Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Innovation is everyone's job. Regardless of where we sit in an organization, innovation is essential to survival and therefore a core competency of every competitive organization on the planet. But how will 21st-century companies innovate?

My last Advisor on leading agility focused on the fact that agility was not reaching far enough into organizations (see "Making Middle Managers Catalysts for Agility," 25 November 2009).

Why is it that silos, like weeds in a garden, sprout perennially and require vigilance and hard work to remove? Those whose work spans silos see clearly the cost of silos in terms of cash and calories. Organizations with strong silos have a harder time coordinating processes and integrating data across those silos.

Several weeks ago when I issued my predictions for the coming year, I said that I expected that the use of software and services for analyzing social networking/media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Yelp, would begin to increase in 2010 (see "BI and Data Warehousing Predictions for 2010," 22 December 2009).

Forecasting trends is a perilous exercise, particularly in times of great uncertainty. We are in the midst of revolutionary technological change within an uncertain economy. For decision makers, the result is unease, as we throw the die and bet either on embracing new opportunities or remaining with the status quo.

This issue is the fifth in our yearly series on technology and IT trends for the coming year. Our focus is to evaluate new technologies and IT trends you should be watching in 2010 by investigating and benchmarking the priorities of your peers. Moreover, on the basis of our work over the past years, we have assembled a database of responses to a number of questions that we have consistently asked each year since we first began this survey.