Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

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. I'll close off the issue by addressing the key point Jim poses at the beginning of his article: "it's not what we know -- it's what we will do with that knowledge that defines our collective future."

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.

"No matter what goals your company has set or planned for 2013 -- a clean end game for an ongoing set of initiatives, an accelerated start for new ones, radical changes, or battening down the hatches -- now is the time to take stock and turn plans into action."

-- Joseph Feller, Editor

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.

Last week, CNN reported on the "biggest Cyberattack in history" involving two Internet companies in Europe. Apparently the scale exceeded any previous attack by, maybe, a factor of 10.