back the layers to figure out the root causes and solve the problem systematically.

The mind forms a “whole” with self-organizing tendencies: The central principle of Gestalt psychology addresses that the human mind considers objects in their entirety before, or in parallel with the perception of their individual parts; suggesting the whole other than the sum of its parts. Digital organizations are people-centric living systems with the tendency to be self-organizing for improving adaptability and self-renewal. From the economic and organizational point of view, people follow Gestalt principle to perceive the “whole,” are able to adapt themselves and their organization through a collaborative and peer to peer approach. Self-organization will occur naturally and most of the time without, or in spite of, external direction. Teams naturally gravitate towards self-organization, if not interfered with. The two fundamental system elements -structure and behavior co-working in every organism in nature and in every system designed by humans. The behavior points out the relations (actions/reactions) between the system and the environment; and the organizational structure points out the impacts (changes/ transformation) of environment condition on the business system. Digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment and make an adaptation for the future actions.

The part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole: The fundamental "formula" of Gestalt theory could be expressed as "there are whole, the behavior of which is not determined by that of the individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.” The digital paradigm is associated with deep ecology. Consider the nature and organizations as self-organized but interlaced system which have their own purpose, and the processes are determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. In reality, the problems of many traditional organizations are silo functions, incoherent processes, overly rigid hierarchy, fractal structure, or bureaucratic management style. Thus, to design a self-adaptive digital organization, the management needs to apply Gestalt principles to understand cohesive relationship between parts and the whole, to fine tune the fundamental business elements such as process, structure, technology, culture, capability, etc, and to ensure that the digital organization can strike the delicate balance between solid and flow, standardization and flexibility, and to improve business responsiveness and coherence.

Gestalt theories, psychology, and principles provide an invaluable angle for the management to understand perceptions & cognitions, business patterns or interconnectivity, etc. The digital organization of the future should be designed openly for unleashing collective human potential based on the comprehensive understanding of how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of challenges and strategic imperatives of the 21st century, with the goal to unlock performance and drive progress.
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Fair Reasons to Fine-Tune the Organizational Structure

Fine-tuning underlying business structure and processes is a critical step for improving digital business fluidity, flexibility, and overall digital fit,

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.

Change in a strategy requires realignment of resources and fine tuning the organizational structure: With increasing speed of changes, the degree of business responsiveness depends on how business systems and subsystems interact with each other, flatter organizational structures will help to speed up the organizational response to changing markets. In the industrial age, many organizations are running in silos, with the top down organizational structure and overly restricted hierarchy which slows down the speed of changes. Limited hierarchy works best in a creative environment where the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of business success. Forward-looking organizations work proactively to dismantle business bureaucracy, experiment with different types of organizational structures to enforce business alignment, enablement, communication, and collaboration, design for trust, and improve the adaptability and maturity of the organization.

Disappointing customer satisfaction results give the management a sense of urgency to fine-tune the organizational structures or processes: The digital era upon us is the age of customer centricity. The challenge for the business across vertical sectors is to fine-tune a successful organizational structure that delivers what customers what and architect an organization to bring value to customers while also creating value for the business itself. To fine tune a customer-centric organization, they need to break down silos, keep information and ideas flow frictionlessly, and manage knowledge holistically so that they can capture almost real time customer insight, tailor customers need, meet their expectations, and adapt to changes with faster speed.

The adoption of new technologies provide companies great opportunities to fine-tune the organizational structure and reinvent the business: In a world that has been transformed by technology, many old and powerful hierarchies became “commoditized.” The latest digital technologies and collaborative tools provide great opportunities for the business to optimize business design, fine tune organizational structures, and improve business maturity. New generations of digital technologies are highly powerful but nimble and lightweight to bridge functional silos and provide omnichannel communications, enabling not only the structured processes of the past but also the unstructured processes of the hyperconnected digital enterprise. Thus, any organizational restructure effort should leverage the emerging digital technologies and platforms for improving cross-functional communication, mass collaboration, and harnessing innovation.

The organizational structure tuning helps to create the chemistry that has a significant impact on productivity, performance and creativity: Organization structure and its impact on business culture could play either a positive or negative impact. The digital workplace needs to be designed to help employees at all levels within an organization, from top leaders to front-line employees, understand and develop their creative capacity to solve problems and explore opportunities in innovative ways. An organization can approach the flow zone when positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks. Thus, the challenge for any business is to fine-tune a successful structure that helps to empower people and enforce business relationships to unleash the collective potential. The management should do their best to make sure that their personnel is educated, accepting, and eventually investing in that change themselves.

Restructure organization to drive digital transformation: Leading digital transformation is like navigating a ship on the sea, you have to make the timely adjustment for adapting to the changing climate, otherwise, it perhaps causes fatal damages. It’s about setting out goals and working at them in a systematic way for proactively disrupting outdated mindsets, organizational structures, processes, technologies, or cultures. Traditional organizations are often silo-based and strictly hierarchical. The large scale business transformation often requires to fine tune the underlying organizational structures, functions, or culture, etc. Digital leaders are eager to set stages, fine-tune organizational structures that allow the growth mindset and digital culture to bloom so that the business can stretch out in every business dimension for driving a full-fledged digital transformation.

