IT-based forecast allows the business to capture the emerging digital trends and respond to changes promptly: We are living in an information abundant world with rapid changes and unprecedented business complexity today, envisioning and foresight are critical to navigating the organization into the uncharted water or blurred digital territories. In a business scope, there are some of the important bits and bytes of information needed to forecast a new market, an emerging technology trend, or a business growth opportunity. Forward-thinking companies leverage IT to provide the business foresight and customer insight about upcoming opportunities or risks, understand what customers want even before they know themselves. Some trends are more significant than others in their impact on business growth. Digital leaders today have to keep evolving and gaining fresh views, leverage information for discovering unexpected connections between the business and its rich environment, and shape the future together. The goal of the business foresight and forecast is to predict what will happen and take a step further - what shall you do upon it. It’s a scientific management discipline of business orientation. IT-led forecast precision helps the company respond to changes promptly and prepare the journey for digital transformation confidently.

IT-driven products/services/business model innovation development & management to shape unique business competency: Innovation often has a lot to do with external circumstances, such as the macroeconomic environment or technology trend. The fast growth of information and the disruptive nature of technology brings abundant opportunities to innovate business across vertical sectors. The highly innovative organizations depend more heavily on its technological knowledge and market capabilities to develop and commercialize innovation. IT can drive all sorts of innovation, proactively pushing ideas on how to leverage technology to catalyze revenue growth, increase business productivity, flexibility, and agility. Thus, IT leaders need to break down the IT thinking box and clarify innovation management goals from outside in business perspectives. IT should go out and talk with varying shareholders, business executives and customers to know their pains and gains and understand their tastes as well as current and future needs, for sparking more innovative ideas and managing a balanced innovation portfolio with products/services/business model innovation development from the business lenses .In fact,  IT is the linchpin to integrate all crucial elements into differentiated innovation competency.

IT-led ecosystem alliance to accelerate digital transformation: There is no doubt we are moving from a static and linear business world to a dynamic, hyper-connected, and interdependent digital era,The enterprise digital platforms enabled by information technology break down functional silos, business silos, geographical silos, and even industrial silos, allowing people across the business ecosystem to share knowledge, brainstorm ideas, overcome common challenges, and co-solve business problems creatively and collaboratively. Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual harmony between humans. The dynamic digital ecosystem can be perceived through the lenses of sociology, psychology, anthropology, the economics of education, economics, organizational and communication sciences, poetical science, etc. Many companies have never been better positioned to engage in multi-industry collaborations. It is excellent to bring digital technologies to this realm, to urge a sense of connection. Digital organizations are like the switches, and IT is the fabric to connect them all together in the digital ecosystem and enforce ecosystem alliance to accelerate digital transformation.

IT faces an unprecedented opportunities to refine its reputation, also needs to take more responsibility as a true business partner and build the good credibility and reputation as a change agent. Contemporary companies must master IT as a trendsetter of the organization advancement; as an innovation hub to create new ideas and generate business value; and as the catalyst of the digital transformation.

Breadth: There are all sorts of changes and there are different attitudes to changes. More specifically, there are transformative changes and incremental changes; there are organizational change, technological change, and behavioral change; there are changes as a response to dynamic external conditions and changes that are initiated because of external factors. There are all kinds of problems about changes as well. Sometimes the problem is inability to perceive a change in the environment or lack of the ability to plan and make necessary adjustments of adapting to the dynamic environment; more often the problem is at the mindset level, people resist changes and the organization suffers from the change inertia. Transformative change starts with the realization that you currently can no longer deliver the vision of success for the company and it takes a structural approach to make change happening and bring up impact at the business scope with less side impact. Because too often, transformative change is acted on the basis of improving one part of an organization at the expense of other parts of the company. Understanding the breadth of change enables change management to keep information and interaction flow in all directions and build up trust by bonding people around clear and benevolent intentions.

Depth: Change, especially radical change often means that the company reinvents itself,” and needs to restructure the root of the company such as beliefs, objectives, processes, functions, culture, or business model, etc. Change is chaotic, but change management needs to be structural. Change is never for its own sake, it starts with leveraging critical thinking to figure out the “Big Why” about change, dig through the very reason for change and how to manage it for achieving tangible business results. "Why" concerns should not just precede "How" elaboration, but should be reaffirmed at each step in the "How." Every change is about fixing problems large or small, understanding the depth of problem helps to not just fixing the symptoms, but curing the root causes. Every process, every expenditure of time, money, or energy, and every assignment of resources should directly relate back to the "Why." Change mechanism needs to be woven into communication, process, and action of the organization to dig through and solve problems radically.

