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
Dramatic changes in organization, technology, and outsourcing signal limited career potential for 21st-century IT professionals.
A New DayHigh business expectations and a new demographic mixture signal a world of opportunity for 21st-century IT professionals.
IT is undergoing major changes that affect individuals as well as organizations. Mobile technology advances, cloud computing, and social networks are having a profound impact on the role of IT and IT professionals. In the past, businesses had to rely on their IT departments to make every enhancement to their systems and applications, whereas the current trend toward scripting languages, intuitive interfaces, and cloud-based services enables business users to quickly create their own applications.
Individuals entering the workforce today use the devices at their disposal differently from employees that came before. With over 5 billion cell phone subscriptions and 1 billion PCs in the world, the cell phone is the next digital frontier for companies looking to engage their employees.
Gone are those days when monolithic IT systems were developed and maintained by exclusive communities of IT professionals confined to technology-savvy regions of the world. The challenges of software engineering during the 21st century are quite different and multifold because of factors such as globalization and technology evolution.
We have written this article thinking mainly about the IT department of the future and the IT profiles needed. Management of IT could free business growth or restrain it. But this depends more on the setting of IT roles and the management paradigm chosen than on the proper use of IT tools.
Over the past few years, businesses have become more focused on customer-centricity. Organizations are increasingly emphasizing cutting costs, being more market savvy, achieving customer delight, and rolling out products and services faster than ever. Apart from redefining business processes, IT is being sought after to provide much-needed competitive advantage and as a catalyst to achieve business objectives. IT has seen manifold growth and, at the same time, simplification over the years -- especially in the last two decades.
Dramatic changes in organization, technology, and outsourcing signal limited career potential for 21st-century IT professionals.
A New DayHigh business expectations and a new demographic mixture signal a world of opportunity for 21st-century IT professionals.
IT is undergoing major changes that affect individuals as well as organizations. Mobile technology advances, cloud computing, and social networks are having a profound impact on the role of IT and IT professionals. In the past, businesses had to rely on their IT departments to make every enhancement to their systems and applications, whereas the current trend toward scripting languages, intuitive interfaces, and cloud-based services enables business users to quickly create their own applications.

