Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

A big idea, that collaborative innovation requires us to reconceive our idea of "failure," seems to be taking hold. We're getting it that an iterative process will include segments that don't achieve closure, don't solve the problem, aren't ready for the market. We're getting it that, since we can't foresee an emergent outcome, we have no way of knowing when exactly we'll get there.

For any IT governance to work, we need the active participation of business management in these decision-making areas:

• Project approval (e.g., project sponsorship)

• Decision-making processes (e.g., setting the ground rules for making prioritization decisions)

A client group recently asked about the use of maturity models to measure its current progress in applying IT governance processes. We assured them that maturity models are indeed used for that purpose, and we discussed how to go forward with applying the concept to the group's circumstance.

Is your organization going green, whatever that means? Well, that turns out to be a lot more than just server virtualization at the data center. Is the enterprise architecture (EA) team involved? Well, it should be. Let's take a look.

Pendulums swing back and forth in lots of areas. This is especially true in corporate and technology governance. But it may stop swinging for good very soon. Let's look at why things are so different now -- and likely to stay that way forever.

Let's begin with a definition of technology governance. Wikipedia describes it as:

In his book Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World, Michael Hugos, who is also a columnist for CIO magazine, talks about two fundamental business strategies: responsiveness and efficiency.

Our two-decades-old World Wide Web architecture is long past due for an upgrade. During what we might call the "Web 1.0-2.0 epoch," demand for computing has grown across every enterprise, in every sector, around the globe. We continue to struggle to meet this demand using our traditional approaches to building and managing enterprise information systems.

Cloud computing is the most talked about emerging technology trend today. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as "a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." 1