Fine-tuning underlying business structure and processes is a critical step for improving digital business fluidity, flexibility, and overall digital fit, and drive a frictionless, immersive, and relentless digital transformation. The ultimate business goal is to unlock latent expertise, scale innovation, amplify digital impact, and streamline business flow across the organizational ecosystem. Ideally, the digital organizational structure needs to be solid enough to “keep things in order,” but also fluid enough to interact with the expanded digital ecosystem seamlessly.
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The Monthly “Digital Maturity” Book Tuning: The Multidimensional Digital Maturity Sep. 2019

The high mature digital organization today needs to be sophisticated enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. The digitalization flattens the organizational hierarchy and blurs the functional, organizational and geographical borders in the business ecosystem. It is like a gigantic puzzle with many misplaced pieces, you have to put them all in the right places to discover the real meaning and unleash its full potential. You cannot make a true digital paradigm shift without an in-depth understanding of the digital interconnectivity and embracing the multitude of digital maturity.


The Multidimensional Digital Maturity


Five Pillars of Organizational Maturity Today’s business world is dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hyper-competitive. Every business is different, they are at varying stages of its business life cycle and different level of organizational maturity. Many companies may be in business for many years but has not matured its management disciplines. But surviving and thriving in today’s business dynamic requires structural flexibility, cross-functional collaboration, inter-relational process to reduce business fricitions and deal with conflicts or disruptions that arise, to shape a people-centric organization from functioning to delight. Here are five pillars of organizational maturity. 
Five Characteristics of IT Maturity With rapid changes, exponential growth of information and often technology led disruptions, the role of IT in the current business environment should enable business outcomes, catalyze enterprise growth, and build organizational competency. Many companies are reaching the inflection point of digital transformation. IT plays a critical role in the digital paradigm shift. Here are five characteristics of IT maturity.

Five Aspects of Innovation Management Maturity? Innovation is the differentiated business capability enabling the organization to ride on emerging trends and beat down competitions effortlessly. How well the organization manages innovation is based on varying factors such as how effective of the allocation of resources; how efficient of the innovation process or lack thereof; how fast they can make decisions, how consistently they are able to deliver the business result; how much risk they can afford to take and how big is the innovation impact, etc. Here are five aspects of innovation management maturity.

Three Refinement to Shape High-Mature Digital Organization Change is multifaceted with increasing speed and velocity. Digitalization is the radical change, Change Management is all about balancing the main elements impacting change such as people, strategies, processes/procedures and IT, refining business success factors to practice digital management disciplines relentlessly.

The Characteristics of Digital Management With very nature of hyperconnectivity and interdependence, the exponential growth of information and frequent changes, the digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating cross-ecosystem which is dynamic, continuous and interactive. Perhaps we need to consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem. The traditional management discipline based on linear logic and reductionist thinking is outdated somehow. Because the high mature digital organization today needs to be sophisticated enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly. Organizations that thrive on consistency and predictability are excellent at maintaining business growth momentum by taking integrated digital management practices which are based on interdisciplinarity, holism, and management innovation experimenting.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6000th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 25 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the 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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Five Leverage Points to Run a High Performance Digital Organization

Digital transformation is the change, but on a grand level, at the level of the system.

Today’s digital dynamic enables companies adapting to their various environments or ecosystems to pursue growth opportunities and accelerate business performance. Many forward-looking organizations are able to identify some critical leverage points for changing the right things to make a larger impact and make a leap of digital transformation which represents the next stage of business maturity.





Information flow: Organizations like individuals, need to keep their energy flow and stay in a healthy cycle of movement to operate smoothly. Information does not live alone but permeates into everywhere in the businesses. Information or knowledge flow helps to unlock latent expertise, collaborate through communities with geographically-distributed teams or cross-functional communication and interactions. It’s important to identify how information is associated with the tangible value of the business, products, and resources; and then, refine information to capture business insight for exploring growth opportunities and preventing risks. Information flow is, in fact, a leverage point to synchronize business functions and create organizational synergy. An organization can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks. The ultimate goal of leveraging information flow is to get the mass collaboration and multiply business performance through less hierarchy and highly integrated processes designed for running a hyper-connected and interdependent digital business.

Prioritization techniques: A company has finite resources to apply for getting the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectations. Many organizations today are inundated with overwhelming growth of information and overloaded with urgent issues or daily “busyness,” they are transaction driven and short-term focused. To survive and thrive in today’s “VUCA” digital new normal, companies need to understand  prioritization technique is a critical leverage point that enables them to spend time and energy on strategic goals and result-driven activities, bring up transparency and force people to become more effective and creative for solving problems really matter and drive changes smoothly. Continuously try to improve, develop, change everything in a prioritized order as long as it creates a long-term business advantage. From a management perspective, have a respected intra-organizational agreement of priorities and resources to keep the organization healthy and fit, laser focus on strategic management, and unlock business performance.

