Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Introducing Agile causes pain to your organization. This is not because Agile doesn’t work — it works for hundreds of organizations, some of them probably quite similar to yours. This is because Agile shows you the problems and deficiencies in your organization as brutally as the mirror you look into in the morning after a late night out. It is not the mirror that makes you look bad! The short iterations of XP and Scrum and the focus on lead time in Kanban work better the more mature the engineering and management skills in your organization are.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is driving demand for cloud-based platforms designed for building and managing connected solutions and for storing and analyzing the data they generate. This Advisor examines the available products for IoT infrastructure services.

Our friend and colleague Ken Orr passed away on June 14. Ken was a true intellectual. A highly skilled technologist, Ken was a philosopher at heart, who took a genuine interest in everyone he met; he listened closely and was generous with his kind and thoughtful words. We invite you to add your stories and memories in the comments section below.

It’s time to regain control of your organization’s cloud buying strategy. The coming of age of on-demand cloud computing has led to a surge in the adoption of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) because both the benefits and economics of cloud computing are so compelling. However, the haphazard way we buy cloud resources creates a new issue around trying to manage cost without compromising on newfound business agility.

Many popular definitions of leadership emphasize charisma, vision, or position. The darker definitions hint at manipulation or even coercion. In software companies, though, people throughout the organization are smart, well intentioned, and capable of making good decisions. So we need a different definition if we want to make our companies more flexible and smarter.

Cognitive computing is starting to impact the enterprise by changing the way data is analyzed and the manner in which employees and customers interact with computerized systems. This is happening across various industries, ranging from healthcare and retail to banking and financial services. 

In this article, I will try to expand upon the last clause of Kranzberg’s First Law of Technology: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Those who claim technology is ethically neutral tend to focus attention on the underlying processes, to the exclusion of the original motivation. While I lean in this direction, I recognize that bad actor/bad faith technology provides an important exception.

This article explores and repositions ethics, trust, and responsibility in the age of autonomous machines. It begins by posing new technology-induced ethical dilemmas and suggesting that there are different moral resolution systems. Frankenstein’s monster and Asimov’s Laws of Robotics represent early attempts to come to terms with the ethics of autonomous robots, yet the role of humans and their ability to intervene invite ­ethical considerations about the impact of autonomous machines. The new uncertainties that come with the use of innovative technologies require paying more attention to the responsibility of designers for their creations. The article concludes by identifying different levels of responsibility and proposing a finer balance between trust, safety, and reliability as well as considering the interaction between users, designers, and their creations.