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
In this article, Cutter Fellow Bob Benson ponders two related questions: What does the IT budget contain (are there any surprises)? And, perhaps more to the point, how much of the enterprise IT spend is in the IT budget?
Although social media tools like Facebook and Twitter were initially developed for personal communication, businesses quickly became enamored with social media as a mode of expressing their own messages and selling products or services. Numerous companies have one or more social media accounts today, handling everything from product launches to corporate damage control.
Over the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has generated a lot of hype, touting how embedded sensors combined with mobile technologies will lead to a multitude of connected devices and services (all generating a deluge of data), which will open up a gold rush of opportunities in the consumer, business, technology, and industrial worlds. We've also learned that the IoT is not just about sensors and a lot of data and analytics; it also involves the application of new technologies including drones, wearable computers, and smart networks, as well as new practices such as predictive maintenance.
While Agile is commonly considered a successful methodology to add value to software development, is it possible to adapt Agile to bring better beliefs and practices to other areas of the organization beyond IT? If sales, branding, operations, or other business units were to be transformed for greater agility, what changes would be needed?
Although we see our people as our greatest assets, we don't do a good job of developing them. In many cases we don't use the training budget for training. If we do train, we tend to use inferior delivery mechanisms. We train on the wrong things. We don't evaluate the training. We don't spend our training budget wisely. But it doesn't have to be this way, as we'll point out in this Executive Update.
Forget big data, digital exhaust, data lakes, and all the other trendy terms created to describe big piles of data. Gang-tackling new terms to describe stores of data isn't going to advance the current state of affairs much. While we are at it, throw in the term "chief data officer." I have a simultaneously oscillating aversion and desire for that title, just like a pigeon that skittishly jumps back and forth between pecking at the bird feed and scattering away from the oncoming wreck of a car. Should I grab it or should I flee from it?
Enterprise architecture is reemerging as a practice that allows business and technology to respond to major transformation in an orchestrated way, paving the way for the CIO to approach technology enablement with a new mindset.
This Executive Update takes a practitioner's lens to business architecture and explains what the concept embodies. It also outlines some pitfalls to avoid while introducing the function to an organization.