Competency identification: Running a high performance business is all about setting the right policies, identifying the right people and doing the right things in the right way to solve the right problems timely. Thus, competency identification either individually or collectively is an important leverage point for maximizing business potential. In reality, business risks include talent-related risks, it’s important to identify the skill gaps, define the technical/functional competencies required to achieve business goals, put the right people with the right capabilities in the right position to solve right problems timely. In practice, it is much easier to say than doing because it involves the multiple intelligence assessment processes to evaluate people and problems. Hence, organizations must address their common and unique skills requirements and map that out through some sort of skills/competency matrix within their organization, gain foresight about human potential, and treat people not just as cost or asset, but as the capital to invest in.

Feedback-feedforward cycle: Feedback is the information gained from experience or lessons learned from the past. Feedback should always be genuinely precise, proper and substantive. It tells you what is happening so that you can adapt and make continuous progress. Therefore, feedback is a leverage point to speed up learning and accelerate performance. If you want your team to create a great future, they need to be responsive to feedback. Such feedback helps not only to act but also aid to feedforward. Organizations are destined to look forward and step into the future, and in doing so, leveraging feedback-forward is about seeing both the past and the future, and the past is blended into the draw of the future. It means that the feedback forms have to be creative as to focus on both past performance and future changes to achieve the required goals.


Governance mechanism: Corporate governance is where resources are allocated to turning the strategy into a reality. Corporate governance needs to be part of strategic planning to ensure accountability. Effective governance mechanism is a critical leverage point for the business to facilitate the successful functioning of an organization while ensuring there are adequate controls in place to operate responsibly in accordance with its business values and strategic goals. The governance mechanism needs to be well embedded in business processes to encourage desirable behavior. If it isn’t, the strategic planning of the business perhaps becomes a synonym for wishful thinking. If organizations feel stifled by effective governance discipline, it means they have not reached the high level of business maturity yet, or put another way, they are undisciplined. The effective GRC effort shouldn’t stifle change or innovation. Rather, they have built the right mechanism to lead transformative changes and take a balanced growth cycle with premium speed.

Digital transformation is the change, but on a grand level, at the level of the system. It’s important to transform the company's underlying functions, processes, and cultures. identify effective leverage points for expanding in all directions horizontally and vertically and make significant impact on different aspects of the business. Up to the next level, businesses not only need to adapt faster, but orchestrate a full-fledged digital transformation.
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Five Characteristics of IT Maturity

IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. IT maturity directly impacts the overall business competency and maturity.

With rapid changes, exponential growth of information and often technology led disruptions, the role of IT in the current business environment should  enable business outcomes, catalyze enterprise growth, and build organizational competency. Many companies are reaching the inflection point of digital transformation. IT plays a critical role in the digital paradigm shift. Here are five characteristics of IT maturity.


Adaptability: Digital organizations are highly adaptive living systems. Adaptability is to be understood as the ability of systems or people adapt themselves to changed circumstances fast and smoothly. IT adaptability directly impacts the business competency for either responding to rapid changes or expanding market share timely. IT needs to provide guidance, direction, support, and assistance in the adoption and application of information technology solutions in support of strategic business goals and objectives with speed. More and more businesses expect the consumerization style responsiveness from IT, foresightful IT leaders understand what emergent digital technology trends can add business value and transfer that to the business advantage. Adaptation is faster if made with full involvement of people in organizational flow to harness change and innovation. IT needs to ensure its strategy allowing for digital speed and it’s fast enough to discover the root cause of problems, also quickly find solutions in case of emerging circumstances.

Multidimensional value proposition: IT value is multifaceted (economical value, quality value, utility value, social value). The value of IT is in the eye of the beholders - customers. IT value can be categorized in a number of ways such as revenue improvement (enable the top line business growth), agility (speed to market, ability to change), productivity increases, and the rate of customer satisfaction gains, etc. In fact, there are both tangible (cost saving, revenue gains, productivity increase) and intangible value (brand equity, sales enablement) components of IT value proposition. IT plays a critical role in driving changes and leading digital transformation. IT value-based management needs to be driven by concepts like collaborative value or collective advantage and multi-layer ROIs. It’s important to triangulate IT value from different angles in order to become a strategic business partner and change agent of the company,

Elasticity: Organizations are taking advantage of emerging digital technologies and abundant information for shaping highly adaptable and scalable digital organization. They build elasticity (scale up/down more seamlessly) by developing Lego-like module design architectures and capabilities with internal processes being broken into modular service components that have a standard open interface. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system, as long as the interface is kept stable. The challenge for business management is to understand where and how you can improve to scale up for getting the biggest effect and improving business competency. Technically, scaling and performing the appropriate transformation could be vendor specific as you have to take into account the technology provided. It’s also important to develop a series of best/next practices to scale up and amplify its effects with the goal to improve IT elasticity and organizational competency.

