Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders
Leadership and teaming skills are front and center in times of rapid change. Meet today’s constant disruption head on with expert guidance in leadership, business strategy, transformation, and innovation. Whether the disruption du jour is a digitally-driven upending of traditional business models, the pandemic-driven end to business as usual, or the change-driven challenge of staffing that meets your transformation plans — you’ll be prepared with cutting edge techniques and expert knowledge that enable strategic leadership.
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Insight
The critical 20th-century management skill -- making things and people fit into systems that execute efficiently -- will inevitably be transcended by a different 21st-century critical management skill: creating the conditions in which people of widely varying backgrounds, behaviors, and inclinations can maximize their particular contributions to economic value. This is certainly happening in most firms in developed economies, yet most managers (especially IT managers) have not yet come to grips with it.
The critical 20th-century management skill — making things and people fit into systems that execute efficiently — will inevitably be transcended by a different 21st-century critical management skill: creating the conditions in which people of widely varying backgrounds, behaviors, and inclinations can maximize their particular contributions to economic value. This is certainly happening in most firms in developed economies, yet most managers (especially IT managers) have not yet come to grips with it. With this Executive Report, we move away from our usual format and revisit an "ahead of the curve" Council Opinion by the Cutter Business Technology Council, which highlights what has now become a major corporate movement.
As we explore in this Executive Update, various standards organizations are working to establish common frameworks, platforms, and protocols intended to ensure widespread interoperability and connectivity among IoT products targeted at various domains, such as smart homes, connected cars, smart grid/energy, industrial systems, smart cities, and healthcare.
In one open enrollment Lean software development class I taught, two participants were the development manager and manager of project managers of a very successful company that built sophisticated websites for other companies. They were currently at about 100 developers and growing rapidly. As successful as they were, the company had a serious technical problem -- about 5% of their installations would fail in the field and have to be fixed, causing about a 20% hit to the company's development effort.
The advent of software-defined infrastructures (SDIs) brings to hardware many of the known problems of software: since software is invisible, it is not bound to physical constraints and can become much more complex than hardware.
If we view the practice of architecture as a business, then innovation at the business level recurses into innovation of the underlying business of architecture, so that the broader business is positioned to innovate.
A discussion of wearables really needs to be separated into at least two parts from the start. There is the fashion element, and how anything affixed to the person becomes a badge of class, status, or coolness; and there is the sensor/utility function, which is of greatest amusement to technophiles.
Members of the Cutter team can assess and analyze your governance processes and craft solutions that are tailored to your organization's profile and nuances. Such solutions will enable you to maximize the value your IT team's services contribute to the success of the enterprise.