Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In his book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development, Donald Reinertsen formulates the principle of quantified cost of delay as follows:

It's widely understood that most of the life of any product ever fielded is spent in production. Specifically, despite the time and costs of initial development and installation, most of the time invested in the life of a product is during the postinstallation phase, commonly called "operations and maintenance" (O&M).

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.

Whether it is the collapse of a particular bank or the global financial crisis, weakness in critical thinking and inadequate strategic analysis in decision making appear to make significant negative contributions to corporate collapses. Business analysis (BA) offers an answer by sharpening the capabilities of critical thinking and analytical decision making.

Like many folks, I've become fascinated watching IBM's Watson playing the TV quiz show Jeopardy! As a result, I've been examining everything I can about it. In a nutshell, Watson is a pretty amazing system, and it's got me thinking just how smart it is and about what its significance may be when it comes to BI and decision support and corporate computing in general.

In sailing, you can't head directly into the wind; you have to sail at an angle to it. To travel from point A to point B where the path is directly into the wind, we perform a series of directional changes, each one called a tack (see Figure 1).

Chances are that your IT organization is structured in different departments, such as development, quality control, and operations. Although the names may vary across companies, the idea is to group people that execute similar work or have similar expertise.