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.
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Insight
Where work is outsourced to remote departments, integration becomes an important issue. Integration requires development of clearly understood policies and careful oversight. The outsourced department must be integrated into operations on both a technical and a social level. This is greatly aided by modular organization, in which the boundaries and interfaces between departments are well understood.
A couple weeks ago, I discussed how social media monitoring and analysis tools can be used to defend an organization's reputation (see "Play Better Defense With Social Media Monitoring," 16 November 2010).
In my last Advisor (see "Preparing for the Net Generation," 11 November 2010), I discussed the distinctive characteristics of the Net generation, or Net-Geners -- the group now graduating from college and entering the workplace.
Introduction by Ken
Andy Maher is a very old friend of mine and a long-standing collaborator. Andy may be the best business intelligence consultant/programmer in the world -- no kidding. This is because, rather than write books and give speeches, Andy still does real work, helping large organizations try to pry near-real-time information from the cold, hard grasp of their antiquated databases, data warehouses, data marts, etc.
These days it is quite fashionable to paint a dramatic picture of the sweeping changes and cataclysmic winds swirling all around us. Faced with this effective illusion of certainty of change (or do we call it a reboot now?), many heads nod in groupthink response to the shibboleths spoken by our techno-shamans.
Explore the Fringes to Find the Killer App
When a group of Baby-Boomer IT professionals get together, it is not unusual for a game of “IT Codger One-Upmanship” to break out. In this game, the old-timers usually start talking about who remembers programming in FORTRAN or COBOL. Someone then ups the ante by talking about punch cards. If the participants are old enough, a winner emerges by explaining how he or she used to program in hexadecimal using toggle switches!
Adoption of high-performance analytic databases1 by end-user organizations has experienced moderate but steady growth since their inception. According to Cutter research, about 18% of end-user organizations use high-performance analytic databases to support their BI data management and data analysis efforts.
As we move well into the 21st century, there will be several skill sets critical to the impact of IT on the businesses we enable. One of those skills is business relationship management (BRM). Others include vendor management, business intelligence, architecture, and mobility. BRM is all about relationships and collaboration. It's also about subject matter expertise, models, and methodologies.