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.
Subscribe to Arthur D. Little's Culture & Leadership Newsletter
Insight
"We are seeing that market leaders in all industries are increasingly using outsourcing as a way to build and sustain competitive advantage."
-- Dennis Torkko, Arthur Andersen Contract Services
All modern companies use computers and software in significant amounts, and they will use even more in the future. Efficiency in computer and software acquisition, deployment, and usage is an important competitive aspect of modern business and government operations.
For about 10 years, the Social Systems Business Group of OMRON Corporation has been outsourcing various kinds of software products to advancing Asian countries such as China, Singapore, and India. These outsourced products are characterized by migration of embedded software from proprietary systems to open systems platforms such as Unix and Windows.
The mechanics of the outsourcing process are known [1]. Knowing what to do when is only part of the challenge. The three big problems (as Jerry Weinberg says) are people, people, and people. Therefore, use a basic, proven process and remind your people to remember the people.
Corporate IT managers who become involved in outsourcing projects, and work with outsourcing vendors, come to the same realization sooner or later: only 10%-20% of what they do has anything to do with software and technology.
In the Y2000 field, there is an ongoing debate about the ethical responsibility of IT professionals to resist the temptation to "bug out" and head for the hills. Strong suggestions are being made that good programmers will remain loyal to society, and to their profession, by staying on the job to fix Y2000 bugs right up until midnight on 31 December 1999 -- and beyond.
OUTSOURCING: THE GREAT DEBATE by Rob Thomsett
"We are seeing that market leaders in all industries are increasingly using outsourcing as a way to build and sustain competitive advantage."