Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In 1968, an ecologist named Garrett Hardin published an article in Science titled "The Tragedy of the Commons."1 This article described a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently and rationally, driven by their own self-interest, will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen.

Back in October, I wrote that the question of whether the cloud model is reliable enough for corporate IT would not be answered soon, adding that no amount of reassurances from service providers or IT analysts would really settle the question (see "Viability of the Cloud Model Still Up in the Air," 20 October 2009).

In this series of Advisors, we are exploring some typical problems traditionally trained managers run into when their firm begins to use agile.

There are two major strategic bets that went bad in the news this week that are interesting from an enterprise risk management perspective.

The beginning of a new year is a good time to make resolutions, and the beginning of a new decade is an even better time. The resolutions that I'm going to concentrate on in this Advisor (I reserve the right to add to it later) include a number of words and phrases that I believe confuse those of us in enterprise architecture and/or systems development as well as our clients.

In many organizations, IT has become crucial in the support, sustainability, and growth of the business.

The presumption behind sourcing is that the vendor will, and generally does, bring in technical depth and hands-on expertise for IT projects and programs where it is engaged. Traditionally, inhouse architects, designers, and other senior technologists would be involved in complex technology initiatives. As they helped to solve problems -- say, configuring networks, servers, and firewalls or defining key interfaces with external partners -- enterprise architects would add back to the organizational knowledge ecosystem.

Although it may not be as trendy or sound as cutting edge as some of the other analytic applications I've been covering (social network analysis, data mining, etc.), I can almost guarantee that more organizations will be examining workforce analytics as the new year progresses. Here's why.