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
LEFT TO THEIR OWN DEVICES
The consumerization of IT is a catchy term for a sneaky trend that has been going on for at least 10 years, in which consumer devices and applications are increasingly being incorporated into the workplace. While the enterprise was spending the past decade downsizing, outsourcing, and otherwise squeezing IT down to its essentials, all in the name of efficiency and cost savings, practically all of the innovation, revolutionary products, and hot technologies were being developed directly for the consumer sector.
The "consumerization of IT" is a name we've given to a new phenomenon. A couple of new edge devices have come on the scene -- smartphones and tablets -- and they are quickly moving from being consumer gadgets to widespread elements in enterprise IT. Employees are bringing them to work and insisting that IT support them, and IT departments have gone from ignoring the devices to trying to regulate them to accepting that they will have to support users who bring their own devices (BYOD).
James Cooper and Charles Bess reinforce a theme raised by all the authors in this issue in their article "BYOD Is Not Really About Devices." Despite the growth curves, despite the sheer numbers, IT departments are missing the boat if they focus on managing devices. Instead, Cooper and Bess assert that the real focus should shift to managing information and "personas."
In this article, Chaka Chaka adds an interesting twist. Are we consumerizing IT, as we've all been saying, or are we IT-izing consumer devices? In the move to social computing, have employees really made corporate IT bend to their will, or have they been maneuvered into using their own devices as platforms for deploying enterprise IT services?
Advisor
Why You Need a Platform Strategy
Information technology in the modern large enterprise is becoming increasingly expensive. With new IT systems going online every week and an ever-increasing range of products and systems flowing into the enterprise, there is a vital need for a governance structure to control the amount and quality of IT systems on which the business is based.
Executive Update
