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

With the popularity of "design thinking," companies are encouraging their designers to be in the field interacting with end users. Like any other new methodology or process adoption, design thinking requires a fair bit of change in the mindset of designers along with some new skills.

In this Advisor, I will briefly explain the design thinking process and detail its skills requirements. My intent is to help companies to be better prepared to embrace design thinking.

The standard design thinking cycle is shown in Figure 1.

Back in April, I discussed a mobile app undergoing trials with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) designed to provide foot-patrol officers with fast, easy access to information assembled from various separate databases when they attempt to investigate a building or question a pos

Over the years, the progression from transactional data as the basis for most management reporting and business intelligence activities has increased rapidly. Right now the industry is going through a major set of transitions, with the latest being explosion of Big Data initiatives.

The proliferation of mobile devices for business use, driven to a considerable degree by bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives, serves to increase corporate interest in enterprise app stores. To date, however, adoption of enterprise app stores has been somewhat limited, and, for the most part, primarily by larger organizations.

This year is my 50th working in IT. I began as a part-time programmer while I completed a law degree (now that seems like a non sequitur, but it's how it happened). The technology was certainly rudimentary: punch cards, very slow tape drives, the first really usable commercial disk drive (not RAMAC but an actual removable multisurface drive), chain printers.

Problems are mostly caused by people. Thus, if one can improve the people factor, it stands to reason that the success of projects will increase.

In my experience, the three important factors that contribute to making people more successful in software development are:

The last couple of weeks have not contained a lot of good news for CEOs, CIOs, and corporate security folks.

Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.

-- Paracelsus (1493-1541)