Monday, November 16, 2015

The Spotlight on Digital CIOs Nov. 2015

Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges.


The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.1 million page views with about #2300th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom.


Modern CIOs have many personas and face numerous challenges. It is not sufficient to only keep the light on. Regardless of which industry or the nature of organization you are in, being a digital leader will need to master the art of creating unique, differentiating value from piles of commoditized technologies, but more specifically, what are the digital-savvy CIOs doing to run IT as a value creator and innovation engine? And which profile is yours as a contemporary digital CIO:

The Digital Profiles of Contemporary CIOs    Nov. 2015

  • CIOs as Chief Innovation Officer (Part I) (Part II) (Part Part III) : Nowadays information is the lifeblood, and the emergent technology is more often the business disruptor. And due to the changing nature of information & technology, IT is always in the changing environment creating unexpected situations and requiring quick and appropriate responses based on the conditions. As businesses embark on the “digital Era” of computing (Cloud, Big Data, Mobile, Social). how will IT have to change? What is the nature of the new IT leadership and what is the primary role of the CIO in harnessing the IT leadership?


  • CIOs as Transformational Leaders The majority of businesses today are on the journey to digitalization and globalization. The reason is that the world is becoming smaller every day and as a consequence every successful business has to sooner or later go beyond borders. At the same time, the global business landscape is only becoming more complex due to varied factors. And it is in this context that organizations build business verticals within to manage the complexity. So the logical concerns could be: What kind of IT leaders are on demand? Transformational or transactional? What’re differences between transformation vs. transaction? How would you define differences between transactional and transformational CIOs?


  • CIOs Leading as Conductors  At the age of cloud, CIO  needs to lead as a conductor than a constructor, in order to speed up and improve IT agility. A forward-thinking CIO will figure out a way to leverage the cloud to explore business options much more quickly. As the cloud era is also the age of innovation and radical digitalization, while IT provides an important structure and framework to streamline process and enable the digital transformation. Learning the business is a must for the CIO to come up with an experiential knowledge coupled with data for enabling and empowering the enterprise. For larger enterprises, their IT resources and capability are often the company's secret sauce and key to how they deliver value to the business.


  • CIOs as Chief Insight Officer:  (Part I) (Part II) CIO is the information steward at enterprise today, however, data or information is means to the end, not the end itself; more importantly, CIO needs to capture business & customer insight from the abundance of information in foreseeing the future of business and continuously driving operational excellence. Therefore, CIO plays a crucial role as ‘Chief Insight Officer’ to provide data-based advice for business executive peers and corporate board.  


  • CIOs as Chief Inspection Officer: (Part II)The widely-popular Agile methodology provokes quite many debates upon software quality issues such as: Is it better to release code quickly ... or release clean code? Is bug-free software the goal?  Does Agile mean to poor quality delivery? As IT leader, what're CIO's strategy and methodology to balance quality and speed; flexibility and discipline; best practice and next practice? And how to apply Agile principles when managing software development or running IT as a whole?

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