From thinking to practice, the successful path of digital transformation of IT operation

Introduction | With the introduction of the Digital China strategy, more and more companies are accelerating digital construction and gradually changing the original business model, which also makes technical managers face the same severe transformation challenges. In this issue, we specially invite Mr. Xu Bin, Vice President and CDO of CIFI Group and Tencent Cloud TVP Industry Ambassador, to share new thoughts on many changes in the era of digital transformation.

About the Author

Xu Bin, Vice President and CDO of CIFI Group, and Tencent Cloud TVP Industry Ambassador. In the early days, he served the financial industry, mainly engaged in innovative e-banking business, and later turned to foreign companies. He has been deeply involved in retail, petroleum, energy, and chemical fields for decades. How foreign-funded enterprises operate. He used to be the vice president and CIO of Country Garden Group. He has rich practical experience in how Chinese private enterprises can rapidly develop their business in a short period of time and how to achieve digital empowerment. Based on his decades of industry experience, Mr. Xu Bin will share the IT operation in digital transformation from four dimensions: thinking adjustment, cultural and organizational change, structure management, and capacity building from multiple perspectives. Due to space limitations, this article will be published in two parts, the first and the second. This article focuses on practical changes in digital transformation.

The previous article "Looking at Digital Transformation IT Operations from the Change of Thinking" shared what inherent thinking needs to be adjusted by technical managers who are responsible for digital transformation. This article mainly expounds from the practical dimension, including from the perspective of change and structure, as well as how to build your own team capabilities and capabilities.

1. Internal transformation of digital teams: thinking, culture, organizational structure

From the overall perspective of digital transformation, as a digital leader, you need to take responsibility for helping companies and their business personnel to change their thinking. Due to space limitations, here we focus on sharing how to make changes within the digital team. The core of change is the change of organization and culture. Change must be culture first, mission, vision and values first. The role of mission vision values is to let people know why they are doing it. Change is hard to do if people don't understand why they are doing it.

(1) Establish a whole-team entrepreneurial mindset

We must let team members understand the core mission of the digital team, constantly pursue lean, and achieve continuous lean of the enterprise by continuously leaning themselves. At the same time, in the process of the company's continuous pursuit of excellence, we must make ourselves better. This is entrepreneurial thinking. Change is constant, and in the face of uncertainty brought about by the ever-changing environment, entrepreneurs will continue to improve themselves and iterate their self-awareness. Digital teams also need to build this culture and thinking, constantly improve themselves, constantly pursue better goals, and pursue excellence.

(2) Cultivate an entrepreneurial culture in the team

In the pursuit of excellence, changes are often accompanied by resistance, such as the original way of working that does not match the current situation. This requires the digital team to be like entrepreneurs, constantly breaking the rules, breaking through innovation, and promoting construction from 0 to 1, from scratch.

Every member of the team must first have breakthrough thinking, and have the courage to think about whether there is a smarter way to break through themselves, whether they can accomplish a thing in different or even better ways, and constantly enrich their abilities to become a leader. All-rounder. At the same time, you need to position yourself as a driver, think in different dimensions and bring some innovative methods. For example, to make the carriage faster, the general idea is how to feed it more horse feed, or how to build more rest stops. But from the perspective of our digital transformation team, from the perspective of technology, can we turn the carriage into a car and drive it through a machine, so that it will not be hungry and tired. This is an innovation.

(3) Turn the team into an independent combat unit

In practice, the three-three system and the diamond-shaped organization are common.

The three-three system is to split the organization into smaller combat units, and through small combat units, the capabilities of different colleagues can complement each other, so as to quickly realize some important value points. When the organization is too small, everyone must have multiple roles. At this time, team members can be forced to continuously expand their own capabilities, so as to achieve the purpose of cultivating team members' comprehensive capabilities and awareness. In the era of digitalization, enterprises are faced with various uncertainties. In the rapidly changing market environment, the requirements for agility and agile organizations are particularly obvious. Through the three-three system, each team member can be trained to be more than one post. capable all-rounder.

In the product line, the team needs to do a good job in the management of demand and delivery, do a good job in the operation management of value creation, and learn to use data to find problems. At this time, it is suitable for the team to be organized in a diamond shape (also known as a diamond-shaped organization). The diamond-shaped organization requires the team to have four dimensions of ability: product management ability, technology delivery ability, data application ability, and customer success ability. The construction of these four capabilities will turn the entire product line into a relatively complete establishment, objectively building the team into a quasi-entrepreneurship organization.

Through this organizational form and the management of business thinking, the team will not only consider the input-output ratio, the effectiveness of demand, the adequacy of value creation, and the efficiency of delivery from the product itself in product construction. I have become better, and I will have more forward thinking, such as considering how the product line supports multiple industries and multiple companies. The product construction of the team will be more diversified, and more abundant and flexible capabilities will be considered. This lays the foundation for enterprises to pursue efficient construction and delivery, efficient operation, and high-quality cost performance and rate of return.

2. Architecture management drives global dimension upgrade and promotes digital transformation

In the actual process of digital construction, it is necessary to build around two core points in the architectural dimension, one is called starting from the end, and the other is called global dimension improvement. The essence of starting with the end is to be able to see the future at a glance and to be able to connect end-to-end. Global dimensional upgrading requires us to look at the overall situation from a higher dimension and think about everyone’s value creation from a higher level of thinking.

