Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

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.

To make something new, you have to decide when it's done. If it's really new, it's unique, and you don't have anything to base a decision on but the thing itself. So you're in exactly the same position as an artist deciding on closure.

While I am normally not one for tilting at windmills, I do have to take on the October 2008 Cutter Council opinion against the "cheaper, better, faster" (CBF) philosophy. In their 7-0 opinion (see "The Cheaper and Faster Tailspin," Vol. 9, No.

There are four critical areas in managing large projects: people, product, plans, and tools. In a previous Advisor, I discussed the collaboration aspect of people in teams (see "Help Agile Scale by Fine-Tuning Collaboration," 11 December 2008), and in another I covered organization and management style (see "Scaling Agile: People and Organization," 24 December 2008).

Headlines in just about every city right now are about economic meltdown. While the economy still deserves top billing, the backstory to those headlines is about IT. The proposed solution to the meltdown is more standardization and regulation, forcing companies, organizations, and government to evolve their IT in a stressful situation. What would Darwin do? How did land-living animals evolve from fish? The transformation required in many companies is no less than the transformation from the fins of fish to the arms and legs of human ancestors.

As it was two millennia ago, today a decimation of sorts remains a distressing part of our cultural experience.

Challenges abound in every enterprise, but the success of most major initiatives requires that all relevant parties understand the breadth and depth of the problem, the current environment in which the problem exists, and the impacts and implications of potential solutions.

Business-IT alignment is a broad vision that has been debated endlessly since the 1960s. It embraces a wide range of areas and, although other terminology has been suggested, the debate remains the same. The business environment continues to evolve and, as part of that evolution, the relationship between business and IT processes must also change.