Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

We've talked a lot about how e-business is different from traditional business: new technologies, 24/7 availability, worldwide access, and faster time to market are just a few of the ways that the e-business world is different. Most of these changes are concrete and obvious, but e-business is different in intangible ways, too. This article addresses one of the more surprising of these intangibles: business-IT alignment. A perennial bugaboo for traditional business and IT, business-IT alignment is alive and well in the e-business world!

One surprising result from a recent Cutter Consortium business-IT strategies survey is that, on average, those who spend more money on e-business have a higher e-business success factor. Assuming that higher cost comes from larger, more complex projects, we tend to assume that higher project price tags will be accompanied by lower success factors. Respondents surprised us by reporting just the opposite. As Figure 1 shows, those who have spent less than US $1 million on e-business report lower success factors than those who have spent more than $1 million.

IT shops generally have treated software development as an art rather than a science. After a brief interest in the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (CMM), most IT shops have reverted back to application development as usual. Unfortunately, if a firm's e-business applications fail, it can have disastrous consequences.

I have been a systems professional for more than 20 years. For two of those years I was a consultant, where I was enlightened about the "elevator conversation." It goes something like this:

Projects are an integral part of business. In this fast-paced, ever-changing business world, doing projects well is crucial. To clarify what I mean by "project" in the accompanying Executive Report: a project is a planned set of actions taken to improve a business process or to implement a new business process.

E-project management (EPM) has been defined as the management of projects that are large and mission-critical but involve the use of novel tools and processes required to address turbulent business and technology environments (see Cutter Consortium's e-Project Management -- now known as Agile Project Management -- Executive Report, Vol. 1, No. 1). In this Update, we'll be examining EPM primarily as it applies to managing large-scale, advanced software projects.