Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Although we in the IT professions don't eat our young, we certainly do take clear concepts and make them completely vague and less than understandable -- to the point of making the concept unusable. Asset management is one of these concepts. Through the normal IT developmental processes, asset management now means almost anything we want -- ranging from project portfolio management to help desk support tools to procurement.

It's something of an age-old question: are IT projects, particularly those that involve significant software development, intrinsically different from other types of project? Over the years, people have argued two sides of the story. One camp says that IT projects involve tasks, resources, and processes the same as any other project. The other camp focuses on software development as a highly intellectual activity that is all about people.

Happy New Year! I wish everyone a terrific 2009 and success in all projects you undertake.

We face a crisis that is affecting everyone, not just one business or one industry, or even one country. Many businesses will survive this recession, or as some assert, a depression, but a number of companies will either go bankrupt or be acquired. A few businesses will figure out how to thrive and take advantage of this situation.

"May you live in interesting times" is an ironic Chinese curse about to be experienced by more than a few CIOs in the US. Our truly terrifying current economic climate is sure to impact IT organizations profoundly as organizations call on business units to do more, maybe far more, with less. In the name of sound IT management, CIOs are reminded to consider the most common sources of technology management failures that happen in the good times because in bad times like these, managerial vulnerabilities are often magnified.

When introducing an agile approach to IT development into an environment that has known only a structured, start-to-finish, planned approach, you will likely encounter resistance. Thus, you will find yourself needing to compromise and adapt your methodological approach, to institute control points we call "traffic cops," and to learn to depict what you are delivering in a way that proponents of the previous "waterfall" methodology will not just understand but also accept.

Many companies are decentralized these days, though the number that are reverting to centralization is increasing. The essence of the centralization/decentralization dance spins around the value of shared services. But it's also about discipline and governance.

The recent downward economic spiral has predictably put IT in the spotlight as a target for cost reduction. As I've noted in past years,1 the fact that IT has historically been viewed as an expense while at the same bearing the expectation of delivering strategic value has caused a long-lasting macro-headache that still plagues corporate IT across all industries.