Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders
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Insight
This is my fifth contribution to CBR, and it was by far the most difficult survey to prepare. Not the survey itself — the questions that my coauthors and I believe to be interesting and important were obvious to us, and we had no problems harmonizing our thoughts and quickly arriving at a finished product. So what was the struggle? Defining "the tablet."
Article
A Storm Is Coming In
At the very end of the movie The Terminator, Sarah Conner, future heroine of the human race, fills her car with gas at some "out in the middle of nowhere" service station. She knows how the next decades will roll out for the world; she has seen what lies ahead. As the gas tank fills, a man nearby speaks something in Spanish. Sarah then asks the station attendant, "What did he say?"
The attendant replies, "He said there's a storm coming in."
Sarah then sighs and says, "I know."
This survey examined how organizations perceive and are using tablet devices. Sixty-two percent of the 103 respondents come from organizations headquartered or based in North America, 16% from organizations in Australia/Pacific, 11% from organizations in Europe, 3% from organizations in Asia, and the remainder from organizations in other regions.
The most important way to reduce risk in innovation is to establish efficient innovation processes and consider risks versus benefits at each stage of development for new ideas. General practices that can help to build efficiency and reduce tendencies toward a risky "all or nothing" approach include:
Risk management is really tough. It involves thinking the unthinkable and then, because you have thought of the unthinkable, feeling compelled to do something to prepare for it. If the latest Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear reactor disaster teaches us nothing else, it is that if something can go bad, it will.
The relationship between intellectual property (IP) rights and innovation is by no means straightforward. While conventional economics dictates that innovation is the route to value creation -- and IP protection provides the means to secure that value -- this formulation breaks down almost at the instant in which it is questioned.
"Frantic," "indecisive," "technology-disabled," "fantasy-driven," "doesn't know what it wants" -- these are only some of the statements provided by IT people when asked to describe their customers. And this is hardly a surprise. In general, IT processes are characterized by long durations and time-consuming efforts. Once assigned to a task, the IT project manager is first asked to "understand the need" (aka requirements management).