Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Today mobile phones are used mainly for communication purposes -- making phone calls or sending SMS messages. But new, high-end phones are already introducing new mobile services that allow mobile phones to be used not only for communication, but also as information processing, storage, distribution, and sometimes even local computing devices.

Here at University of a Kentucky (Lexington, Kentucky, USA), we are deep into the early stages of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) adoption. As it is at any point in time and with nearly any IT team, these sorts of things become equated with process control, with metrics, with improvement, with thickness, with complexity, with rigor, and then usually with rigor mortis.

According to Webster's Dictionary, the word "profession" means business, calling, career, employment, job, line of work, occupation, office, position, sphere, walk of life, and so on. This is also the foundation of the word "professional," which we think of as the person who is employed on the said work or occupation. According to Webster's, professional means adept, competent, skilled, efficient, experienced, masterly, polished, practiced, proficient, qualified, slick, trained, and so on.

There are numerous reasons why outsourcing could be detrimental to innovation. Perhaps one of the most self-evident is that outsourcing firms are unlikely to innovate, as their work is confined by stringent, unbending contracts. Suppliers find it difficult to justify innovation unless it directly helps their ability to meet their contractual obligations and internal revenue/profitability targets. Clients commonly assume that innovation during an outsourcing engagement will naturally come about.

Do you think data mining and predictive analytics are too complex to deliver via the cloud? Better think again, because that's what Predixion Software is now doing. Moreover, what Predixion has done with its Predixion Insight offering is not simply host some complex data-mining workbench in the cloud.

This Executive Update provides an abridged section from my upcoming book, Supply Chain Management: The Real WOW Factor, covering the critical business planning process. It delves into the key steps of planning to transform how MIS, supply chain, sales, and product line executives work together to win with customers and consumers while improving top- and bottom-line results.

Consider for a moment what impressed you most about Apple's new iPad. Was it some fancy feature? Its compact design? Or perhaps a cool application? I must confess that I was most fascinated by none of these. What most impressed me was what the iPad did not have.

In a recent Cutter Business Technology Council Opinion ("Managing Differences: The Critical 21st Century Management Skill," Vol. 10, No.