IT Transformation
Showing posts with label IT Transformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IT Transformation. 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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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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Follow IT Leadership Principles to Run Strategic IT

In its best form, leadership is about creating a powerful future that is compelling in the present.

Digital businesses are becoming complex and uncertain, to survive and thrive, IT plays a linchpin to integrate all important business elements into a set of differentiated business competencies. To transform IT from a cost center to a strategic business partner, modern CIOs should follow a set of well-defined principles to lead through influence, not through brute forces.




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

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

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

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

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

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

High performance teams are high-effective, high-innovative, and high-disciplined.

Digital organization is complex, to improve its performance, the highly complex and dynamic business system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort. IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. The priority for CIOs is to build high performance IT teams and genuinely position IT as an integral and inseparable part of the business. Here is a set of characteristics of high performance IT team.


Realistically ambitious goal-setting: IT strategy is an integral component of the business strategy. It’s important to align IT functional goals with the strategic goals of the entire company and from there determine the team’s goals to meet the strategic goals of IT organization. This also ensures the alignment and cascading of organizational goals to individual goals. Organizations need to pay more attention to creating shared and admirable goals and then, develop a highly effective team to compete and collaborate as they deem fit. A goal is a driving factor, an ambitious goal setting stretches up the team and boosts employees' morality, comport a vision for a better state. A goal should also well define the timeline, resources, benefits, and beneficiary and there should always be deliverable associated with each goal.  Digital leadership encourages growth mindset. The manager's role is to ensure the plans are in line with the corporate direction to achieve the well-defined goals. Either individually or collectively, high driven IT staffs develop their own individual career goals, and aligned them with the strategic goals of their organization. Thus, realistically ambitious goal setting at either individual or organizational level inspire change and catalyze innovation.

Focus forward: With overwhelming growth of information and continuous digital disruptions, today’s IT organizations are so easy to get distracted, very often say yes to all the initiatives, with the consequence of getting lost or keeping spinning but going nowhere. Focus forward becomes an important factor to manage a high performance team and run a successful IT organization. It’s important to set the right priority, focus on a few initiatives and prioritize them well. When the team loses the focus or only focuses on the transactional side of the business, it will cause ineffectiveness and decelerate the speed of strategic execution. It’s important to focus on things that really matter for the business’s long-term perspective, such as working closely with customers to solve their critical issues; focusing on the information aspect of the role in the context of the business to unlock business performance and potential; focusing on building core business competency to catalyze growth.

Autonomy and alignment: High level of autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity at individual, team, or organizational level. Running an autonomous organization is about building a work atmosphere to encourage creativity, discovery, and mastery. The high performance team is well disciplined enough to do their work well in a dynamic business environment. You know the team will deliver the best outcome and give them the freedom to do it on their way. Autonomy helps individuals in taking ownership, responsibility and keeps focused, to improve the team performance and manageability. The management should assess the responsibilities and competencies required to achieve strategic goals, and ensure they have the right people, in the right place, at the right time, and for the right cost to achieve strategic goals smoothly.

Learning agility: The professional competencies for adapting to unpredictable or riding above the learning curve are critical to shape a high performance team and make continuous improvement. Learning agility becomes one of the most important capabilities for digital professionals to compete for the future. Even the top seasoned digital professionals become aware some conventional wisdom or long-acquired knowledge is no longer applicable in certain situations, and feel the pain when they keep making poor judgement or ineffective decisions. To improve leadership effectiveness and digital professionalism, they have to adapt themselves and their organization via learning, collaborating, and improving. The emergent digital technologies such as social platforms provide a flexible way to learn, share and collaborate, with the very goals to groom future leaders, build high performance teams, and foster employee engagement and development.

