IT Innovation
Showing posts with label IT Innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IT Innovation. Show all posts

Master IT to Lead 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. 

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

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.


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The Monthly “IT Innovation” Book Tuning: Running IT as a “Center of Possibility” Sep. 2019

With the overwhelming growth of information and often technology-led digital disruptions, Information & Technology becomes the most time-intense piece for solving innovation puzzles.

Within abundant information and emergent digital technologies, IT is a key component of holistic business mindset to re-imagine “what is possible” - unleashing business potentials and improving business efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity. The art of possible to reinvent IT in the digital age is to deliver the value of information in helping businesses grow, delight customers and doing more with innovation.

 


Running IT as a “Center of Possibility”  


Running IT as the “Center of Possibility” IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. To keep IT relevant, IT management shouldn't just practice some transactional activities or act as a controller only. It has to explore both the art and science of digital management discipline, run IT organization as the “center of possibility,” to accelerate its performance and unlock business potential.

Running Bold IT to Pursue Innovation Opportunities In forward-thinking companies across the vertical sectors, IT is transforming from a reactive support center and business enabler to a proactive change agent and the business revenue creator. The expectations for CIOs have also grown multifold, they are expected to be visionaries and path-finders to pursue business innovation opportunities, opening new revenue stream and leverage IT to build competitive advantage of the business.

The Art and Science of IT Management With the overwhelming growth of information and pervasive technology, to keep IT relevant, IT management shouldn’t just practice some transactional activities or act as a business controller only. IT management has to explore both the art and science of digital management discipline, run IT as the “Center of Possibility,” accelerate its performance and unlock its full potential.

The New Book “100 IT Charms” Introduction Chapter V: IT as the “Center of Possibility” With the overwhelming growth of information and often technology-led digital disruptions, Information & Technology becomes the most time-intense piece for solving innovation puzzles. Innovation happens at the intersection of business and IT, you have to manage it strategically and systematically in order to achieve a consistent business results. IT is no longer just the mechanical or monolithic hardware pieces to keep the business spinning or the mechanism for realizing a vision described by other C-level executives; it’s the innovation engine to run a digital organization.

The Digital CIO as “Choice Generator” The unprecedented digital convenience brought by powerful technologies changes the way we think, live, and work. Embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of the business venture. The digital era upon us is the era of options, empathy, personalization, and sharing. IT is the linchpin to run a high-performance digital organization. Today’s digital CIOs need to become the “Choice Generator,” envision the emerging technological trends, refine information to capture business foresight and customer insight, imagine the new possibilities and alternative ways to do things, and drive the digital transformation proactively.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 6000+ blogs posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.
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Running Bold IT to Pursue Innovation Opportunities

To keep IT relevant, IT management needs to take calculated risks and proactively pursue opportunities to improve business revenue, contribute to the top line business growth.

In forward-thinking companies across the vertical sectors, IT is transforming from a reactive support center and business enabler to a proactive change agent and the business revenue creator. The expectations for CIOs have also grown multifold, they are expected to be visionaries and path-finders to pursue business innovation opportunities, opening new revenue stream and leverage IT to build competitive advantage of the business.




Take advantage of the IT vantage point to surface ideas proactively: Innovation often happens at the intersection of Information Technology and people, business and customer. The creative idea is often, if not always arrived through the interaction of ideas from different domains of thoughts, knowledge, and experiences cross-domain without boundaries. IT has to become an integral part of business driver and they can do so by marrying technology with strategy. IT leaders must realize that stifling creative side of IT will set back the business, it’s critical to work closely with business stakeholders and bring together ideas and resources to create something novel and achieve business objectives in any way possible. In fact, IT is the linchpin to integrate all critical pieces for implementing innovation, accelerating validation of facts about business ideas, benefits and shortcomings, applications and disruptive technologies. The success of IT driven innovation should be evaluated on how IT is able to surface ideas proactively, deliver innovative products, services, or business models to achieve top-line business growth by maximizing ROI.

