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.
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Insight
This installment of CBR focuses on an often-neglected issue: reverse logistics. To help us better understand the potential of the reverse logistics process, and keeping with our standard process, we recruited both an academic and a practicing professional. Our academic on this issue is a returning contributor, Kathryn Brohman, Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the School of Business at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (Canada). Kathryn and I share an interest in customer service systems and IT-enabled service.
This survey examined how organizations are using IT to better manage their reverse logistics process and whether opportunities exist to leverage an improved reverse logistics process to reduce costs, develop better relationships with customers, and capture knowledge that may be critical to the development of new products and services.
No Pain, No Gain
IT governance requires a rigorous, structured approach to ensure IT’s delivery of value. There are no easy answers.
Keep It SimpleIT governance should be simple, involve business, and apply common sense. It shouldn’t require comprehensive frameworks and complex processes.
IT governance is one of those subjects around which, at one level, it is easy to reach a consensus: IT governance is a necessary and important process by which an organization makes decisions and assigns responsibilities for the appropriate strategic and operational allocation of shared IT resources. However, at another level -- the level of specifically describing the scope of IT governance and the details of IT governance as a process -- consensus is more difficult to achieve.
GOVERNANCE: A MUCH-MISUNDERSTOOD TERM
Governance is one of those difficult words. Ask different people to define it, and you will get a range of answers. Ask business leaders what it means, and their responses will probably revolve around regulation and compliance, with an emphasis on the 21st-century demands of corporate governance.
Effective IT is essential for modern business performance. Since the mid-1990s, our company has accumulated a database that now contains data from over 230 organizations. In the database (which we discuss in further detail in the next section), business dependence on IT has been measured since 1990, and the average organizational dependence scores have increased from the low 4s on average to about 6.5 on a 7-point rating scale.
INTRODUCTION (AND CONFESSION)
IT has taken a place next to finance and human resources as a critical and pervasive discipline in just about every enterprise and government body. Yet practices and processes for successfully directing and managing IT (i.e., governance) have proved difficult to implement and even more difficult to sustain. This has not been for lack of trying -- many of the ideas, approaches, and techniques recommended today were originally proposed 30 or more years ago.