Flexibility: Flexibility is about taking an alternative way to solve problems or making multi-dimensional choices to delight customers, etc. With unprecedented digital convenience brought by technologies, the “reach and range” flexibility that now exists removes barriers that have existed in the past. The pervasive digitization requires both business and technology professionals to rethink how things are done in organizations. With rapid changes and continuous disruptions, IT organization demonstrates flexibility by taking a different approach for solving emerging problems and meeting the business’s expectations. They also take initiatives to break down silos and overly rigid processes, encourage cross-functional collaboration, and enforce business changes. Great IT leaders advocate the culture of flexibility; they are comfortable with ambiguity and respectful of processes, without being slaves to them, have risk tolerance for encouraging different ways of getting work done and inspire creativity.

Resilience: The fast growth of information and disruptive nature of technology bring both abundant opportunities and unprecedented risks to businesses today. Resilience is the ability to respond to changes proactively, act courageously when facing challenges, bounce back or fail forward. We live in an era of information abundance and continuous disruptions. Strategic risks are about uncertainties, inherent variability and the unknown interdependencies among sources of risks that could have an effect on the delivery of strategic objectives. The business managers should weigh risk and reward, take prudent risks and find ways to mitigate risk rather than eliminate it. Digital resilience depends on how to manage the gray effectively at today’s VUCA –Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous business environment. The risk management mechanism needs to be well embedded into both soft business factors such as corporate culture or communication and hard organizational elements such as processes or functions so that high mature business can elevate the management discipline from risk mitigation to risk intelligence.


IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. IT maturity directly impacts the overall business competency and maturity. Business savvy CIOs can take an outside-in lens, articulate the business benefit realized through IT investment, truly build a high mature IT organizations with all these important characteristics and run IT as a strategic business partner, to help their organizations"playing to win" not just trying not to lose, and gain long term business advantages.
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How to Deal with Business Dynamic with “Unpredictability, Uncertainty, and Unrepeatability”

It is no surprise that there is a tension between “old and new,” from the business model, mindset, process or practice perspectives.

The tides of change and waves of disruptions indicate that business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy. To tackle great challenges with grand consequences over long time spans, they need to become highly visible, proactive, and innovative for dealing with an unprecedented level of uncertainty, unrepeatability, and unpredictability effectively.




Unpredictability: Modern organizations are complex systems which tend to be non-linear and thus, hard to predict the upcoming changes on the way. Often, a part of nonlinear business system emits more energy and that’s going beyond the linear response of that part. It means small changes in the initial conditions could have a much larger and unpredictable consequences in the outcomes of the business system. From the business management perspective, even though you couldn’t predict anything beforehand, you can always imagine different scenarios based on “lessons learned” with many experiences involved in current or in the past. Although not everything is predictable, information is still one of the most important assets of the company. It is a complex domain and information becomes meaningful when being sort through and processed to make sure its coherence. When information is refined into the business foresight and customer insight, it becomes the “light tower” to navigate the business in the right direction. It requires to take leaps of setting some of the right things in motion, and delicately balancing and re-balancing the results toward urgent, but hard to predict outcomes.

Uncertainty: The pace of change is accelerated both in businesses and society, either as an individual or an organization. Uncertainty (of outcomes or occurrences) is inherent in almost every business endeavor, More specifically, uncertainty is a state of having limited knowledge where it is impossible to exactly describe the existing circumstance. From a strategic management perspective, although there is not so much you could do about uncontrollable situation. Still, a good plan can identify external business factors and a structural process can enable an organization to walk around the externals. From a leadership perspective, great leaders supply the framing context in understanding uncertainty and encourage optimism, help to mitigate the impact of uncertainty or risks by enabling a team to encounter uncertainty and deal with it strategically and systematically. They need to visualize and identify uncertainty, convert uncertainty to risk through the application of quantification methods in order to be able to manage uncertainty as risk, and move up management maturity from risk mitigation to risk intelligence.

Unrepeatability: Due to the “VUCA” digital new normal, change is unavoidable and digital disruption is inevitable. Businesses become complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interaction with un-repetitive activities and behavior. Nonlinearity, hyperdiversity, less rules and regulations, information exponentiality, unpredictability, etc, are all causes of unrepeatability. Therefore, today’s business leaders and professionals need to be open-minded, resourceful and learning agile, be able to effectively handle issues which they had never met before and overcome some unrepeatable challenges smoothly. To improve collective and collaborative problem-solving competency, business leaders should take a holistic look at the variety of business relationships and interconnectivity, enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration, apply interdisciplinary management approach to frame bigger thinking boxes and deal with many complex and unrepeatable business issues technically, scientifically, and culturally.

It is no surprise that there is a tension between “old and new,” from the business model, mindset, process or practice perspectives. To survive the “VUCA” digital new normal and thrive with the long-term business advantage involve more planning, adjustment, and speed. In today's interdependent global economy with high level of unpredictability, uncertainty, and unrepeatability, that will need a new model of leadership in which openness, vision, innovation, multidimensional intelligence, learning plasticity, flexibility, transparency, become necessary features. Lead by influence, not brute forces. The most critical and yet overlooked foundation of being a real leader is in choosing a destination that creates a better world!
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Five Pillars of Organizational Maturity

At the heart of digital, it is people and how to build a customer-centric organization. 

