Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In a recent discussion among international members of the Centre for Art and Leadership at the Copenhagen Business School, we considered the broad question: "What can art do for business in the current financial crisis?"

The argument was getting heated. At one end of the table stood the Linux bigots, banded together and angry. At the other end were the Microsoft bigots, standing stalwart and snooty. At stake was the future of operating systems for a new business intelligence platform. Neither side would retreat from its position that its product was superior.

Editor's note: This Executive Update is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of the author's book Best Practices in Software Engineering (McGraw-Hill, forthcoming 2009); Chapter 1 discusses 50 best practices. Here, we present the first topic: best practices for minimizing harm from layoffs and downsizing. As the recession deepens, layoffs, downsizing, and bankruptcies will increase in number. Past recessions indicate that these activities are often handled so poorly that they result in loss of operational efficiency for a period of years.

Recent developments have brought together parallel processing and cloud computing technologies in such a way that they are set to change the way organizations look at analyzing massive amounts of data. In fact, I believe that these developments hold the promise of ushering in a new era in high-end, affordable data analysis.

The world of business technology is dramatically changing. Everything about it is changing, including what we acquire, deploy, support, the way we support it, and -- perhaps most important -- the way we manage it all.

Recently, I had a conversation with Julie Zawisza, director of communications for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

It's déjà vu all over again. The cycle has repeated. The economy is and will continue to shed jobs. Businesses are trying to get leaner. Again, IT is expected to not only shrink itself, but help other units in the firm shrink themselves. A key approach for doing so involves reengineering the business process (BPR).

Companies today are trying to lower costs and increase staffing flexibility by taking some, or even all, of their development activities overseas. Many of these same organizations have teams that are using agile development practices to increase quality and improve project performance. What happens when these two trends in our industry intersect?