Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

We spoke with several technology leaders of large, established enterprises who are successfully tackling the myriad challenges of digitization: transforming their operating model and technical architectures, streamlining core processes, simplifying legacy systems, improving data quality, and unwinding excessive governance and control mechanisms. They are navigating the balance of technical and social considerations and creating a culture of continuous collaboration, problem solving, experimentation, and learning, which collectively creates enterprise-wide agility. These are very big enterprises that are learning to operate like small, agile startups. 

The values contained in the House of Lean for the 21st Century give us guidance as to the mindset required to succeed, but it takes concrete practices to bring these values to life. Given that leadership is the foundation of Lean, the effective Lean leader needs to form habits that align to the pillars that support the goal. 

Apart from consumer adoption of digital technologies, startups are also disrupting the status quo of traditional organizations. To address the threats and capitalize on the opportunities, organizations are transforming themselves to enable digital capabilities to improve customer experience and offer analytics-driven personalized products, services, and collaborative innovations, leading to increased top lines and margins. 

Our research and consulting reveal that CEOs and their CxO colleagues play a pivotal role in determining whether or not their organizations exploit the innovative opportunities provided by digital technologies. Creating and sustaining value from digital investments requires the CEO’s focused attention and oversight. CEOs set the tone, and their active participation determines whether their organizations optimize a return from any spending on IT. Most CEOs don’t seem to understand this or quite know what they should do. 

Today, when everybody wants to disrupt their own or somebody else’s business, and new technologies that let them do it seem to appear almost daily, people with the “capacity to lead” are critical, and nowhere more than in the exploitation of IT. Obvious though this is, recognizing, empowering, and sustaining good IT leaders has been a challenge. People who can think strategically about what, why, and how to deploy technology but have trouble delivering it — and the reverse — fall short as IT leaders. Both skills are needed, and this edition of Cutter Business Technology Journal covers them in great depth.

Social collaboration is not about technology. It’s about connecting people, and it’s changing the way business is being conducted. Similarly, gamification is not about games. It’s about motivating the per­sonal and professional behaviors that drive business value. Together, social collaboration and gamifi­cation help companies reap great benefits — among them, the ability to deepen customer relationships, drive operational efficiencies, and optimize their workforce. 

If you are spending US $50,000+ per month on public cloud, you have likely reached the penultimate rung of cloud torment — a journey from the Plains of Forecasting to the Gates of Commitment — and certainly you want to pass through the Undercroft of Budgetary Responsibility as unscathed as possible. Even those organizations that have been in and around the cloud for some time will need to go deeper to understand how to address challenges to their cloud buyer strategy. What’s around the corner for some CIOs is already a reality for those organizations in the throes of digital revitalization.

The new generation is looking for life-work balance as well as inspiring leaders who will fire them up and motivate them. In the new workplace, company values actually need to mean something. People need to see their leaders living and breathing these values every day.