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

If I could summarize my experience in presenting business cases into one sentence, it would be the following: it is more important to be credible rather than accurate.

Just as the word "computing" has lost its original association with mathematics and now refers to the entire range of information systems, "cloud computing" does not denote just the provision of compute servers. The distinction among IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS already indicates a broader scope.

Are your business units and IT solution teams speaking the same language? The business capability provides a common vocabulary in business terms. This report reveals how capability mapping enables business analysis and business/IT architecture alignment. You’ll gain step-by-step guidance that will help you define your business capabilities and use them to drive business-IT transformation initiatives. Not yet a Cutter client? Download your complimentary copy of the report now.

Are your business units and IT solution teams speaking the same language? The business capability provides a common vocabulary in business terms. This report reveals how capability mapping enables business analysis and business/IT architecture alignment. You’ll gain step-by-step guidance that will help you define your business capabilities and use them to drive business-IT transformation initiatives. Not yet a Cutter client? Download your complimentary copy of the report now.

Businesses are faced with ever-increasing complexity, competition, and cost pressures. New products and "silver bullet" solutions are espoused by vendors, but more often than not, they fall short of expectations, and worse, add to the complexity of IT challenges. Yet, there is hope for getting a handle on this complexity and finally addressing the challenge of business/IT alignment. The approach is not based on a new product or technology but rather on an architectural foundation that brings the complexity of IT into focus from a business perspective.

Abstract

In the past few years, the managerial area of demand management, portfolio management, and IT governance have become more and more popular. Organizations are adopting these processes to better manage their expenses, reduce cost, and formalize an often chaotic relationship between IT and the business.

Over the past few decades, the perception of IT has evolved dramatically from an internal unit that provides back-office support to a meaningful group that supports the organization's business processes and, finally, to a revenue-generating division. This "new era" IT is more involved in the business elements that allow the organization to grow, profit, and prosper.

The 1988 movie Rain Man won Dustin Hoffman an Oscar for his portrayal of a mentally challenged man who was incredibly gifted at recalling certain things; for example, recalling facts and computing complex numbers in his head.