Length: With today’s business dynamic, change shouldn’t be just a few random business initiatives, but an ongoing organizational capability and business continuum. Digital transformation is a long-term journey, either individually or collectively, the success factor to the “transformative change,” has been the endless self-exploration in material, emotional, or intellectual dimensions. Thus, a change road-map should be prepared, which lays out the specific steps needed to accomplish the longer term goals and objectives, establishes timelines, assigns responsibilities, and looks at potential obstacles, etc, for leading change confidently. It has to be clearly understood in the map's vision to satisfy both short-term gratification and long-term strategic goals for transformative change. Change is continuously happening and spiraling up in such a dynamic environment. Thus, Change Management could be a never ending journey and it requires step-function changes in tools, culture, leadership, and process to make continuous improvement and deliveries.

Height: Change management often needs to go hand in hand with strategic management. The height of change management needs to be compatible with the height of strategy. The ‘height’ of strategy depends on how clear the business vision is; and a good strategy identifies its contribution to accomplishing the organization's vision, helping to achieve the organizational end-goal and overall mission. The height of Change Management is related to how ambitious the change objectives are. It is important that businesses get the best out of the people. The company with high changeability pushes people out of the comfort zone, get the maximum motivation to unlock the performance and unleash their full potential. Change can be an opportunity, at the end of the day, it needs to be all about expediting strategy management, unlocking business performance by moving the business number upwards and achieving calculable business results.

Time: Today’s digital business ecosystem has become more complex and dynamic, change itself changes. Thus, Change Management also turns out to be more complex. Can change managers spot the right time for change? How well organizations can strike the right balance of change and stability, implement changes time after time and develop it as a differentiated business competency. It's time for changes when you see the negative emotions (ONR - Objections, Negativity or Resistance) permeating into the business culture and diminish creativity, mediocrity pops up and drag down the business speed. It’s time for change when the business seemingly goes nowhere, the top feels the urgency and the bottom feels the pain. It is only when the management has a sense of urgency, change occurs at different levels of the business and the majority of people are on the journey, the real results start to emerge.

The businesses, and the world as a whole become over-complex, uncertain, and ambiguous, the digital business dynamic allows the organization to morph as the business conditions and organizational capacities for change to allow a better fit, absorb and accept changes in all its forms, gain an in-depth understanding of the breadth, depth, length, height, and pace of changes, eliminate redundancy and complication, and take a systematic approach to drive change with multidimensional disciplines and continuous disciplines.

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.

Blind spot: To survive in today’s “VUCA” digital new normal, organizations must adapt to rapid changes by making effective decisions in a consistent way. Often, there isn’t always a right or wrong choice in any situation, there are a lot of gray areas and varying blind spots in decision making. Blind spots are usually caused by silo thinking and homogeneous team-setting. They will cloud your vision, trigger poor judgment and lead ineffective decision-making. Therefore, it’s important to challenge, debate, and initiate dynamic and respectful dialogue to broaden perspectives and close blindspots.

In reality, many companies still have rigid organizational hierarchy and bureaucratic culture, their business is still the sum of pieces rather than a holistic whole. Many teams operate with an incomplete and relative small view of the business and take linear management discipline. It’s no surprise that such silo mentalities will create numerous blind spots in talent, resource, process, capacity, and capability management, and further cause failures in strategy execution. Thus, it’s important to develop high-performance leadership team with cognitive difference, complementary skills and distinctive capabilities to identify and fill blind spots and improve their leadership effectiveness.

Dark spot: Individually, negative emotions create dark spots - your fear drains energy and thwarts creativity; your ego is a mask or a costume that you wear in the great play of career or life to hide your authenticity; your envy degrades your integrity or professionalism, etc. Collectively, in the business environment, silo or bureaucratic thinking creates dark spots and generates negative energy. It’s about fear of failure; fear to get out of old habits, fear to lose the status quo. It makes people feel threatened, that’s why learning is stressful. Negative emotions create dark energy, drive misjudgment, and cause inertia to adopt the right course of action. To brighten the dark spot, learn to abide by nature and let the positive dominate the negative through continuous learning, adapting and maturing. As the society, the negative behaviors caused by negative emotions should be discouraged, organizations and society should adore and appreciate those individuals who are directed towards using their superior skills or unique abilities for driving progressive changes and making a better world.

