Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

The strategies, techniques, and skill sets that made IT executives successful in the past will not suffice today or in the foreseeable future. Rather than a technology manager, today's IT executive is a business integrator, the executive who can identify ways to use technology to achieve competitive advantage.

"Cut off their hands," sums up Alistair Cockburn's approach to software development. This admittedly graphic metaphor, Cockburn explains, comes from the early 1600s writing of Miyamoto Musashi, a Japanese samurai who was never defeated in a duel. Musashi's book on sword fighting techniques focuses on doing something in deadly earnest -- nothing minutely superfluous allowed.

In IT, we often reflexively retreat into our own world, even when it makes more sense to stay open to the rest of the business. Taking on the entire burden for developing and implementing a sourcing strategy is an example of this mistake. Keeping the business involved from the earliest planning through day-to-day execution not only makes sense, it also produces better results.

"It takes longer to turn a good idea into good software than it should," Eric Lander claimed in an interview with Computerworld (4 January 1999). Lander is a pure mathematician who has been working on the Human Genome Project for many years. We all have our troubles getting the software we use to work smoothly. Lander's work is undoubtedly far more difficult than what most of us encounter.