Grasp Total Cost Ownership Opportunities: Digital organizations must manage information effectively, and bring to the table a healthy innovation portfolio with a right mix of breakthrough innovation and incremental innovation. From finance perspective, IT investment must facilitate business but also bring down the incremental cost of growth and the time to market. The management needs IT to become the cost optimization expert for the entire company, grasp TCO ownership opportunities, discover creative sources of business competitive advantage, to better compete in an expanded and hyper-competitive marketplace. Total Cost of Ownership is often held up as the critical metric for IT performance in high mature organization. Assume you're going to allocate the cost of IT investment across several revenue-generating initiatives, whatever the cost is estimated to be, they will then need to determine the net increase in revenue at current margins needed to offset the cost of business. So the management can get a clearer picture of IT solutions from cost, transparency, innovation, and maturity lens.


Practice intrapreneurship activities: To reinvent IT as the business growth engine, innovative IT organizations are practicing intrapreneurship and running IT as a software startup. As a matter of fact, IT entrepreneurialism becomes a new fixture to substantiate competitive position, improves company performance by increasing the firm’s pro-activeness and willingness to take risks, pursue innovation opportunities, pioneer the development of new products, processes, and services through enriching its competitiveness, drive new business revenue growth, and shape the digital landscape. Innovation is to reinvent business, but not to reinvent the wheel. Running IT as innovation catalyst is about nurturing a way of ‘out-of-them-box” thinking and keeping creative energy flow into every dimension of the business. Intrapreneurship is a unique combination of innovative mentality, attitude and high mature leadership behaviors. The great intrapreneur IT leaders can envision how emerging technology trends impact on the business direction, articulate the big why behind business initiative clearly, explain the strategic rationale behind the venture, have the right dose of risk appetite and show resilience to recover from failures.

To keep IT relevant, IT management need to take calculated risks and proactively pursue opportunities to improve business revenue, contribute to the top line business growth. CIOs should practice open leadership styles, be able to convey the technological vision, run the bold IT to pursue innovation opportunities, and improve innovation management effectiveness.
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The Signature Themes of Digital IT Organization

IT needs to be unique, innovative, and influential, develop and discover its significant theme by leveraging unique IT knowledge and strength.

With information technology permeates into every corner of the organization, IT can no longer just hide in the corner to be a cost center and play background music only, IT needs to be the core of most parts of the business today and must, therefore, be visible and present all the time. To keep IT relevant, CIOs are expected to constantly propose new ideas and challenge the status quo. Every IT organization needs to tailor their own circumstances, make an objective SWOT assessment, build its own strength and demonstrate their signature themes.

Topple monolithic systems and structures to improve adaptability: Traditional IT organization was run with monolithic technologies, focused on heavy weighted hardware to keep the lights on, and was perceived as a back office support function. With emerging lightweight digital technology and on-demand IT service/application delivery model, it’s important that business leaders including CIOs showing objectivity and humility to realize that some of their systems and processes are out of date, they need to keep consolidating, modernizing, and optimizing for adapting to changes and unlocking business performance. The signature theme of digital IT is “I” driven - focus on information, insight, intelligence, innovation, and influence. Still, IT is the means to an end, not the end itself. Every IT initiative is a business change either for empowering employees or delighting customers, and improving productivity, flexibility or performance. IT not only should keep optimizing its own functions and structure to stay fit, but also help to fine tune underlying the overall business functions and design for getting digital ready.

Converge device and service to drive disruptive growth: The exponential growth of information and the emerging technology with a high degree of digital convenience are imposing faces of digital disruptions, recharging business models, and lift the business up to the next stage of the business development cycle. Traditional IT thinking with “controlling” or “order-taking” mentality simply cannot move fast enough in the digital era. The digital convergence of devices and services are developing new business models and exploring alternative revenue sources as companies across vertical sectors are being forced to become information technology savvy company. Highly effective IT leaders nowadays are able to articulate the business impacts and opportunities of emergent digital technology trends to the C-suite, knock down the barriers separating insulated IT team and the revenue generation business teams, design and deliver innovative products/services or new business models, and demonstrate the signature theme of IT as the revenue growth engine.

Rebel with a mediocre culture to inspire change and innovation: Many traditional IT organizations getting stuck at the lower level of organizational maturity often have a reactive attitude and mediocre culture, take orders from customers and run IT from inside-out, operational lens only. The worst mediocrity is not “the mediocre result,” but a complacent mind and mediocre attitude, or unprofessionalism. Culture is invisible, but the most powerful elements to lead organization or society's long-term prosperity.  It is a culture that supports collaboration, harnesses changes and fosters innovation. To demonstrate digital theme, CIOs need to become far, far more business driven and innovation focused. Highly effective digital cultures don't reflect their members, their members reflect them, especially the top leadership sets the cultural tone of their company.

