Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

What do you do when a team member is actually creating higher risk for the team, and yet you need that person and/or the organization insists you keep him or her? This is actually a far more common quandary than we care to believe.

The biggest trend to hit business intelligence (BI) since the days of executive information systems may not be an innovation in the technology itself but in the kinds of data the technology analyzes. The new BI foreshadows a time when, for example, a disease epidemic will be stopped because data can reveal to health officials the movements of infected people. Welcome to the world of "reality mining."

You can measure the effectiveness of your IT sourcing professionals by the prices and terms they get from their vendors, by the quality of the products and services they obtain, by their ability to develop relationships and integrate your company's objectives into their vendors' actions, by the time it takes them to close deals, by the wisdom of their choices as to what vendors to consider, and more.

I recently conducted a workshop on IT cost containment at a national conference (note that I will give an overview and discussion at this year's Cutter Consortium Summit 2009, 4-6 May, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA). In the workshop, I present several critical principles. I separate them into the "supply" and "demand" principles.

IT management literature provides various, more-or-less theoretical recipes for release management implementation in the scope of technology management processes in the company. Those frameworks usually focus on strict definitions of processes and hardly ever extend their scope to cover business issues related to release implementation or its practical aspects.

Application developers are achieving productivity gains by using a wide variety of sometimes eclectic tools, and virtualization and cloud computing are introducing more flexible options for deploying applications. The result: an application delivery environment that is more complex than ever for IT operations. At the same time, corporate resources are under the strain of aggressive cost-cutting mandates. This is forcing IT leadership to rethink today's application delivery models.

In Part I of this three-part Executive Update series on information security, 1 I discussed the reasons that business leaders would be wise to realize there is not a more effective information security and privacy defense than informed and aware employees.

The IT organization must simply align itself with the strategic orientation of the business. It is inappropriate for IT to define a strategic orientation in an independent manner. IT should not simply react to the business strategy with the given strategic orientation. IT needs to actively participate in the organization's strategic planning process.