Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

I disagree with the premise that prosperity breeds innovation and scarcity kills it. People innovate when there is a need to find a new or better way to do something. The decline in our economy has created a tremendous need for everyone to find innovative ways to prosper with less.

Remember ^KB, ^KK, ^KC, ^KV, and ^KY? These are the WordStar commands for marking, copying, moving, and deleting blocks of text. For those old enough to remember, WordStar was the dominant word-processing software in the early 1980s that was dead by the early 1990s.

In Part II of this series (see "Managing the Complete Product Lifecycle, Part II: The Technical Product Manager," 3 June 2009), we talked about the product manager role that is primarily focused on the technical integrity of the product.

I've been thinking a lot about the possibilities offered by adding a "social layer" to an organization's BI environment. I'm talking about combining social computing concepts (blogs, wikis, and social networking) with BI capabilities (query, reporting, dashboards, and analysis).

Many information security and privacy practitioners spend a lot of time thinking up hypothetical situations to use in training content for information security and privacy as well as awareness communications. What a waste of valuable time! All you need to do is scan the headlines for a few minutes, and you're sure to find many security and privacy incidents that have occurred throughout the world.

It's no secret that these are tough times. Technology budgets are being slashed over and over again. CFOs are running wild, attacking every budget that cannot be justified logically, financially, and politically. If the ROI is not bulletproof, it's not real.

Making business decisions is never easy. It becomes progressively more complicated as those around us offer their "two cents' worth" about how we should act or what practices we should adopt. And the sheer number of those around us sometimes means that we receive input from a host of different parties, all with different perspectives.

This past week, a number of intersecting risk-rich related news stories caught my eye. First, there was the ongoing investigation into the loss of Air France Flight 447 and its 228 passengers and crew.