(1) Cultivate end-to-end awareness and enable efficient collaboration among multiple departments

Why are there information silos in the enterprise? Because everyone is doing department-level applications, without establishing an end-to-end awareness, they all think about applications at the enterprise level. At this time, it is necessary to carry out horizontal value chain management, linking multiple departments in a time series, so that information flow, data flow, and business flow can operate really efficiently. At the same time, in this process, we insist on improving the caliber, standards and data governance of multi-departmental communication, which is easier for the overall value creation of the enterprise and reduces a lot of waste. Our company is also using lean management and sigma management to improve the management of the horizontal value chain. Only through the end-to-end sorting of the value chain can we more effectively reduce ineffective costs.

In addition to focusing on horizontal value chain management, vertical integration also needs to be taken care of. The so-called integration refers to how to coordinate multiple departments in key business scenarios. For example, in the investment of real estate companies, the practice of buying land is very critical. If you buy a piece of land right, you will basically have a 70% success rate. However, buying the right piece of land is not just a matter for the investment department. It also needs to consider the development direction of the macro economy, the policy requirements of the city, and the changes in the market. The combination of multiple factors can effectively help everyone make a correct decision. This is the integrated application on key scenarios. End-to-end is one horizontal and one vertical, the horizontal is the value flow, and the vertical is the integration, so that each team can maximize the value.

(2) Do a good job in structure management

Excellent digital capabilities are essentially reflected in their flexible and high-return capabilities. The core of high-return capability is actually deconstruction. Why is movable type printing so efficient? It is because it turns the traditional stereotype into a combination of well-engraved characters. In fact, everyone faces similar problems in the process of system construction. Why are there a large number of systems doing 2.0 and 3.0, and continuous iterative development, it is because it is done very closely, it is not considered in accordance with the service-oriented thinking, and only solves the current problems. To solve future problems, it is necessary to continuously update and iterate in the later stage, wasting a lot of costs. Therefore, a very important point in architecture management is to deconstruct capabilities. By deconstructing business capabilities, the design of digital capabilities is formed. Build digital capabilities one by one by building blocks, then complete 70% of the work by splicing, and finally complete the remaining 30% by combining applications according to the actual scene. In this way, digital capabilities become very flexible. In turn, these capabilities can flexibly support respective organizational changes and business changes. In fact, every enterprise should have an architecture team, but this capability is currently very lacking in most enterprises.

(3) Practice the restocking mechanism

The management of requirements is called "doing the right thing", but in the actual process, everyone also needs to "do the right thing". Within the CIFI Group, we are also building core review capabilities. There will be very serious reviews in the more critical 4-5 links in our product construction. At the same time, our team will have random reviews and reviews every week. Real-time replay. We have a 6S model for review: the first is to look at the overall goal; the second is to look at the criteria for success; the third is to look at the core logic, what do you need to do to achieve your goals and success; the fourth is the key Path, what method do you use to implement this logic; the fifth is system support, you must consider what your own system support is in the early stage; the sixth is the key scene, everyone can verify the above by sorting out some key scenes It can be done, thus forming a complete closed loop. Through the 6S model and the review mechanism, on the one hand, everyone can use every resource on the edge, and everything is done correctly and efficiently. On the other hand, it is to cultivate the management awareness and iterative awareness of team members.

3. Internal and external capacity building to form an innovation ecosystem and accelerate digital transformation

CIFI Group has a "1+N+X" model for internal and external capacity ecological construction.

1 is your own team. The core of the team is compound talents, and the Yang triangle model must be established for the internal 1. The Yang Triangle Model is a model made by Professor Yang Guoan. For a thing or a team to grow, the core of capacity building is three perspectives, one is willingness, the other is ability, and the third is mechanism support. Therefore, within CIFI, we first let everyone have the will through the construction of culture, and then through the 6S model, the review mechanism, etc. to make everyone have the ability, and finally establish a development and incentive mechanism, so that good colleagues can have better development.

N is a strategic partner. The discussion of "whether digital capabilities are self-built or bought out" has always existed in the industry. In fact, this should be a combination. For example, those that have a greater impact on the core competitiveness of enterprises, or some industries with relatively innovative capabilities can be built by themselves, because they cannot be found in the market, and others cannot be allowed to do so. However, there are a large number of general underlying capabilities. In fact, you can find market partners to help you quickly realize these capabilities, because these capabilities are very mature in the market. In this field, partners are already at the forefront, which can bring many forward-looking future-oriented capabilities. Think, so working with them can help businesses get some digital capabilities in place more quickly. At the same time, through their forward thinking and continuous iterative product capabilities, enterprises can also continue to obtain this value. This is a good package. Instead of building general underlying capabilities from 0 to 1, you should put resources where it is easier to create business value.

X is a cooperative ecology of industrial companies and startups. On top of the big tree of digital transformation, through single-point innovation on some specific branches, we cooperate with start-up companies to establish a new ecology of cooperative innovation. Inside CIFI, we have also established an innovation laboratory, and cooperated with many start-up companies to combine many scenarios to form a new cooperative innovation ecology, that is, the ecology of cooperation between industrial companies and start-up companies.

Therefore, in terms of internal capacity building, everyone needs to maintain their core competitiveness through the 1+N+X model, and at the same time be able to cooperate with the entire ecosystem, so that the team's ability to deliver value and create value is stronger.

The last word, "Counting dreams into horses, and building a bright future together" is for everyone. In the era of digital transformation, the positioning and requirements of society, the country, and enterprises for digital construction are undergoing major changes. As the heads of digitalization and IT of enterprises, everyone undertakes an important historical mission. We hope that enterprises will walk on the top of the wave of digital transformation because of our existence. Hopefully our efforts will also enable the industry to become better and more sophisticated through digitization and make the country a better place.