[LeaTech Summit Review] Red Hat Global Vice President Cao Hengkang: The secret of digital transformation lies in people "cooperation"

[51CTO.com original article] Not long ago, the LeaTech Global CTO Leadership Summit, carefully created by the CTO Training Camp (http://x..com) brand under 51CTO, kicked off at the Beijing Yuecai JW Marriott Hotel. As a high-end social circle for technical managers such as CTOs, technical VPs, and technical directors, this summit brought together alumni of the CTO Training Camp, CTO mentors, and senior technical managers in the industry. More than 600 guests fully exchanged views and thoughts on exciting topics such as technical vision, technical leadership, and technical team organization. With the help of the offline platform of the summit, technical managers actively explored more business possibilities, expanded their management vision, and took their leadership to a new level.

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At the main forum that morning, Red Hat Global Vice President and China President Cao Hengkang delivered a keynote speech titled "The Secret of Digital Transformation Lies in Human Collaboration". In his speech, he analyzed the reasons for the current failure of digital transformation in enterprises and shared the six key personnel factors that enable enterprises to achieve success in the process of digital transformation.

Successful IT transformation is not only about technological innovation, but also about people

Cao Hengkang said that currently, enterprises generally recognize the value of digital transformation, and many enterprises have begun to try transformation, but not many enterprises have truly succeeded in transformation. In the survey, only 29% of IT projects were successful, while 19% of projects failed completely. 75% of overseas executives said that they did not gain tangible benefits from those disruptive technologies. In fact, although the success of digital transformation is inseparable from technological innovation, the "human" factor is more important in comparison.

Think about it, if during the IT transformation process, senior management does not pay enough attention, does not regard IT projects as the most important thing for the company, employee training is not in place, and communication between departments is not smooth... and the IT department is left to fight alone, then failure of digital transformation is an obvious result.

"I think IT managers should try their best not to be distracted by new technologies, but firmly choose technologies that are strongly related to the business to make innovative breakthroughs." Cao Hengkang pointed out that transformation must go beyond technology and start digital transformation from the issue of "people". When people and technology are combined, the success rate of digital transformation is higher.

6 factors related to “people”

In his speech, Cao Hengkang said that there are six people-related factors that are very important for digital transformation, providing a very practical methodology for the digital transformation practice of enterprises: one is to accept an open culture, two is to establish a clear common vision, three is to establish cross-organizational teams and processes, four is to cultivate and train personnel, five is to build an inclusive and diverse team, and six is ​​to achieve personalization.

He explained in detail that, first of all, in terms of open culture, Daniel, a famous American analyst, believes that corporate culture is like the operating system of an organization. Without a stable and reliable operating system, no matter how good the hardware is, it will be useless. An open culture can help companies better adapt to digital transformation. Red Hat has always been very particular about doing things in an open source way, which has greater freedom and transparency. Open source itself pursues collaboration, sharing, and everyone solving problems together.

Secondly, every company has a vision, but a great vision must have three elements: first, it must be simple and easy to remember; second, it must make everyone reach a consensus; and third, it must have detailed indicators to achieve. 50% of companies do not have digital transformation indicators or methods to measure the progress of digital transformation. Red Hat's vision is to unleash the world's potential through open source technology, and Red Hat employees around the world are working together to achieve this goal.

Third, we need to establish cross-organizational teams and processes. Red Hat often assists many customers in setting up innovation labs, but we find that the IT department rarely communicates with the marketing department, finance department, and business department. Even the internal developers, infrastructure team, data management team, and security team of the IT department do not exchange ideas. They cannot reach a consensus on the corporate vision, direction, goals, and assessment points of view, so it is naturally difficult to achieve success.

The fourth point is to train personnel. To train talents, it is necessary to clarify what fields of talents are needed, what problems are solved, and to cultivate soft skills such as communication skills. More and more talent development agencies use external business partners to train their own employees. In the "2019 Workplace Learning Report" released by LinkedIn, they found that 52% of talent developers need to rely on external partners to achieve their learning and development goals, which is a significant increase from 32% a year ago.

The fifth point is to build an inclusive and diverse team. Diversity will allow everyone to actively make suggestions and help the company make better decisions. Studies have shown that diverse teams can make better business decisions 87% of the time and are 2 times faster. "Diversity is not just the right way to do things, it actually improves business results, increases employee retention and boosts morale."

The last point is personalization. He believes that IT managers need to go out, make decisions outside the IT environment, and communicate with users face to face. In an environment where mutual learning or relearning has become a new trend, trust is one of the stable principles that people can rely on.

At the end of his speech, Cao Hengkang said that Red Hat has become a bridge between the open source community and enterprises. At present, the concept and practice of Red Hat's open organization are still in the initial stage. Its innovation and complexity determine that there is still a long way to go. He welcomes like-minded friends to join the "Open Organization" global community initiated/supported by Red Hat to dialogue, practice, share, and jointly promote the development and improvement of "open organizations" and "open leadership".

The above content is compiled by 51CTO reporters based on the speeches of guests at the LeaTech Global CTO Leadership Summit. For more guest speeches, please follow .com. To obtain the PPT content of Mr. Zhang Zhiyong, please use the following WeChat account:

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