Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders
Leadership and teaming skills are front and center in times of rapid change. Meet today’s constant disruption head on with expert guidance in leadership, business strategy, transformation, and innovation. Whether the disruption du jour is a digitally-driven upending of traditional business models, the pandemic-driven end to business as usual, or the change-driven challenge of staffing that meets your transformation plans — you’ll be prepared with cutting edge techniques and expert knowledge that enable strategic leadership.
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Insight
As Microsoft gets ready to release its first customer relationship management (CRM) product, there is a great deal of speculation as to whether or not Microsoft will come to dominate that market.
"There is nothing like the thought of having to pack your toothbrush on your way to prison in helping executives to focus on their role in corporate governance."
-- Alan Fels,
Chairman of the Anti-Competition
Commission, Australia, September 2002
Advisor
Technology Arbitrage
Any time there are different regions of the world, there may be an opportunity for technology arbitrage. What's common sense in one area of the world may be rocket science in another.
As IT becomes further integrated into business -- and, in fact, is the business -- it is critical that an enterprise's IT assets be in full, fluid alignment with business needs and actively managed from an investment perspective -- risk, yield, benefits, etc. -- rather than solely a cost-side perspective, as is widely practiced today. As such, the financial services metaphors of portfolio management and perhaps fund management are applicable and essential to the management of new-age IT.
Whether implicitly or explicitly, portfolio management has always been a key function of IT management. Selecting which projects to undertake, allocating resource levels to projects, and monitoring results across projects are key portfolio management activities. Today, just as individuals have learned about risk/reward strategies from recent stock market plunges, IT organizations are adjusting the "mix" of their project portfolios to emphasize cost reduction and decreased risks. However, it's still important to manage the entire mix of potential projects.
In these days of economic uncertainty and crashing stock prices, everyone is searching for safe investment opportunities. One of the best ways to get more for your money is to improve the performance of your existing investments. From an IT perspective, the biggest and most valuable investment is its portfolio of application software.
Every manager has a good idea of what portfolio management means in an investment context. It's about stepping back and looking at the entirety of your investments to ensure that they make sense when viewed as a group. In doing this, we consider the characteristics of investments along a variety of dimensions. For example, we consider how risky they are; we don't want a portfolio that includes only risky or safe investments, instead, we want a good mix.