Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

This article is the next in a series of Advisors that articulate the use of the Agile Triangle. It also introduces another project management tool, the Tradeoff Matrix, and describes how these two tools are used together.

The past few weeks have been both discouraging and heartening if you are an enterprise risk manager, for both the best and the worst aspects of ERM have been on very public display.

For the past decade, search technology innovation has been largely static in that it has been fixed and unchanging. Further, we, as business and technology executives, have been "snowbound" in a digital whiteout of epic proportions -- if you will, an Internet Static Age.

One very effective technique I have found to improve relationships and to drive cultural acceptance of candor, honesty, and transparency is called the "undiscussables." I have seen many variations on this technique. Mine is derived from The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Peter Senge et al.1

As important as success is to any organization, it's just as important to evaluate how we deal with the situations where the organizations don't succeed. That's truly crucial. But note how I framed it here. It's not about failure; it's about a lack of success. The two are not interchangeable.

What can organizations do to make sure their investments in social networking applications pay off? First, organizations need to make sure that their social networking applications are aligned with their corporate strategy. Starbucks provides an instructive example.

Cutter Consortium Fellow Ward Cunningham's quip, "A little debt speeds [software] development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite," is intuitively very clear.1 He is talking about short-term debt, which should be reduced -- and, it is hoped, eliminated in its entirety -- at the earliest possibl

It was always inevitable. If we ever solved the business technology alignment problem, we were told so many times over the decades we'd reach optimization nirvana. Is this the end of IT? Yes. It's 2015, and everyone's a chief information officer, or more accurately, everyone's a chief BI officer.