Continuous performance deliveries: High effective IT leaders encourages the staff to improve their proficiency in work by managing iterative thinking, learning, and acting continuum, and make continuous deliveries. In these high-performance and high mature teams, the selection of roles is done automatically and naturally, focus on creating the right atmosphere in which people can take ownership of their processes and participate in various activities to boost performance or catalyze innovation. Either individually or collectively as the team, real-time appraisals take place consistently and can be tracked accordingly, with the goal to map performance and potential with the dynamic business strategy execution more closely and seamlessly.

Digital organizations are like the living systems that can self-renew in thriving as high-performance businesses. High performance teams are high-effective, high-innovative, and high-disciplined. Due to fierce competition and rapid changes, it is important to understand that digital business development is multifaceted and take cohesive effort to build high performance teams, make a continuous improvement and enable organizations thriving,
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The Monthly “CIO Master” Book Tuning: Strategic IT Leadership Sep. 2019

The CIO is not just a tactical manager, but a strategic business leader with multidimensional thinking competencies and multifaceted perspectives.

Compared to the other executive positions, the CIO role continues to be shaken up, refined, reinvented and reenergized. The magic “I” of the CIO title sparks many imaginations and modern CIOs need to wear different hats and play multiple roles. Here are a set of blogs for CIOs to practice strategic leadership and reinvent IT to get digital ready.
      

                          Strategic IT Leadership


Five Facets of Strategic CIOs With the increasing pace of changes and fast-growing information, clearly, the role of IT is at the inflection point to go through significant changes. IT shouldn’t be just satisfied with the surviving mode, it has to be thriving. How well an IT organization can adapt to the dynamic environment directly affects the future of the business significantly. The CIO is not just a tactical manager, but a strategic business leader with multidimensional thinking competencies and multifaceted perspectives.

Three Perspectives of Strategic CIOs Due to the exponential growth of information and continuous disruptions often led by technologies, the business will not just use IT as a digital extension, but leverage IT across their organization to attain the enterprise-wide digital competencies. CIOs have to be the strategic business leader to lead, advise, and execute proactively, with the goal of clarifying the direction for the whole company to follow and developing the best and next practices for accelerating performance. Here are three perspectives of strategic CIOs.

Does Your IT Organization Lack of “Strategic Bone”There is no doubt IT plays a critical role in both improving bottom line business efficiency and top-line revenue growth. However, there is no "one size fits all" magic formula on how to run the IT organization as a strategic partner and a revenue generator. Different IT organizations and enterprise as a whole are at a different stage of business maturity. The role of CIO is the mirror of the business reputation as an innovator or a plumber; a strategist or an operator; a change agent or a controller, etc. Lack of “strategic bone” is perhaps one of the root causes of diminishing IT influence and keeping IT irrelevant for the long run.

IT Strategic Planning: How to Make It Right With continuous disruptions and fierce competitions, many IT organizations suffer from overloaded tasks and overwhelming growth of information. They encounter so many daily distractions that stop them from laser focusing on achieving strategic business goals. High performance CIOs should have knowledge and leadership influence to demonstrate IT as strategic business competency. They need to build a good strategy which is an integral component of the business strategy, based on the circumstances that will allow the highest probability of IT management success. But more specifically: How to make IT strategic planning right?

Running IT as Strategic Differentiator of the Business With the overwhelming growth of information, rapid changes, and fierce competitions, nowadays IT has a lot of things to leverage, IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. IT needs to work both in IT and on IT; IT and business need to develop a true partnership and work to pursue the desired outcomes. IT has to shift from “IT vs. business” to “IT as the business.” IT has to move from a reactive order taker to the strategic differentiator of the business.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6000 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.
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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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The Monthly “100 IT CHARMS” Book Tuning: The Characteristics of IT Maturity Aug. 2019

IT is no longer just an enabler of the business strategy, but becomes an integral part of the strategy. 

The purpose of the book “100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready“ is to articulate different flavors of digital IT organizations and brainstorm the best and next practices for running highly innovative and high-performance IT. Digital charm is not based on the style presented on the surface but on a set of unique competencies to make IT shine through as a business differentiator.

