Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Global competition, increasing customer power, and quantum advances in technology have combined to demand a new and more adaptive approach to managing the business. In spite of significant advances in methods to improve business performance, such as TQM, Six Sigma, Lean, BPR, ERP, CRM, SaaS, and the cloud, many organizations continue to struggle in executing improvements to business performance.

One reason for slow cloud adoption within the enterprise has been a justifiable fear of vendor lock-in and proprietary systems partially caused by a woeful lack of cloud computing standards. Cloud migration or onboarding has long been hampered by the lack of virtual image standardization.

Big Data and analytics are of growing importance to the enterprise. These areas have developed so swiftly and contain such levels of potential complexity that they are creating a variety of staffing issues.

I recently worked with two client management groups on the basics of trust and partnership between IT and business. This is a continuing and ongoing issue that affects our profession and is somewhat amazing to me, since we have been dealing with this problem for so many decades.

Each time I fly, I notice flight attendants taking passengers' food and drink orders on a pad of paper. I've thought for some time now that would be a perfect scenario for using a tablet device. So you can imagine just how pleased I was to learn recently that American Airlines (AA) is going to be doing just that.

"Is it possible to invent or innovate in a more open or collaborative manner, leveraging the intellect of inventors outside of a traditional corporate structure, given the current frameworks for IP protection?"

Innovation is the key to survival and prosperity. This is particularly true today, when the rapid advance -- and obsolescence -- of technology regularly changes the business environment.1 Such innovation is facilitated by opportunities to collaborate on electronic platforms.