Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In his groundbreaking book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore develops his interpretation of the technology adoption cycle of Everett Rogers. This cycle starts with the innovators, moving on to the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and finally, the laggards.

The shift from local to distributed, from physical to truly digital, is inevitable. Maintaining digital infrastructures, however commoditized, is not core to any of the beneficiaries of the Web, just as running one's own power plant makes no sense. Preteens, adolescents, and young adults don't even think about these things.

There was an interesting and well-written column in the New York Times editorial section a few weeks ago called "Sleepwalking Through September," by Doug Glanville (20 August 2009).

The product team is a cross-functional group of managers and/or individual contributors who are collectively responsible for managing the product's lifecycle. The size of the product team will vary depending on the role of the product manager, as described previously in this series.

Outsourcing represents another way of managing the costs of an activity. Whether we outsource the mowing of our lawn to avoid the cost of owning and operating a lawn mower, or if we outsource the costs of developing an IT service, the result ends up in a net savings of direct and indirect costs.

Different people understand cloud computing in different ways. Some see it as a communications enabler. Some see it as the source of open source and proprietary applications. Some see it as a path to technology independence. Others see it as extreme outsourcing. So what is it? My working definition comes from our colleagues at Wikipedia, who tell us that cloud computing:

I'm not sure that I agree with the notion that innovation (creativity) is going to collapse in these hard times just because of a lack of money (see "Code Blue for IT Innovation," Cutter Business Technology Trends Council Opinion, Vol. 9, No. 12).

A couple of recent client engagements, with very large companies, reminded me about the fixation on process in many companies. Having used agile, iterative methods for so many years, I lost track of how pervasive process orientation can be in some organizations.