Today’s business world is dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hyper-competitive. Every business is different, they are at a varying stage of its business life cycle and different level of organizational maturity. Many companies may be in business for many years but has not matured its management disciplines. But surviving and thriving in today’s business dynamic requires structural flexibility, cross-functional collaboration, inter-relational process to reduce business fricitions and deal with conflicts or disruptions that arise, to shape a people-centric organization from functioning to delight. Here are five pillars of organizational maturity. 

Leadership maturity: Many say the spirit of the organization comes from the top. Due to the speed of changes and abundance of information, leadership in itself is a constant learning process that requires leaders to have open and growth mindset, humble attitude, gain a great understanding of people and group dynamics, share insight and build experience. Due to the complexity and ever-changing business dynamic, sound judgment is a hardcore leadership competency which often does not come from “gut feeling,” but based on growth mindset, updated information, solid knowledge, and contextual understanding. High mature leadership is one of the strong pillars to build a high mature digital organization. More specifically, the maturity of digital leadership depends on a number of factors such as the purpose to lead, leadership intelligence, emotional intelligence, confidence but not arrogance, the mix of knowledge and experience, the quality of information they receive and their collective leadership ability to accelerate business performance and improve organizational maturity.

Innovation competency: Innovation is the most wanted changes, innovation competency is one of the solid pillars to build high mature digital organization and the key differentiator between the digital leader and the follower. Innovation can happen anywhere across the organization and its ecosystem. To develop the organizational level innovation competency, it’s important to build a powerful innovation navigation system that involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for capturing opportunities to innovate, develop tailored innovation principles, methodologies, practices, and manage a balanced portfolio of innovations across the matrix of different types of innovation (process, product/service, business model, etc) and different degrees of innovation (incremental, substantial, breakthrough) A leading digital organization with innovation competency can handle innovation streams for different goals and different time frames, create new value, even become a game changer, position a strong business brand, and reach the next level of organizational maturity.

Operational excellence: Achieving operational excellence is fundamental to build a high mature business. It’s challenging because business management needs to ensure they have enough resources and necessary skills to implement the business strategy; the risks and assumptions are understood and manageable. It’s also important to keep trimming wastes and redundancy, set priority to bring transparency and keep optimizing business structures and processes. “Keeping it Simple” should always be one of the guiding principles and management cultures for running digital organization to achieve operational excellence. It requires some kind of re-tuning corporate processes and re-combining the business capabilities into differentiated business competencies. When the business operation is refined to the point that they are nimble, can adapt to changing business demands in a timely fashion, the organization reaches the inflection point to achieve high-level business maturity.

Information Technology Synchronization: Information is one of the most invaluable assets besides people in modern businesses and technology is the driving force of digital transformation. The power of information is to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before. Inconsistent or broken business processes result in significant information inconsistencies and business deceleration. Thus, IT is one of the strong pillars for building a high mature digital organizations. The real-time information can bring business insight and foresight, enable organizations to see the future clearly; the emerging digital technologies significantly improve business productivity, efficiency, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction. Information Technology synchronization is the prerequisite to run a real-time, high-mature digital organization. The insight-driven digital powerhouse can create the business synchronization of all functions running at the multiple levels of the organization seamlessly. It provides the quality of information for effective decision-making and high business responsiveness and adaptability.

Workforce proficiency: Organizations are complex adaptive living systems, which are comprised, in part, of people. People-centricity is one of the most important digital characteristics. Workforce proficiency is a strong pillar of building a high mature digital organization. In an ideal digital workplace, talented people are encouraged to learn, grow, and prosper by continually learning, innovating, evolving and adopting. Whenever people feel respected and needed in an organization, they are highly engaged in their work, encouraged to participate in creative activities, motivated to change, and contribute to achieving strategic business goals, It’s also important to bridge the gap between knowledge and insight, to ensure digital leaders and professionals can make information-based decisions and reach the state of knowledge proficiency collectively. Psychology, sociology, technology, anthropology, and philosophy, etc interdisciplinarity must be applied for improving talent management effectiveness and maturity.

At the heart of digital, it is people and how to build a customer-centric organization. Organizations today need to build dynamic business competencies and develop solid pillars to shape a high mature business which is sophisticated for complex problem-solving, adaptive to rapid change, innovative to create unique business value, flexible to provide alternative solutions, energetic to perpetuate business improvement, and resilient to fail over and fail forward.
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The Monthly “Digital Fit” Book Tuning: The Multifaceted Fit of Digital Business Aug. 2019

 Digital organization is a self-adaptive and self-renewing system which is able to reconfigure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environmental changes. 

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. But what are digital organizational traits, how to define digital fit and take a structural approach for digitalization?

