CIO Master: Built to Change

 Built to Last, Good to Great is every organization’s dream journey, however, the global economic uncertainty, digital information explosion, and unprecedented social and environmental changes make business facing the significant challenges everyday, IT on the other hand, no longer afford to be built to maintain as a cost center, IT need be built to change as the value center, key differentiator to help reshape organizational competency, re-energize modern leadership and workforce, rekindle innovation and re-imagine growth.

IT’s new vision and mission is transformation, IT need be built to change for transforming organization into: 

1.     Elastic Enterprise via Cloud Computing

The industrial-based enterprise of 20^th century had run out of gas, the digital enterprise of 21^st century has the new characteristics and DNA of innovation. The elastic enterprise will promptly adapt to changes, ride up the new digital tide, not only surviving the economic recession, but also thriving and expanding effortlessly into the adjacent business, and explore the global landscape.  

The elastic enterprise brings back IT as the strategic asset, the value creator, and modern IT solution such as cloud is timely and strategic, because it provides unprecedented flexibility in deploying applications,  because it has a  huge potential for reducing costs, because it is elastic to adjust capacity with more reasonable OPEX, easy to provisioning, faster to the marketing, and CIOs are increasingly becoming solution brokers or service orchestrators.

2.     Real Time Enterprise via Mobile Computing

The modern enterprise need be non-stop, instant-on, IT consumerization is the catalyst to fuel today’s fast speed, to boost employees’ productivity, to reduce the cost and to leapfrog the competitors, and provide unique customer values.

The real time enterprise get “wired” without wire, the modern mobile computing such as smart phone, tablet., etc offers both organizations and employees alternative to access working related information with their fingertip remotely,  

The foresighted IT organization will build up the effective enterprise mobility platform both for today’s efficiency and tomorrow’s growth,  deploy the mobile application to create the new revenue stream,  attract new talents such as next generation of digital native workforce, leverage the security and pursue operational excellence.  

3.     Networked Enterprise via Social Computing

The emergence of social computing challenges us to re-imagine the way we are working, learning and connecting, and by intelligently embracing the social computing, the modern organization extend its boundary, to inspire and inform customers and business partners to participate the conversation, and engage employees’ wisdom and insight.

IT plays critical roles to orchestrate the enterprise based social platform, collect big data and analyze it, to hear customer’s voice, foresee the business and technology trend,  cultivate the innovative change management culture and unleash humanistic energy.  

4.     Agile Enterprise via Agile Methodology

Today’s digitized and decentralized global economic environment not only proves Change is the only constant” even more true than ever, but also the speed of change has been accelerated exponentially, agile imperative is  strategic priority for every progressive, forward-looking organization in the new decade of 21^st century.

Agile software development methodology, agile process management are the hard disciplines for organizations to adapt to the changes via iterative communication with customers, timeline-based project principles, more compatible with fast-paced, hyper-competitive environment; agile corporate structure, open leadership and learning culture are the soft disciplines to soil the innovation seeds. Being agile is strategic imperative for any modern enterprise regardless of its size. http://futureofcio.blogspot.com/2011/08/agile-wings.html

5.     Intelligent Enterprise via Analytics

The exponential grown of data (both structured and unstructured data) in digital era brings both significant opportunities and risks for contemporary enterprise.  Analytics, as one of the most critical components of business capability becomes another strategic priority for business to gain competitive edge and distinctive capability in 21^stcentury

The data is foundation of creating the insight, the insight perceive the new business opportunities and risks, however, the organizational modern data environment is fraught with inconsistency, redundancy, and multiple data and knowledge platforms, the modern IT need more integrated data life cycle management solutions to conquer data challenges, to provide data accessibility and availability, ensure transparency and visibility, enable trust and reliability.

In fact, top-performing organizations use analytics five times more than lower performers, and more than twice as many top performers indicated they use analytics to guide future strategies and day-to-day operations, as compared to low performers, CIO need create the strategic analytics roadmap in order to build up the intelligent enterprise, one of  the most purposeful components in smarter planet and human society.   http://futureofcio.blogspot.com/2011/09/cios-analytics-roadm.html

6.     Sustainable Enterprise via Green Computing

Sustainability is not just the buzzword about corporate social responsibility, green is the new gold and means the bottom line profitability in downturn economy.

Sustainability is about minimizing usage of non-renewable resources, optimizing resource use, cutting emission and recycling waste, the major role of IT is in the orchestration and delivery of the effective process, manage the capabilities and capacities of potential suppliers and mange the relationship with both partners and customers

Green computing such as virtulization, cloud computing, sustainable desktop strategies, green supply chain and smart meter & smart grid technology will bring up significant impact for IT to become the true game changer and value builder from sustainability perspective.

7.     Customer-Centric Enterprise via all above Characteristics

The new characteristics listed above will become the new pillars to support the customer-centric enterprise, how to delight customers is essential for any organizations intent to build to last, and to be great by those strategic choices

Modern IT built to change, interwoven seamlessly with business, to become true innovation engine, strategy enabler, and modern capital society also transform itself from capital driven into customer-driven, to embrace the constantly change and deliver the shared social value for business, community, and humanity.