Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In the first Advisor in this series, we examined three governmental IT systems from the US states of Michigan, Washington, and Rhode Island. Each experienced operational failures that caused needless harm to their respective state’s citizens. In this Advisor, we argue that a strong case can be made that these failures can rise to a level of administrative evil.

If you start changing an organization toward an Agile mindset, there’s no real end. Agile is about creating an organization of continuous learning and the transformation is done when there is nothing new to learn, which will probably be never. This puts an enormous challenge on middle management.

A corporation has various business goals, many of which involve profit expectations and ROI. Lapses in the development of a corporate architecture and security risks to data storage and processing can stifle business profit goals. Although there are a few industry and government regulations intended to strengthen a corporation’s information security posture, no regulation should be considered a one-size-fits-all solution.

While other strategies can to some extent be seen as alternatives, information superiority is different; it should be implemented in combination with any of the other options, serving as a “booster” of competitive advantage. In this Executive Update, we propose possible scenarios for the implementation of information superiority strategy, which provides relatively high sustainability without introducing too much complexity.

The articles in this issue present perspectives and ideas on business transformation in the digital age. We hope they will inspire and encourage you to visualize the likely future of business in your domain and to explore the opportunities it presents. Finally, we hope their insights will help you identify suitable transformation strategies and plans and, if needed, choose viable collaboration models for partnering with startups and other firms in your digital business efforts.

The financial services sector was one of the first to be impacted by digitization, and for many years, banks (and also insurers) have been innovating their offerings to respond to the increasing demands of customers, changing regulations, and heightened competition. But the real disruption — which has changed banks’ business models and the way they interact with consumers — began with the emergence of fintech. Increasingly, small, nimble, technology-savvy companies are unbundling the offerings of traditional banks; consider online lenders that provide loans to customers who, due to strengthened credit criteria, have lost access to conventional bank loans, or remittance companies that allow customers to send money abroad at the fraction of the cost charged by banks. In recent months, the trend has been observed even more strongly in the insurance space with the rise of insurtech, which impacts the whole insurance value chain, from customer onboarding, through risk assessment, to selling the products, and finally to claims processing. Digital transformation has become inevitable, and banks and insurers are looking for the most efficient strategies for the digital age. 

Big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the cloud are technological innovations that need to demonstrate corresponding business value. While the aforementioned technologies have distinct identities of their own, they are also interdependent. Innovating with these technologies at a business level demands a multidisciplinary, holistic approach that also incorporates an understanding of how to manage risks. The Big Data Framework for Agile Business (BDFAB) provides a basis for fostering innovation and managing the risks associated with it in the big data, IoT, and cloud space. This article discusses the nature of innovation in the context of big data, IoT, and the cloud and its application in practice.

The business environment is changing at a faster rate than ever before. One of the drivers of change is clearly technology, which is disrupting business at multiple levels. Within the organization, technology is disrupting business processes and the roles people play. Outside the organization, technology is enabling new business models, leading to new forms of competition. Today’s customers have much more access to technology and devices, and they expect to use those to interact with businesses. They also expect businesses to offer more sophisticated, smarter products and services tailored to their needs and preferences.