Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

While recently raking together a large pile of freshly fallen leaves from the London Plane trees in my yard, it occurred to me that they had a strong connection to the ongoing pitcher risk-reward controversy involving the Washington Nationals baseball team.

I have heard so many CIOs say they just want to be able to walk into the offices of their internal customers -- business-unit VPs and other executives -- and show them exactly the real, fully loaded costs of the systems they are using and the financial consequences of some of the demands they push on IT without full knowledge of costs.

Thinking outside the box is a great approach -- but note how it only works if there is a box!

My "baptism" in programming was based on a discussion scratched on the back of my user's used-up cigarette case.

In response to economic downturns, it should come as no surprise that many companies turn to short-term cost cutting and/or choose to place big bets on business transformation efforts that may be premature.

In my last Advisor (“ Big Data Analytics in a Socially Infused Healthcare Enterprise”), I shared an account of leveraging Big Data analytics in a large healthcare IT organization.

As we all know, Abraham Lincoln was largely self-taught in the midst of meager means and living on the frontiers in the US states of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois -- far from centers of learning and culture east of the Appalachian Mountains. For Lincoln, the book represented the path, and he sought them with great effort.

"Cloud computing represents a game-changing paradigm shift in the industry, with consumers (and the enterprises they serve) crying out for a broadened set of standards in areas where standards have never existed before."