      

 The Characteristics of IT 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.

Setting High Standard to Run High Mature Digital IT Organization Organizations across the industrial sectors are relying more on information technology, IT organization has more to overcome. It’s simply not sufficient to run IT as a support function only. IT can provide the business ability to explore new business models by knitting all important components seamlessly or delight customers by providing them digital options. IT organizations can bring up business benefit by mixing diverse business elements to create great products, services, or processes which generate differentiated value for the long-term growth of the business. It’s time to set a high standard to run high mature digital IT organization.

Five “Missing-Links” to Stop IT from Reaching Next Level of Maturity Nowadays, information and technology become the creative disrupter to business growth and industry evolution. IT is no longer just an enabler of the business strategy, but becomes an integral part of the strategy. However, in many companies across industrial sectors, IT is still perceived as an isolated support function and reactive service provider. How to identify and strengthen those missing links in order to run a high mature digital IT organization?

Running High Mature Digital IT with Three Mind Shift IT is in the middle of a sea change as businesses move into the digital future, information is permeating everywhere and technology is the fastest growing arena. It’s the undoubtedly dynamic time, with “always-on” businesses and high expectation of customers due to IT consumerization trends and continuous digital disruptions. CIOs must make three mind shift in order to run a high mature digital IT organization.

The Board as IT Maturity Evaluator 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.

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

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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The Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Turning: CIO as “Chief Improvement Officer” - How to Improve IT Maturity Aug. 2019

The digital CIOs have to wear different colors of hats and master multiple leadership personas and management roles effortlessly.

The book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. The important thing is that CIOs as the top leadership role must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth. Regardless of which personality they have, digital CIOs need to be both transformational and situational, innovative and tactical, business savvy and technology insightful, communication-effective and operation-efficient. Here is a set of blogs to brainstorm CIOs as “Chief Improvement Officer.”

CIOs as “Chief Improvement Officer” - How to Improve
IT Maturity

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

Make Radical Shift to Improve IT Organizational Maturity 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 change 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.

Five “Missing-Links” to Stop IT from Reaching Next Level of Maturity Nowadays, information and technology become the creative disrupter to business growth and industry evolution. IT is no longer just an enabler of the business strategy, but becomes an integral part of the strategy. However, in many companies across industrial sectors, IT is still perceived as an isolated support function and reactive service provider. How to identify and strengthen those missing links in order to run a high mature digital IT organization?

Setting High Standard to Run High Mature Digital IT Organization Organizations across the industrial sectors are relying more on information technology, IT organization has more to overcome. It’s simply not sufficient to run IT as a support function only. IT can provide the business ability to explore new business models by knitting all important components seamlessly or delight customers by providing them with digital options. IT organizations can bring up business benefit by mixing diverse business elements to create great products, services, or processes which generate differentiated value for the long-term growth of the business. It’s time to set a high standard to run high mature digital IT organization.

Five Characteristics of IT Maturity Compared to the considerably static industrial age, the digital environment is complex, uncertain, unpredictable and unrepetitive. Organizations rely more and more on technology, and IT needs will only expand. Thus, the CIO’s ability to build fundamental business competency is now greater than ever. How well an IT organization can adapt to the dynamic environment directly affects the future of the business. IT maturity is proportional to overall business maturity. IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. Here are five characteristics of IT maturity.

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talent. The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly. They need to lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to plumbing information and keep it flow smoothly; they also have to be like the diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.
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Setting High Standard to Run High Mature Digital IT Organization

IT needs to continuously try to improve, develop, and change everything in a prioritized order as long as it creates a more long-term business advantage. 

Organizations across the industrial sectors are relying more on information technology, IT organization has more to overcome. It’s simply not sufficient to run IT as a support function only. IT can provide the business ability to explore new business models by knitting all important components seamlessly or delight customers by providing them digital options. IT organizations can bring up business benefit by mixing diverse business elements to create great products, services, or processes which generate differentiated value for the long-term growth of the business. It’s time to set a high standard to run high mature digital IT organization.


