Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Despite general agreement among researchers and academics of the need for board-level involvement in IT governance, it appears that in practice this is more the exception than the rule. Given the prevalence of this issue, we have sought to answer the question, “What is the state of the art of the research domain of board-level IT governance?” In this Advisor, we share a few of our findings on the various determinants, theories, and outcomes surrounding board-level IT governance.

An architecture is often thought of as one uniform thing that underlies an enterprise. However, if an enterprise itself is not uniform, is it reasonable to think of its underpinnings as being consistent everywhere? Would we not expect an ideal architecture to mold itself around the curves and ragged edges of the real outlines of the enterprise, guiding it, and being guided by it? This Advisor suggests a three-dimensional framework intended to help in grasping the critical spatial dimensions of enterprises, and to assist in seeing the lines and jagged edges of a specific enterprise, along those dimensions. Architecture needs a ground to stand on – that ground is the enterprise architecture. It behooves architects to grasp what lies beneath their feet.

In this Executive Update, we explore why organizations need data democratization and how they can achieve it.

We hope the insight provided in this issue gives you an enlightened perspective on the current and future cloud computing market and the guidance required to make well-informed decisions on the strategies and technologies that will provide your organization a competitive edge.

This article tries to take a very pragmatic viewpoint about cloud computing: what are the things we have learned? What do most reasonable analysts and users now agree on, as opposed to questions to which the jury is still out? What should you spend time worrying about, and what should you consider settled, for good or for bad? Finally, with various lessons learned, what should you educate your managers or clients about, so they don’t waste their time or yours?

A truly successful digitization project will change a company to its core. Thus, product-to-service transformation is probably the best example of the pervasiveness of digital technologies.

In this article, we draw attention to the benefits of including a mechanism for the wholesale trading of contracts in delivering cloud services to mirror that of delivering electricity. Plus, we argue that it is possible for the cloud market to avoid the plethora of mistakes experienced in the many deregulated wholesale electricity markets globally. We also detail features from certain electricity markets that have led to attractive market attributes, such as increased competition, price transparency, and increased resilience to external shocks. Moreover, we leverage the analogy to explain how we can replicate such features for a global IaaS cloud computing market.

This Advisor reflects on the technology evolution of data warehouses and data lakes as well as the evolution of computer-assisted decision making, including data exploration, analytics, and decision support. Arguably, the data warehouse still serves an important purpose and will continue to have a significant place in the IT infrastructure. It is important, how­ever, to consider new technologies to support the need for real-time data, dynamic data warehouses, self-service business analytics, and algorithmic decision making.