 

                  

              

 The Multifaceted Fit of Digital Business 


Build Ambidextrous Digital Organization Digital makes a profound impact from the specific function to the business as a whole and the entire digital ecosystem. Building an evolving digital organization is to ensure that the business is complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough for adapting to changes promptly. It’s important for business leaders and professionals to think the systemic wholeness, renew knowledge, and develop the differentiated business competencies to shape an ambidextrous digital organization.

Running Digital Organizations with Differentiated Business Competency The characteristics of digital business are dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hypercompetitive. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted, so that simply adopting a new digital technology isn’t insufficient. You have to continuously scale up and dig underneath, optimize organizational processes and develop business capabilities, transform the underlying organizational structures and functions to ensure the business as a whole presenting the differentiated business competency and running with digital speed.

Three Aspects of Digital Multiplicity The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced environments, there are many emergent digital characteristics. Digital organization is a self-adaptive and self-renewing system which is able to reconfigure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environmental changes. There are multidimensional management discipline, multi-layer business relationships, and multigenerational and multicultural workforces in making digital business both dynamic and complex. Here are thee aspects of digital multiplicity.

Three Aspects of Building a Digital Savvy Organization Digital reality is a flexible blend of the physical and virtual world. Many organizations are moving from doing digital by experimenting with some emerging technologies to going digital by expanding to all dimensions of the business transformation. Organizations have to keep evolving, improving, collaborating, and innovating for becoming digital savvy and reaching the next level of organizational maturity.

Three Fitting Characteristics to Make the Business Stand out as a Digital Master With rapid changes and exponential growth of information, companies large or small are brainstorming the digital ways to think and experiment the better way to solve either old business issues or emergent problems, delight customers, improve employees’ engagement, increase productivity, and inspire creativity across the enterprise ecosystem. Organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation. So, what are fitting characteristics to make the business stand out as a digital leader and reach a high level of business maturity?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5900+ 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.
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Make Radical Shift to Improve IT Organizational Maturity

IT strength and competency directly impact the competency of the business, IT maturity is proportional to the maturity of the entire company.

Information Technology is permeating into every corner of the organization and continues to grow in importance to the company across the vertical sectors. The increasing speed of changes forces IT leaders to get really creative on how they architect and implement change, make broader, deeper, and bolder impact, and ensure that IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next, in order to drive change and lead the digital paradigm shift seamlessly.



From business afterthought to forethought: In many traditional organizations, IT is just a service provider and afterthought of the business executive and usually IT leaders don’t have a seat at the big table to co-develop the strategy. It significantly limits the business potential because emerging digital technologies and abundant information can lift the company up to a more advanced stage of digital explorement, set models and platforms that work best to meet business goals. When IT is the afterthought of the business, the strategy implementation often fails apart because it’s too late for strong technical solutions to be implemented in time or there are just too few efforts to improve the strategic value of the business effectively. Furthermore, forward-looking organizations can leverage information-based forecast to bring business insight, allowing business functions, stakeholders, and executives clearly foresee what’s happening so that they can acquire new abilities to reshape products or services for delighting customers or engaging employees, enter new markets, explore digital marketing channels or optimize daily operations continually.

From the weakest link to superglue of the company: In many organizations, IT is still an isolated function and one of the weakest links to fail the business either technically or strategically. The disconnect between the business and IT is one of the biggest root causes to fail IT and business as a whole. To improve business performance and speed, the role of digital IT is to identify and blend the ways that IT can link all digital aspects (goals, objectives, actions, etc.) of the business together to enforce business competencies and unlock performance. IT has to shift from the weakest link to superglue. IT is the only function in an organization which has the touch point with all other functions to keep optimizing business processes and information systems, and provide the necessary integration to ensure seamless strategy execution. The highly effective corporations can embed the power of information in its fiber to weave agility and other business competencies, to ensure it is part of the digital mechanism and linchpin for driving changes and improving business responsiveness and organizational maturity..


From cost center to revenue generator of the enterprise: Many companies still perceive IT as a cost center to “keep the lights on” only. To reinvent IT reputation as a revenue generator, top-notched CIOs in various industries are creating new ways to pull in revenue at their companies. Nowadays, business leaders are increasingly looking to the IT function for introducing beneficial change into their business models to improve business performance. IT management at all levels needs to understand how the business makes and loses money, and it needs to articulate solutions around this with business language, look for solutions which will directly benefit the external end customer, improve competitive advantages and in-turn, bring in increased business revenue. These engagements are leading IT to become much more proactive to spot opportunities for increasing business revenue, proposing and developing a compelling strategic business case for IT initiatives with identified benefit flows and believable dollar values.

IT strength and competency directly impact the competency of the business, IT maturity is proportional to the maturity of the entire company. Digital CIOs are uniquely qualified to envision the digital trends and manage IT in an iterative cycle to design, build, scale, and optimize business competencies and make some radical shift to achieve desired effects. The payoff of IT digital transformation is not just for the quick win, but to build the long-term business competency.
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The Monthly CIO Debates Collection & “Digital IT” Book Tuning: The CIO’s Five “How”s to Improve IT Maturity Aug. 2019

Debating is not for stimulating conflicts, but for brainstorming better ways to do things.

