Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Crowdsourcing, as a making process, has problems because of its perceived lack of management control and the related uncertainty and risk regarding outcomes. At the same time, crowd creation1 appeals as a potential source of inexpensive innovation infusion, got from a global talent pool.

We've observed considerable interest in "IT governance" lately. For example, we've just completed a Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR) survey on the current IT governance practices around the world. We've also written several Advisors about the results and the interest we've seen in clients.

Believe it or not, IBM has developed an internal, private cloud-based BI analytics environment -- called "Blue Insight" -- designed to support its overall corporate sales, marketing, and product development needs. Moreover, IBM is now marketing and producing a version of this tool.

Enterprise adoption of social media usually hinges on three factors: financial projections, pilot results, and politics. Financial projections are based on spreadsheet models. Pilot efforts, often called proof-of-concept efforts, study the real-life effects of the innovation. But the effort involves resource allocation, and that's where politics enters.

Your IT organization has certain skills and capabilities that you deploy to solve various business technology problems. Ideally, you market these skills and capabilities to your internal clients (as well as your external stakeholders -- vendors, partners, etc.).

Many enterprises interested in agile adoption believe that their strategy should consist of sending a technical leader or manager to a training course and then having him or her take over a project (of course, there are also those who try to "save" money and buy a book on agile in replacement of training). But if you were to ask executives from companies that have succeeded in migrating to agile, the feedback would be not to cut corners, but to take the necessary training and get coaching.

Muchas empresas interesadas en adoptar agile creen que su estrategia debe consistir en enviar a un líder técnico o gerente a un curso de entrenamiento y ponerlo a cargo de un proyecto (claro que también hay empresas que intentan "ahorrar" dinero y compran un libro para reemplazar el entrenamiento). Pero si le preguntaran a ejecutivos de empresas exitosas en la migración a agile, su respuesta sería que no corten esquinas y tomen tanto el entrenamiento necesario así como la asesoría necesaria.

Recently, I've been involved in reviewing a number of "advanced" technological initiatives around the world -- let's call them "Initiative X" and "Initiative Y." Now, as familiar as I am with advanced modeling techniques, semantic/ontological thinking, and analytical philosophical concepts, such as "speech acts," I admit I've found both of these models difficult to follow and the intelle