Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

What I have found over the years of deploying Agile is that organizations forget one of the fundamental reason why they deploy Agile practices: you want your scrum teams to mature as a team and as they mature you should expect that the level of quality in the software delivered will be higher than it used to be.

As with most flawed ideas, there is an element of truth in the idea that "leanness" and absence of slack have benefits to companies over the long term. The hierarchical organizational forms that characterize most modern companies were developed in an era when we did not have our current communication capabilities. A large part of the function of traditional hierarchies was to manage information flow. Some of the changes that we have made to organizations have been inevitable adjustments to reflect the fact that we no longer need to devote as much effort to managing information flow because of the nature of new technologies. 

In order to understand the many dimensions of sociotechnical systems, in particular their relevance and importance to the enterprise, we first need an overview of the key issues in the field of systemics, such as complexity.

Efficiency and productivity were the watchwords of the late 20th century, but today the emphasis needs to be more on agility. The prescription for organizational agility is markedly different from the prescription for efficiency and productivity.

Amidst all the cloud computing market kerfuffle, my teams are currently immersed in a slightly provocative and full-throated effort to vacate our data center. We have been looking around to see how the marketplace has shifted, where it has not, and, more importantly, what threats we are likely to face as we all go to the cloud. We have found seven of them.

The issues detailed in this article can and should be addressed prior to implementing an IaaS product, and to whatever extent possible, by your legal agreements with your provider.

FINRA, the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the US, is moving its technology platform to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and open source platforms. The program has been underway for close to two years, and 70% of systems are currently operating in the cloud. This case study begins by outlining our objectives for moving to the cloud and how these resulted in choosing a virtual private cloud using a large-scale cloud provider (AWS) rather than building our own private cloud. It also reviews how FINRA addressed several concerns that companies considering a migration to the cloud often face, including security, the balance of business and architectural concerns, DevOps requirements, disaster recovery, and implications for our culture.

As the cloud market has grown up, CIOs are now in a position to rely on a modern, robust ecosystem of cloud computing vendors to deliver efficiencies and cost savings at scale. To do this, however, the role of the CIO demands an understanding of how to build and subsequently manage that supply chain when deciding to procure infrastructure as a service. This article discusses how the CIO, ahead of launching an RFP, should prepare for the challenge of coordinating multiple, competing IaaS service offerings to establish the type of mature supply chain more commonly found in established utilities markets.