Due to the changing nature of technology, IT leadership role also continues to involve & shift the focus, to move up the maturity level. More and more CIOs are requested to take more responsibility and many CIOs present the breadth of leadership competency. The proactive IT debates help IT leaders to brainstorm better ways to do things and improve management capabilities. Here are the monthly CIO debates collections about envisioning digital IT leadership and running high-performance digital IT organizations.


         The CIO’s Five “How”s to Improve IT Maturity 


How to Run Differentiated IT to Reach the Zenith of Digital Maturity  The majority of IT organizations today still limit their role as a support center to keep the lights on. Bottom line thinking is one of the great limitations of the modern IT organization. The true IT value is hard to derive from support services since measuring productivity can be elusive and difficult to quantify. Also, with explosive information flow and disruptive digital technologies, all forward-thinking organizations claim they are in the information management businesses. Hence, IT as an information steward of the business has to be run as a strategic partner and a key differentiator of the company, in order to improve business competency and reach the zenith of digital maturity.

How to Run Digital IT as a Revenue Rain Maker Traditional IT organizations are perceived as a cost center, running in an inside-out operation driven mode. Nowadays, with the exponential growth of information and lightweight digital technologies, forward-looking organizations across industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business, and there is a high expectation of IT to drive changes and lead the digital transformation. Therefore, the invisible divide IT vs. Business needs to go away, and CIOs should market themselves and advocate IT as an integrated component of the company, in order to run IT as an innovation engine and revenue generator for the business. CIOs must set priorities right and have an IT transformation checklist on how to answer the questions such as: How do we get revenues now? How will we do in the future? How should IT help the company win businesses? How can IT contribute to customer acquisition and retention? And how to run digital IT as a revenue rainmaker?

CIOs as “Chief Improvement Officer”: How to Demystify the Triple Puzzles of IT Digital CIOs have to deal with multiple challenges. On one hand, modern IT plays a significant role in gluing the enterprise puzzle together to ensure the business as the whole is superior to the sum of pieces. On the other hand, due to the complex nature of technology and the exponential growth of information, IT itself is also like the large piece of the business puzzle sometimes being misplaced, because many IT organizations are still perceived slow, expensive, and not integrated with the business. In today’s digital dynamic and technical environment where IT is being used more and more around the globe for revenue-generating initiatives, how to run a digital-ready IT as a thresholding competency of the organization via demystifying the following triple puzzles?

How to Rebuild Trust between IT and Business IT plays an unprecedented role in modern organizations today, information is the lifeblood of business; and digital technology is often the innovation disruptor. However, there is still a lack of trust relationship between business-IT, within IT or between IT and vendors. Is it because most of the businesses still perceive their IT organizations as a cost center or help desk, rarely invite IT to the big table to co-create strategy? Is it because IT speaks technology jargons the business doesn’t understand, or IT plays as a gatekeeper, not an enabler for taking advantage of the latest digital technology trend. Is it also because nowadays technology vendors walk around IT to directly sell their SaaS solutions to the business functions? What are some effective ways to build/rebuild trust in the IT organization? What are the considerations for the non-IT organizations to gain the trust from IT? What are the considerations for a service provider to gain the trust of IT organizations?

How can CIOs Shift their Focus to Avoid Becoming “Chief Irrelevant Officer” More often than not, technology is the catalyst for driving business change and digital transformation, information is the lifeblood of the business. The expectations for CIO have grown multi-fold, and they are expected to be visionary and path-finder for organizational strategy and growth. How should CIO shift their focus to improve leadership effectiveness and how can CIOs prioritize the limited time and resources to ascend IT maturity?


The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 5900+ 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. 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

Build a Cognitive Digital Business to Unleash its Potential

 The cognitive organization is complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly.

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every aspect of organizations. Today’s businesses are dynamic and complex, they have to keep improving their cognitive ability to solve tough problems and implement great ideas successfully. Either at the individual or organizational level, cognition involves exploring a variety of meanings, absorbing and digesting information from varying sources, it’s a sort of perception and insight. Digital organizations are information oriented and people-centric, it’s important to improve their collective cognitive maturity to accelerate business performance and unleash its full potential.

Cognitive understanding requires an ability to grasp or comprehend information: We live in the exponential digital era, there isn't really much of an enterprise without the massive oceans of data that flows through the company at any given split second. Information is the lifeblood of business, the quality of intelligence depends greatly on the quantity of information. The cognitive ability of the organization depends on how effectively they can process information and make data-based, on-time decision in a consistent way. It is the aggregation and the assessment of information that create the intelligence required to run a highly cognitive organization. Information is all that is used to create the intelligence and shape a good strategy; as well as to test the results of strategy execution. It will be those companies that proactively invest in information Management solutions today will be able to competitively leverage their own information going forward and ensure that Information Management activities are effective by delivering tangible and visible business benefits for their long term benefit.

