Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In this Executive Update, we look at the current innovative champs and their best practices. We end with a list of questions you can ask yourselves about what and how to innovate. While your corporate culture and senior management team may be stuck in the old ways of innovation, at least you’ll know how today’s best innovators do what they do.

Digital transformation is a journey of creating and combining specific business capabilities so that they give organizations a competitive advantage in the digital excellence domains in a way that reflects their chosen mix of strategic options. This journey is shaped also by the availability of critical resources — data, analytical skills, technology proficiency. It is very often seriously affected by the state of business and IT architecture, the style of integration, and data quality. It seems wise to focus on domains of excellence where the resources are available or can be relatively easily developed or acquired.

Agile battles significant challenges with management. Managers crave and need predictability, but Agile practitioners are adamant that firm predictions are impossible. Recognizing the need and difficulty of resolving this dilemma, we have formed a company that delivers services to facilitate the right conversations and decisions among the Agile team, its manager, and its stakeholders. Our services recognize that the solution entails dealing with probability. This, in turn, requires a combination of fast and slow thinking.

In this Executive Update, we will take a brief tour of both the strengths and weaknesses of blockchain technology in the abstract, working toward a framework for thinking about its other potential uses. It’s likely that the future will see many and varied uses for blockchain. Understanding how and when to take advantage of the technology will help your business advance into the future more effectively.

Developments in the technologies we use to share and recall life events are likely to create an explosion of business opportunities within the next one to three years.

Can you afford not to see significant architectural changes occurring in and around your industry? Perhaps changes in other industries may also stimulate thinking along different lines? Do you have people who think about architectural changes and dominant designs? Does your organization cultivate such people and enable them? These are important questions when the ground underneath shifts rapidly, but maybe the most important questions in this Advisor are: Do you know, or do you really know? And, do you have the ability to know the difference enough to act upon it?

If we don’t as an IT community start to stop excusing IT failure — or, worse, normalizing it as a success in disguise — then as IT becomes even more embedded into our daily lives with the Internet of Things, we'd better get used to living with very mediocre systems. And we had better not complain when the public decides that the reputations tech workers deserve are lower than those of politicians.

Measuring and calculating the cost of change can affect many of our decisions.