It’s the breadth of vision: Nowadays, technology is often the disruptive force behind digital transformation and information can be refined into business foresight and customer insight. It’s the breadth of vision differentiates a great CIO from an average CIO. Reimagining the future of digital business is exciting. IT can become the driving force for business growth. It takes visionary leadership to create a blue ocean for providing a competitive advantage. To lead effectively and become value-added, IT leaders should learn the business, set high standard, grasp opportunities to participate varying digital dialogs and get their voice heard, and implement strategic goals to achieve high-performance results. IT needs to permeating into the business functions and ecosystem, and invite customers and partners to provide feedback for improving their products or services. An aggressive IT organization can explore new ways to create business value aggressively by leveraging emerging trends and applying lightweight digital technologies. Strategic CIOs are proactive, energetic, engaged, decisive, seek to engage others, and have IT and business collaborate as equal partners so that strategies, people, processes, technologies, etc, work in harmony to accelerate performance.

It’s about catalyzing innovation: Traditional IT organizations act as the controller to avoid risk. But risk is part of innovation. Innovation is the only path to create long term business advantage. It is important to make sure that the management is forward-thinkingl enough for “doing more with innovation. IT leaders understand that technology-led innovation is not only for figuring out a better way to run the business today but also building business competency for the long run. They should set a high standard and take the step-wise approach to leading changes, catalyzing innovation, and driving digital transformation. The science of innovation is to manage innovation lifecycle and executes it in a systematic manner that provides sustained competitive advantage. IT leaders should apply the outside-in business lens to innovate at the organizational level and across the entire business ecosystem. IT plays a significant role in adding all critical pieces which are needed for accelerating validation of facts about business ideas, definition, benefits and shortcomings, applications, and competing technologies. IT can also help to fine-tune light-weight processes which allow creativity flow, channeled and nurtured so that innovation will succeed more often than those organizations do not have such processes and capacities.

It’s for continuously delivering high performance business results: Setting high standard is also about following the progress principle to keep improving IT performance and maturity. Or put simply, make continuous improvement more than discover an elegant solution. IT maturity is not based on how many years IT organizations have been around and keep running to support the business; but about how well IT can provide innovative solutions to reach higher-than-expected business results and delight customers.  IT-driven digital transformation is the journey of continuous delivery and improvement. Great IT leaders have to be prepared to constantly realign technology against the enterprise's business needs and measure things really matter to the business's success in the long run. The high mature digital CIOs are not only passionate digital visionaries but also cool-headed business executives who can play the number game wisely by managing budgets, setting measurement and achieving high performance business results consistently. The business benefit can be measurable in dollars, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, quality, etc.

Driving business growth and leading evolutionary change are the never-ending journey. IT needs to continuously try to improve, develop, and change everything in a prioritized order as long as it creates a more long-term business advantage. The forward-thinking organizations have to set high standards, empower IT to take charge and take a structural approach in building organizational level changeability for thriving in the “VUCA” digital new normal and bringing up substantial business benefits.
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Five “Missing-Links” to Stop IT from Reaching Next Level of Maturity

To identify and strengthen these missing links, business management needs to gain the contextual understanding of the business hyper-connectivity and interdependence.

Nowadays, information and technology become the creative disrupter to business growth and industry evolution. IT is no longer just an enabler of the business strategy, but becomes an integral part of the strategy. However, in many companies across industrial sectors, IT is still perceived as an isolated support function and reactive service provider. How to identify and strengthen those missing links in order to run a high mature digital IT organization?