Improve organizational cognitive maturity to enable holistic management disciplines: Information is fluid, it has to flow frictionlessly to ensure the right people getting the right information to make the right decisions in a timely manner. Thus, digital organizations need to break down functional silos and embrace the holistic management discipline. A cognitive organization can respond to business opportunities and risks promptly, to ensure the organization as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. The value of information must be qualitative, measurable, and defined uniquely by an organization. To deepen the level of understanding and improve organizational cognitive maturity, it’s critical to manage a healthy information-innovation business cycle, bring data-based insight, fine-tune underlying business functions and processes to improve business responsiveness and performance.

The art and science of information management are to optimize its usage and achieve its value and full potential: Information is the golden thread of the digital organization. With overwhelming growth of information, faster pace of changes and unprecedented business complexity, business insight and foresight are critical to navigating the organization into the uncharted water and blurred digital territories. Information Management involves the use of technologies and processes with the aim of refining customer insight and business foresight. The goal is to predict what will happen and step further and what you should do upon it. It helps the company prepare the journey for either capturing the rising business opportunities timely or preventing potential risks effortlessly. Information abundance brings about fresh business ideas which generate business value. When information gets stuck, innovation is stifled and business suffers. Cognitive digital organizations can harness the power of data to provide the emergent business trends with a fact-based vision of where to aim and how to get there. It’s the scientific management discipline of business orientation to achieve the long-term success.

The most important capability of a cognitive business is the willingness and ability to seek out information & knowledge, gain in-depth understanding of their business, capture business insight and foresight, address ignorance and assumptions, and improve business risk intelligence. The cognitive organization is complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly.
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The Board as IT Maturity Evaluator

The corporate board’s IT inquiries help the business understand the critical role of IT in achieving business performance and maximizing business potential.


Information is the lifeblood of the business and technology is the disruptive force behind the digital transformation. Nowadays, information technology can either lift or fail business even overnight. Therefore, an IT savvy board should change the perspective to understand the power of information technology and make an objective assessment of IT maturity of their organization so that companies can leverage IT to improve the top line business growth and build a long-term business advantage.

Help to set guiding principles for running digital IT organization: The corporate board oversees the business strategy and sets guiding principles for practicing business management disciplines. Guiding principles let the organization know what to expect when dealing with IT. It serves as a yardstick by which to manage and measure IT internally and externally, and it can spur some great discussions with fellow C-suites to improve business maturity. To oversee the strategy, you will need a cascade of statements that link the overall vision/philosophy of the organization, value statements, Mission Statements, Strategy, Objectives, and Programs (Tactics). There needs to be a pragmatic way of applying whatever principles to the problem in a consistent manner. Otherwise, it is a waste of effort to even state them. Today IT is permeating into every corner of the business, IT management is no longer just the business of IT department, but a holistic management discipline to ensure the right people getting the right information to make the right decisions for solving the right problems at the right time. The corporate board’s IT oversight is important because it is not easy for a set of defined principles that can be applied holistically - their content contains natural conflict, and without a method of prioritizing and implementing them consistently, they become a source of contention.

Assess the overall IT performance: The fundamental accountability issue for the corporate board is to ensure the organization acts in accordance with the relevant regulations. Often, companies overwhelmed with too many business initiatives is a common scenario. The root cause of the problem is the lack of connection between strategy and implementation. There are a couple of contributing factors to project overwhelming and lack of priority, such as leadership ineffectiveness, resource under-estimation, or the “whirlwind” of the day to day operations, etc. The corporate board’s strategy oversight and performance monitoring help the business management including IT set the right priority, lead the business to a realization that the real challenge and the real opportunity in improving the corporate governance of IT are in reworking the management systems so that they are integral aspects of the corporate management systems for planning, building, and running the business to improve its effectiveness, performance, and maturity.

Evaluate the maturity of the IT organization: Is IT an enabler or an obstacle to getting things done in organizations? One of the biggest obstacles to achieving digital fluency is the gap between business and IT. IT organization is supposed to be one of the most significant building blocks of the business competency, but it’s perceived as the roadblock to getting things done. Too often, IT is involved too late in the decision-making process. This results in a dynamic where the business develops enthusiastically nice and shiny plans and goals, but IT then has to explain why this cannot be developed and fit into the plan at a reasonable investment. Thus, an IT-friendly board should oversee the business strategy with IT strategy as an integral component, invite IT leaders to the big table for providing input and sharing a technological vision. If the IT focus is on operations and controlling only, it is no wonder non-IT executives consider IT as an obstacle. IT leaders must know how to promote their organization by "selling the right things right," to have a seat at the big table and share the vision the radical digital transformation IT can catalyze. The corporate board monitors the business performance and sets the cultural tone to build a high performance organization. Collaboration, transparency, respect, and clear leadership are the keys to break down silos, and every department in the company needs to work together to be successful.

The corporate board’s IT assessment and oversight help the business management understand the critical role of IT in achieving high performance and maximizing business potential. The top leadership needs to sort through the critical issues, develop rationalizations and achieve mutually acceptable solutions that are then communicated up, down and across the enterprise to integrate IT and business and make a seamless digital transformation.
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