Digital Strategy, Operating Models & Technology Implementation Insight
Expert guidance in business technology strategy, leadership, and implementation in response to digitally-driven disruption of traditional business models. From emerging new operating models to strategies that put data at the heart of your business; overcoming cultural hurdles to what makes a digital leader; achieving enterprise agility to creating a culture that supports continuous experimentation — you’ll be on the cutting edge of the factors that are critical to successful digital transformation.
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The examples of leading collective creativity that we offered in the first three parts of this Advisor series (“Learning to Lead Collective Creativity from Miles Davis,” “Learning to Lead Collective Creativity,
Innovation doesn’t always mean grand invention. Sometimes reimagining the supply chain can yield big results and redefine a company’s future.
Even before the pandemic, online retail and rapid food delivery struggled to service “the last mile” to the doorstep. Surging demand from “stay/work/live-at-home” consumers compounded the problem and stressed even the most reliable delivery services.
What does “digital” really mean to a company? What makes Agile different from what came before? What are the implications of DevOps and the speed it provides? This article highlights the degree of change required for various heavily impacted functions within the company and the impact of new behaviors that go against decades of habit.
How many times must a predictable, recurring risk transform into a crisis before those in charge decide that perhaps steps should be taken to mitigate the risk? In the case of Texas power-generating utilities and US states’ pandemic vaccinations preparations, it appears that the answer is at least three times and counting.
This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal, with Guest Editor Eric Willeke, explores the strategies leaders should embrace to enable transformational change. These include integrating elements of digital, Agile, DevOps, and other modern practices, embracing a holistic mindset and culture, measuring impact, and reimagining new approaches to formerly tried-and-true practices.
Successful transformation requires organizations to structure and operate in new ways, which requires creating many new patterns for designing teams and their collaborations with other groups. Anna Wiedemann et al. introduce one example of an organizational structure tactic for enabling successful evolutionary change with a small group of development teams supported by a vendor-managed operations environment.
As leaders, we naturally focus on the exciting, high-impact areas, which unfortunately leads to blind spots around the boring, "un-fun" areas. Cheryl Crupi shares six hygiene factors that can be crippling if not addressed. The factors highlight the need for a holistic approach to agility that integrates elements of digital, Agile, DevOps, and many other modern practices for companies that want to be successful in the digital age.
Cristina Popescu and Danish Aziz introduce objectives and key results (OKRs), one of the core tools for creating alignment in times of intense change and anchoring the types of steering approaches capable of keeping up with the decision speed required to be effective in the digital age.
Kudos
Today's demands on software to provide useful, usable, secure, and scalable services stress all aspects of systems development. Cutter provides comprehensive coverage for these crucial topics—through research reports and customized virtual training delivered globally—helping us to understand needs and solutions that span traditional silos.