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
The promise of business intelligence (BI 1.0) is finally turning the performance corner. While we're still cleaning, migrating, and securing data -- and worrying about platform compatibility -- we've also connected BI to business performance management, a step that reflects rising expectations about what the BI endgame looks like.
Vendor management is still the rage. We talked about it a lot when outsourcing trends became clear -- when more and more companies were outsourcing a greater amount of their infrastructure and applications to partners down the street and around the world. The major outsourcing deals of the 20th century were inked in the 1990s.
If you are embracing transformation as an approach to make your business operations more effective, you are not alone. In fact, a majority of companies and government agencies in the US and other countries are considering transformation. However, it is absolutely essential that you recognize the reasons for the transformation before jumping onto the bandwagon.
Recently, I participated in a design review where the tension in the room was palpable. Talk about the business/IT divide; that was nothing compared to the development/architecture divide. The development team was defensive, resented being there, and was less than effusive in its answers to questions.
This Executive Update provides an abridged section of my upcoming book, Supply Chain Management: The Real WOW Factor, covering the critical strategy engagement process. I have modified it in the context of the CIO's and CTO's important role to ensure they partner with supply chain management (SCM) leaders in developing total end-to-end business processes and systems supporting the product-line strategies of their respective companies.
There was a time when we had one telephone bill. Each month, AT&T billed us for a certain number of hard-wired telephones and long-distance charges. At that time, we also had a TV antenna mounted on the roof (remember antennas?). Then came cable and satellite TV and the antennas slowly disappeared. For a while, we used our landlines to "dial up" the Internet.