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
Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The industrial model that promoted manufacturing and engineering is slowly being phased out to usher in a new digital economy powered by developments in networking and information management. The old model placed controls on everything, including information flow, and permitted sharing of knowledge only through hierarchies of roles within the organization.
Data integration is a key issue for any enterprise. If data from multiple sources can't be mixed and matched, it gets hard to gather the right information at the right time. As a result, it becomes a major hurdle to make informed decisions within or across an enterprise and for employees to reach set goals. How can one overcome this obstruction of the lifeblood of a company (i.e., enterprise data)? One promising set of technologies is based on the Semantic Web.
The Internet and Web have enabled easy and nearly instantaneous dissemination and exchange of different types of information almost free of cost. Most information currently on the Web is document (page) based and presented in textual natural language, because it is primarily meant for use by humans. It's hard for computers to understand and make use of this information content, as it may lack structure, precise meaning, or context, or because a given word or phrase could refer to more than one thing.
ERP STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
As a mature technology, enterprise resource planning (ERP) has a strong history of increasing productivity through organizational integration and the application of the packaged software concept. ERP provides the majority of computer applications associated with day-to-day business operations for medium-sized and large firms, including accounting, human resources management, and the coordination of manufacturing operations.
Abstract
In this Executive Report, I provide a strategy for the effective management of "fuzzy" projects. A fuzzy project is any project where the goal, the solution, or both are not clearly defined. Managing such high-risk projects is challenging.
Abstract
Leadership skills are tested when times are tough, when business is down, and when morale is low. So how do you motivate your people after 20% of their colleagues have been laid off? How do you focus their attention on future prosperity when the future seems so uncertain?
A "fuzzy" project is one where something feels out of sorts. Maybe the goal statement is a bit aggressive and you wonder whether or not it can be achieved. Maybe the proposed solution just doesn't seem to do the job. Or maybe the assumption of a cause-and-effect relationship between goal and solution is a bit of a stretch. Some managers would argue that all of their projects are fuzzy projects.