Sweet spot: Compared to change, business transformation is definitely the more ambitious sounding term and a large scale of changes. It is like a treasure hunting journey to uncover the sweet spots and discover hidden gems for business growth. Business managers should take the intrapreneur spirit, turn the status quo upside down for dealing with”VUCA” normality via interdisciplinarity of art and science. They should practice strategic thinking by envisioning the future and clarifying the reality, keep asking themselves and others: What’s our strategic sweet spot? What’s our competitive advantage? What’s the future of business? What's our unique competency? Etc. Organizations that are skillful at exploring the sweet spots of growth can gain long term business advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value and build differentiated business advantages. To explore these sweet spots for growth, people are encouraged to take initiatives of stepping outside of the box, seek additional knowledge and experience, and focus on the learning opportunities provided by assignment, rather than on the status quo. Digital is the age of customers. focusing on customer needs should be an easier path to identify sweet spots and grow the innovation fruits continually.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. It’s critical to gain a contextual business understanding, look for those critical “hidden spots,” which is not always obvious, see around the corner, read between the lines, to overcome barriers and identify growth opportunities for making a leap to reach the next level of organizational maturity.

Imply structured processes or methodologies, roles, and rules, standards, definitions both from a business and technical perspective: Due to the increasing pace of change, the exponential growth of information and continuous disruptions, digital businesses are like the complex system which needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort to enable emergent business changes in its own behavior, functions, and structure. The digital transformation goes beyond applying the latest technologies, it’s a multidimensional business expansion and multifaceted management discipline. A well-developed digital management framework helps the business take a structural approach with all important business elements such as principles, processes, methods, rules, roles, etc, to intersect and interact with its digital ecosystem, facilitate a structural strategic planning process and a healthy management cycle to benchmark business operations, as well as improve the overall management maturity.

Add value for implementations of the patterns to avoid having to reinvent the wheel: The businesses as systems don’t exist independently and that there are interactions between systems such as system overlaps and real in-and output dependencies. To put simply, the digital organization is the system. System = Pattern; or the systematic view of Information Technology. A well-developed framework adds value for implementations of patterns; while pattern language helps you understand the framework. If you look at patterns, you will find that they are containers for articulating relationships. It helps to figure out better solutions by peeling back the layers to find the root causes and address the issues systematically without reinventing the wheel all the time. Thus, it’s important for business management to tie pattern thinking and systems thinking together and apply the transformation framework to either solve business problems, manage innovation or lead digital transformation.

Harnesses cross-functional communication: Digital means the increasing speed of changes, exponential growth of information, shortened knowledge cycle, as well as multi-generational and multicultural digital workforce. It’s a mix of order and chaos, innovation and standardization, growth and stability, learning and action, etc. A well-developed framework helps to reduce business tensions, frictions, and conflicts that arise to enforce trustful business communication, relationship-building, and collaboration. Define and implement frameworks which can articulate the big why behind business initiative clearly, and explain the strategic rationale behind the business venture. Digital adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational change by leveraging an effective digital management framework, powerful communication platforms, channels, tools, and a feedback mechanism.

Manages a portfolio of relevant cross-border business competencies: Developing a unique set of core business competencies is a strategic imperative to build an ultra-modern digital organization. The right set of scalable, coherent, and impactful capabilities directly contribute to business quick win and long-term winning proposition. A fine-tuned digital management platform enables systematic changes, develop core business competencies, and produce business results that are reliable, repeatable and fully distinguishable. With a well-designed framework, the business can re-purpose well-designed systems and components for change purpose, to ensure that change can be accomplished timely and consistently. The underlying structures and processes are dynamic and flexible and the business capabilities can be recombined and integrated without reinventing the wheel to expedite strategy execution cycle.

Embed digital cultures into the very fabric of the business: It is important to note that within the organizations, the large business transformation is a team effort, often across multiple organizational silos. Each function is not a silo by itself and it draws its energy from within the organization. Thus, a well-designed framework helps to set underlying rules, fine-tune organizational structures, and put the right business culture elements such as beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors together to nurture a creative business environment and embed digital cultures into the very fabric of the business. A high mature digital organization is usually outward-looking rather than insular, it’s critical to leverage a framework approach for incorporating multiple and diverse components such as value, trust, communication, collaboration, simplicity, adaptability, and continuous improvement, etc, into the business culture cross functional disciplines and embed change management mechanism into the corporate DNA.

