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

After almost four years, BI software as a service (SaaS) provider LucidEra is calling it quits. LucidEra, which was founded in 2005, offers a number of on-demand BI applications, including those for customer lead insight and pipeline and order analysis.

The use of social networking sites by activists covering the recent Iranian election protests is a vivid example of how Web 2.0 can upset even the staunchest government's attempts to stifle dissent and the spread of "nonofficial" (i.e., uncensored) information.

"Maintenance has lived in a twilight world, hardly visible in the formal accounts of societies make of themselves," or so wrote David Edgerton in his The Shock of the Old (Profile Books: 2006). The same could be said of the software world.

Since mankind has been making images of things, mankind has seen those images fade. Our perception of the past is deeply reliant on our perception of the artifact that represents the past. Aged, yellow photographs in our hands match the mystic past of faded memories in our minds. Grainy, worn-out super-eight home movies from the 1970s leave much obscured.

Despite the branding, business process management (BPM) is actually not a new initiative but has evolved out of previous generations of both technology and practices. In this Executive Update, we examine the evolution of BPM using graphical examples.

We all know by now that the relationship between the parties of an outsourcing contract is paramount to the success of the deal. While there is a fair bit of advice out there, it is mainly process-orientated (e.g., communicate frequently, plan together, have improvement workshops). But what if you genuinely do not like your counterpart on the other side?

It may not be a simple personality clash with which you have to live. It could just be that your opposite number holds very different values from yours when it comes to managing contracts.

Recruiting is an important and sometimes overlooked portion of the IT portfolio. Its functions orchestrate the talent available to the firm and ensure that the right people with the right training are available to perform the jobs required for the firm to succeed. The processes falling within this area affect both the IT department and the corporation at large.

Going through an outsourcing exercise, even if theoretical, can prove illuminating.