Seize the moment to make continuous performance: To run a high performance IT organization, IT leaders need to be both further thinking and laser focusing on what they are doing now to achieve the strategic goals, encourage learning-sharing-doing as the iterative continuum and seize the moment to make continuous deliveries. CIOs must ensure that application development does not proceed without a "clear business rationale," and deliver value to the organization in a consistent and continuous way. The real-time business insight refined from information also allows the company to “seize the moment,” grasp growth opportunities and prevent risks timely. The performance and innovation provided by IT applications development helps to build unique business competencies to accomplish defined business goals and develop the signature theme of IT as a trustful business partner. The “I” driven IT can play an even bigger role in re-framing business planning processes along with re-framing of in-place processes that filter and fund investment and make continuous improvement more than discover an elegant solutions.

Integrate all important components to orchestrate digital transformation: Digital transformation represents a break with the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. It takes greater transparency, trust, and collaboration. To get digital ready, IT needs to shift from a transactional mode to a transformational mode. The goal of IT transformation is to engage employees, enlighten customers, and run a highly innovative and high mature digital organization. Transformation needs to set strategic guidelines, but not overly restricted roles. A clearly defined roadmap is available, and the industry best/next practices are in place to serve as a framework upon which the solution can be implemented over time. With all necessary platforms and tools, a highly influential CIO can run IT as a linchpin to integrate all important business components and instrument a seamless digital transformation.

IT needs to be unique, innovative, and influential, develop and discover its significant theme by leveraging unique IT knowledge and strength. As a matter of fact, the differentiation provided by fast growing information and innovative technologies are usually more long-lived than differentiation provided by marketing actions that can be copied easily. IT is the business inside the business.
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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 “Change Agent CIO” Book Tuning: Running Evolving IT Aug. 2019

 IT is being elevated to the “light power” of the business for identifying business opportunities and obstacles, navigating changes, and climbing the learning curve ahead of the rest of the organization. 

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

 Running Evolving IT 


Strategize, Maximize, and Customize IT Organizations rely more and more on information and technology; the IT department touches both hard business processes and soft human behaviors, it plays a crucial role in enabling strategy implementation and making a leap of the digital transformation. CIOs has to genuinely position IT as an integral and inseparable part of the business, develop IT that is flexible to accommodate rapidly changing business environment and reinvent IT as the trustful business partner by strategizing, maximizing, and customizing.

Running Creative, Persuasive, and Logical IT Digital transformation represents a break from the past and presents a high level of impact and complexity. With the exponential growth of information and often technology-led digital disruptions, IT is being elevated to the “light power” of the business for identifying business opportunities and obstacles, navigating changes, and climbing the learning curve ahead of the rest of the organization. In reality, IT organizations have come a long way from being purely technical specialists to being critical strategic partners for leading business growth and transformation. In fact, it is at the tipping point that top performing companies see IT as an asset, capital, innovation catalyzer and source of business competitive advantage. It’s a strategic imperative for CIOs to run creative, persuasive and logical IT organizations.

Running an Evolving IT via Consumerization, Contextualization, and Confluence In today’s digital dynamic and technical environments where Information and Technology are being used significantly around the globe for revenue-generating initiatives and business transformation. It is a strategic imperative to broaden IT outlook, embrace IT consumerization and emerging trend, envision the bigger picture, emphasize contextualization, explore the art of possibility, and ensure digital confluence.

Transforming IT via Multiplying, Intensifying, and Maximizing Digital IT is a paradigm shift in role, responsibility, attitude, and aptitude. There are so many things IT can help the business accomplish, but there are also many obstacles IT has to overcome. Forward-looking IT organizations experiment with different management approaches and problem-solving disciplines to transform IT via multiplying, intensifying, and maximizing.

Running a Propositive, Personalized, and Persuasive Digital IT Organization As businesses move into the digital future, technology is the fastest growing arena, IT is in the middle of a sea change. Digital CIOs have to deal with constant ambiguity, rising complexity, increasing velocity, and unprecedented uncertainty, they shouldn’t get stuck with “we always do things like this” mentality and they have to keep IT relevant by running a propositive, personalized and persuasive digital organization for building a strong reputation as the business partner

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5900 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.
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