Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

There's a compelling phenomenon that happens with the commonplace aspects of our lives. The boredom that is frequently associated with the average concerns in our day-to-day existence evolves into a willing ignorance that those concerns even exist. In our cars, we sometimes become oblivious to the fact that speeding inherently carries with it a higher level of risk.

It is just over a week since US President Barack Obama's inauguration, and people are wondering what to talk about next. There are a number of obviously significant issues (war, global warming, the economy, etc.). All are of momentous concerns, and how Obama handles them will affect many of us.

A center of excellence (COE) is not a new concept in business management. Even in offshoring, the creation of IT development centers to more effectively coordinate the application development work of distant service providers is a well-established type of COE. Yet the COE concept in offshoring has matured from its development center roots, taking on a more strategic aspect. The features of the evolved offshoring COE that offer value to managers are worth exploring for what they say about the evolution of offshoring as a management discipline.

A good friend of ours who is very active in business strategic thinking in many industries has mentioned to us that only 20% (or less) of business strategies and goals actually are worked on. This squares with our own experience in working with more than 100 companies worldwide. How can we plan IT to support business strategies if 80% of those strategies do not in fact drive business activities? On the other hand, we know that business managers undertake many initiatives that are not, strictly speaking, connected to the business strategy statements.

As the global economic situation continues to deteriorate, companies are becoming increasingly concerned about costs. Budgets for nonessentials must be cut. But it is important to make sure that money remains for the essentials. And one essential is ensuring a continuing flow of innovation.

With all due respect to Clint Eastwood and his fans, the IT workforce in early 2009 is clearly a mixture of the bad, the good, and the ugly. 1 I hope the juxtaposition of the film's title will have meaning as you read on. I have been following workforce trends since 2000 and decided it might be interesting to see how things were unfolding in the US as we entered the New Year.

I think that many end-user organizations are going to have serious reservations about deploying their data warehouses permanently to the cloud, certainly at least initially. This is quite understandable, given that most companies tend to view their data -- especially customer data -- as a strategic asset.

The production systems environment in its basic role should serve production and commercial purposes. If left unaddressed, the cloud of changes delivered by various software development initiatives would be implemented in the production environment independently, with each introducing some sort of risk and disruption to production systems work.