The digital framework provides guidelines, checklists, standards, processes, tools and building blocks, do & don't practices, to address diverse business perspectives and practicalities, define or develop business competencies, to manage a high-performance digital organization. The broader you can oversee and the deeper you can perceive the holistic digital impact, the further you can reach the digital vision and the pinnacle of digital transformation.

Build an ambidextrous - listening and telling organization: Traditional organizations are usually authoritarian command and control, top-down, compliance driven - do what you are told and don’t ask any questions. In such an environment, people get stuck at the lower level of the Maslow’s hierarchy, with surviving mentality, they react to changes passively and fear of making mistakes all the time, and thus the business culture stifles innovation. To reinvent a digital organization, it’s important to practice open leadership and build an ambidextrous organization with both strong listening and telling ability for improving its agility and maturity. Because, from top down and bottom up, if you do not listen, you will lose the goodwill of the collaborators and innovators. It is difficult to do and it's often uncomfortable to hear. But it’s a necessary step and a secret source to spark innovation. People down the organization need to be encouraged to speak up and tell the truth to the upper level. Creativity is encouraged, great suggestions are adopted, and innovation becomes part of the corporate DNA. On the other side, if you don’t tell- actually communicate thoroughly, your workforce at the different levels of the organizational hierarchy will not know what is required, and thus, you couldn’t achieve well-set business results. Nowadays, surviving is not enough. If the business wants to thrive in the “VUCA” world, it’s important to build a listening-telling-learning organization. Otherwise, its survival horizon can be really short. The business will become more successful when the corresponding learning curve has reduced uncertainty to the point where the information can be synchronized, organizational interdependence can be structured, and the strategic synergy can be created with a healthy cycle of "listen-learn-change."

Achieve "innovative ambidexterity": Innovation is about transforming novel ideas to achieve its business value. The company needs to lay out different thinking, structures, and solutions to develop in its potential. Highly innovative organizations are able to combine all important business elements that are available to them in imaginative and advantageous ways for improving their innovation competency. An ambidextrous organization can strike the right balance of improving efficiency and harnessing innovation by separating the exploitation of the existing methods and technologies from the exploration of the new radical or potentially disruptive innovation. Innovation ambidexterity could also means that the organization can manage a healthy innovation portfolio with the right mix of incremental innovations and breakthrough innovations. From people and team management perspective, the businesses with innovation ambidexterity may separate teams focused on disruptive idea-generation from teams that focus on implementing and sustaining innovation. Innovation explorers develop unconventional and disruptive solutions, then, when ideas were developed and a prototype built, other talent such as innovation builders or operation gurus took over and worked on serial production and sustaining innovation to make products or services more reliable, easier to make, and cost-effective. All those processes in combination favorably affected the outcome= true innovation ambidexterity.

Manage both business balancing cycle and growth cycle smoothly: Withe continuous disruptions and fierce competitions, businesses today need to explore new possibilities and build business competencies to perform in the future.  The organization does not only “earn enough from today,” but “thrive in the future.” Or put another way, reap some quick win and unlock the business potential for building long term business advantage. Therefore, companies today need to keep one eye on today’s performance and the other eye on the future performance of the business. In practice, the organizational management shortsightedness, silo, and running the business in a transactional mode cause digital ineffectiveness in the long run. Sometimes they focus on improving the processes or implementation of performance management or evaluation but fail to look into the business system holistically or think long term to shape the future collaboratively. Many organizations have trouble leading to the future smoothly because they spend too much time on evaluating past performance, without putting enough effort on how to maximize business potential and accelerate future performance. It’s critical to manage both business balancing cycle and growth cycle well seamlessly by taking holistic management approach and focusing on the long-term and transformative business management disciplines in order to develop an ambidextrous organization.

The business should always be open to, conscious of, and feel empowered to act upon change dynamic. The highly responsive and ambidextrous digital organizations have to be solid enough to give some sort of form or meaning but amorphous or fluid enough to its environment and respond to change promptly. From the business management perspective, simplicity and complexity; listening and telling, innovation and standardization; performance and potential, etc. are all invaluable pairs of duel forces for running a high-performance and ambidextrous organization by developing/delivering the hybrid digital solutions and practicing holistic management disciplines continually.