Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

"On a clear day, you can see six weeks." A friend overheard this comment between two IT executives at a conference a few years back. It's become one of my favorite quotes. It beautifully illustrates the difficulty of making predictions about the future of technology.

I hope you have enjoyed this issue of CBR, and that both the survey data and our authors' analysis gave you food for thought as you consider your strategies and operations for the rest of 2013 and beyond.

This survey explored interest in, and adoption of, various relatively new IT technologies and initiatives and investigated staffing and outsourcing trends in 68 organizations worldwide. Fifty percent of responding organizations are headquartered in North America, 22% in Asia/Australia/Pacific, and 18% in Europe, with the remainder in South America, Africa, and the Middle East.

There's a fundamental problem between the IT profession and its customers: there's an abundance of focus on the cost of the technology (the "T"), yet a dearth of focus on the value of the information (the "I") side of the equation. If the connection between I and T is not clear, then the cost of the technology becomes the only common ground between IT and its customers, and this ground is business quicksand.

Every company has some form of organizational chart. We're all used to seeing the hierarchy of boxes and lines and names that are characteristic of traditional reporting structures.

Driven by several converging and complementary factors, cloud computing is advancing as an IT service delivery model at a staggering pace. It is also causing a paradigm shift in the way we deliver and use IT.

The accompanying Executive Report presents a user experience analysis framework (UXAF) as an all-encompassing view of a user's experience with a business that transcends the "known" areas of usability and usage-centered designs of software systems.

Does this quote from Moore's Crossing the Chasm feel like the agile adoption marketplace today?

When a product reaches this point in the market development, it must be made increasingly easier to adopt in order to continue being successful. If this does not occur, the transition ... may very well stall or never happen.