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.

Subscribe to Arthur D. Little's Culture & Leadership Newsletter

Insight

This issue is the seventh installment in our annual series on IT budgeting. Together, our authors have given us keen insight into both the current practice of the IT budgeting discipline and the underlying assumptions that inform IT budgeting practice, as well as a solid "big picture" understanding of both the past and the future.

There has been a lot of discussion about the need for organizations to adopt tablet devices (e.g., iPad, Android-based, PlayBook) to enable their employees to communicate via email, participate in mobile conferencing, and to access, view, and interact with corporate data via reports, dashboards, and other functionality while o

"By running a more or less consistent survey each year, we have the opportunity to not only ‘take the pulse’ of the budgeting activity in the current year, but also to acquire a longitudinal view by comparing the current year’s results with the past."

-- Joseph Feller, Editor

A year ago, most budget researchers like myself were hopeful that the budgets for the coming years would reflect an economic stability -- where businesses and nonprofits alike could begin rebuilding as unemployment concerns started fading away. Yet as the new year dawned, however, it became obvious that world economies had not turned the corner.

This is the seventh annual CBR IT budget survey, with each issue presenting the data and its implications for IT organizations. My contributions always follow a distinct theme, as reflected in each article title:

  • 2006 -- "IT Budgeting: A Management Perspective"

Top 10 lists, year-in-reviews, and predictions abound at this time of the year. Since we don’t like to miss any of the fun, we asked Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows to share their predictions for the business-IT landscape in 2013. 

I have recently confronted a need to revisit these topics. To remount, if you will, my hobbyhorse. Industrial thinking and methods, never quiet for long, seem poised to make further advances in the ongoing struggle to standardize work (of the many) for the convenience of those in charge (the few). I believe we should resist whenever we can.

A few months ago, I was asked by a colleague who graduated from the Paris School of Mines to contribute an article to the school's alumni journal on the topic of the impact of "new technologies" on the work of consultants.