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 latest trends, including DevOps, prove that we must extend quality assurance (QA) efforts to the operations and maintenance period, and we must focus them on the services provided by IT. QA work also involves the amount of time and money spent, right? Not necessarily.
Back in 1887, Mark Twain noted that, "All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure." We've recently had two primary examples of senior organizational management who seem to be following Twain's advice with extra zeal.
In this Executive Report, Part II of a series on cloud computing, we explore the effective adoption and management of the cloud by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as global leading firms. Using case examples, we demonstrate, in detail, the challenges and practices used with these types of organizations. We also provide three distinctive lessons for SMEs and 10 lessons for all organizations.
Cloud computing is considered the great equalizer between small and large client firms by many senior executives and pundits. Is this true? And what are the emerging practices and lessons from cloud adoption by SMEs? To answer these questions, we describe three illustrative cases in depth: the Dana Foundation, Diesel Direct, and Art-World.
In this Update, we explore an important aspect of architecture: its ability to stretch the imagination into the future, into possibilities that promise much. The word "sparkitecture" seems so appropriate in this context. It is compelling as an abstract frame -- a scaffolding to stand on to undim this important window into architecture.
There is a lot of confusion among practitioners about what "digital" really means. Does it refer to a set of technologies (i.e., social, mobile, big data/analytics, the cloud, the Internet of Things), or is there more to it? To give digital a more precise focus, we have coined the term "ExConomy." It defines what digital entails from a business-value point of view and pinpoints why it deserves consideration in executive committees.
Predictive maintenance is becoming one of the more killer applications to arise out of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet movements. We are now seeing companies ramp up their efforts to develop machine analytics with the intent of increasing equipment availability, lowering production costs, and enhancing their customer relationship and loyalty efforts.
Technology backlash is as old as technological innovation. It is inevitable that people will grouse about new technologies and adopt them with varying degrees of acceptance. Yet, with one caveat, the cool stuff will take hold and prevail on the basis of its functionality and actual worth to people. The caveat is that this will happen only if these products do not give people some absurd reason to do a double-take and say, "What? You didn't tell me this amazing product" -- and here, take your pick -- "uses triangulation to share my location with perverts," "shares my aimless meandering around department store aisles with marketers," "leaves my television camera running," or "records my child babbling away to a beloved toy."