Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In my last E-Mail Advisor ("Hidden Pitfalls of Agile: User Contact," 12 November 2009), I talked about a potential pitfall you may encounter when transitioning a traditional organization to agile: the impact of direct user contact. This Advisor is about another pitfall: transparency.

The other night, fellow Cutter Senior Consultant Mike Rosen and I just missed each other in New York City at a conference where we were speaking. As I was coming into the hotel, Mike was leaving to fly to San Francisco for another gig. I had wanted to chat with Mike, but our schedules made that impossible.

An evolution in the nature, methods, and motivation behind perpetrating security breaches has had a profound impact on the business environment. This shift has caused a fundamental altering in the way that an enterprise views information security, privacy, and compliance. The ever-growing compliance framework being built around those concerns fuels the need for the convergence of these disciplines within the enterprise in a more holistic manner than previously imagined.

For most companies, business transformation is usually linked to strategic activities, such as entry to a new target market segment, introduction of a new service or solution offering, attainment of competitive advantage, and improvement of customer satisfaction.

IT is separating as we speak. For some, IT is about desktops, servers, and networks. For others, technology is about data, customers, and revenue. These two perspectives represent entrenched cultures about technology's primary role. Once you identify the dominant culture, you can determine the kind of technology your company wants.

As I flew out of Los Angeles International Airport on my final leg of a late evening flight back home to the Midwest, I gazed in awe at the sprawl of the second-largest city in the US unfolding outside my window. At 5,000 feet, now circling, now climbing, I observed millions of tiny points of lights as far as the eye could see.

One of the most difficult parts of project portfolio management is deciding how to rank the projects -- that is, determining which should be done now, later, and, most important, never. There are several ways to rank a project portfolio. Each is useful in specific situations and not so useful in others.