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

The first priority in all wars is to live to fight another day. The economic war faced by most companies will be replete with reminders that survival is the near-term, full-time agenda. This is true for the IT department and for IT professionals, too. Being part of the survival plan requires a laserlike focus on eliminating any waste, frivolous activities, and all of the "nice-to-haves." Start by getting rid of the toys and hip trophies (e.g., BlackBerrys, iPhones, pagers).

Increasingly, we find business processes that are offered in alternative ways using different channels. For example, purchasing vehicle highway tax in the UK over the counter or online over the Internet. At the same time, as well as offering a process in its entirety over one channel, the same process can be supported by different channels at different points in the process.

Enterprise mashups increasingly are becoming part of companies' toolkits when it comes to integrating data for BI and other decision-support applications.

Today's business-IT divide reminds me forcibly of an anecdote about the automobile market at the end of the 19th century. At that time, it was widely held that the total market for automobiles in Europe could only be around 50,000 because that was the probable number of chauffeurs that were going to be available at any one time.

As a friend of mind was fond of pointing out, jobs are self-selecting. Accountants go into accounting because they like numbers, surgeons go into surgery because they like to cut, and psychiatrists go into psychiatry because they ... have issues.

Last week, there was a most interesting interview in the New York Times with Lawrence W.

All businesses go through phases -- from birth through growth and maturity to decline. However, businesses rarely die; instead, they evolve into something new and different through mergers, acquisitions, strategic regeneration, or other phenomena. That desire for business continuity is a major difference between business and project plans.

Cloud computing provides a great number of advantages, but the new risks that it entails can't be ignored. Every company that takes advantage of these services will need to perform an analysis that looks at the specific risks posed by the service provided, service conditions, and the risk profile of the firm.