Misinformation: IT takes charge of one of the most valuable business assets - information. Information does not live alone but permeates into everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. Misinformation can cause business fail at any moment. If information is unavailable, inaccurate, lost, stolen, or compromised, it will hinder the achievement of business goals, disappoint customers, and even misled the business in the wrong direction. Information is critical, not every piece of information is created equal though. In a business scope, there are some of the important bits and bytes of information needed when evaluating a new market or any emerging business growth opportunity. Information Management is the structural process of aligning the usage of information through the multidisciplinary management discipline. Thus, to strengthen information management link, IT should first work to identify how information is associated with the tangible value of businesses; products and resources. It’s also critical to ensure information quality, accessibility, reliability, and refine information to fully support the business goals and objectives collaboratively.

Miscommunication: The gap between IT and business is reality, and often miscommunication is the root cause. Communication is complicated because there are differences in goals and contexts. There are different business dialects, communication styles, and these contexts can shift frequently. The business system is complex and the organization is multifaceted. Without the contextual understanding of people, process, technology, or system, the blind spots are inevitable and cause miscommunication across functional or geographical borders. Miscommunication enlarges business gaps and decelerates the organizational speed. Communication is the key to improve leadership effectiveness and reinvent IT reputation as a trustworthy business partner. CIOs can lift their role as the strategic business leader and skillful communicator via their unique perspective and insightful abstract. They can communicate effectively with all levels of the organization by interpreting both business and IT issues back and forth accurately without “lost in translation.” The great communicators can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding. Communication is not just the soft discipline, it’s both an art and science.

Misinterpretation: A well-established organization has different dialects, every organizational functions or division has its own focus and dialect. Misinterpretation is perhaps caused by pre-conceptual judgment, random assumptions, or simply lack of deeper understanding. Without using common business language or enforcing mutual understanding, misinterpretation will further cause dysfunctional business management. In fact, the “lost in translation” is the common pitfalls of strategy management. In the digital working environment, context intelligence is about understanding the whole meaning of functional dialects and business cultures or subcultures via connection, discernment, penetration, and perception, etc. Business leaders today need to know how to read between the lines and understand the inter-connectivity between parts and the whole without getting lost in interpretation. They can overcome those communication obstacles, master different business dialects and convey the right message in the right format to tailor different audiences for strengthening business relationship links and improving leadership effectiveness.

Mistrust: Mistrust is often caused by miscommunication, lack of transparency, or micromanagement. Mistrust further causes damages of business relationship and enlarges gaps of involving parties. The deeper the trust, the more valuable the relationship would be. Without a trustful business relationship, every decision becomes an argument and change get stuck. IT leaders have to be able to demonstrate in very tangible ways that IT understands business and builds trustful business-IT relationship via in-depth observation, communication, and empathetic understanding, etc. Transparency is critical to develop a trusting relationship between the business and IT. To keep IT and business on the same page, IT leaders have to reach out horizontally to their business peers. IT, marketing, finance, HR, etc. IT leaders can manage multi-layer relationships such as business peer/shareholder relationship, customer relationship, vendor relationship., etc. Trust = Communication +Transparency + Delegation + Reciprocity + Verification.

Misjudgment: Nothing is certain with the rapid digital flow, business executives, including CIOs have to make assumptions or “forecast” all the time. You have to make them, but you will never have complete information, Forecast precision will help the company prepare the journey for either capturing the rising business opportunities timely or preventing potential risks effortlessly. From decision management perspective, many leaders make poor judgment, due to the lack of comprehensive knowledge, lack of critical thinking, independent thinking, and Systems Thinking abilities, cognitive bias, or preconceived notions. Ego leads to misjudgment as well. Do not fall into linear thought traps, you need to listen, accept, and act on the blind spot. When you intend to understand, interpret and judge something, you need to form a critical opinion of it based on facts, discerned data, common understanding, and clarified notions to ensure the pieces of the puzzle can be integrated into a clear picture.

To identify and strengthen these missing links, business management, especially at the senior management level, needs to gain the contextual understanding of the inter-connectivity of both visible and invisible business success factors, apply interdisciplinary approaches to planning, managing, collaborating, enforce inter-organizational linkage, and take step-wise actions to improve digital management maturity.
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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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