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
Executive Report
Adopting the SaaS Model for Business Applications
Executive Summary
Adopting the SaaS Model for Business Applications
The software as a service (SaaS) model has matured as a viable strategic alternative to conventional software service options. The accompanying Executive Report elaborates on the distinct technical and managerial characteristics of SaaS and the implications of these differences regarding adoption decisions.
This issue of CBR takes a complementary inward look to the issue on IT services and service functionality that we published in December 2008 (Vol. 8, No. 12). Here, we benchmark the service relationship between the IT shop and the other functional areas of the organization.
Executive Report
Goal-Oriented Organization Design
Most people know that innovation requires time to think, reflect, experiment, fail, revise, and explore. But many have likely not contemplated how directly cost pressures can impact innovation efforts. Psychologist Donald T. Campbell developed a model of innovation in 1960 that can help us understand just what's at stake. The Campbell model was inspired by Darwinian evolution. It portrays innovation as a two-step process, as follows:
Blind Variation + Selective Retention
The Agile Triangle way of measuring performance can be useful in looking at business goals in new ways (the triangle involves value, quality, and constraints -- as introduced in my Advisor, "Flex Your Agile Triangle and Add Value," 30 April 2009).
The waves of the business cycle are becoming ripples. The recent American combination of minimal inflation and very low unemployment may not be an aberration, but the beginning of a new worldwide trend. Smarter government policy, globalization, changes in employment, advances in information technology, and emerging markets all cushion shocks and dampen the familiar boom and bust.
As methods such as agile development, agile testing, and agile project management are increasingly deployed to enable organizations to respond faster to the increasing turbulence of the global business and government environment, the roles of sponsors and business experts in the project space must change.
Agile sponsorship is based on a few, very powerful concepts: