Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Strategic agility as a science, especially the analysis of IT strategic agility, is emerging as we speak and will be moving into the mainstream within a few years. The Internet has dramatically altered how capabilities and firms are knitted together. The technology is more pliable today than just a few decades ago.

There exists an agile scaling myth that goes something like this: "Agile development works well for smaller projects, but doesn't scale to larger ones." Whether because of initially reported agile projects that were small or the XP focus (in early years) on smaller projects, the myth has stuck, as project teams of 50, 100, and 500 have been successful.

Dr. Geary A. Rummler passed away on 29 October 2008. Geary Rummler was the real thing. There were not many people like Geary in business process management. In a world increasingly dominated by radical management ideas and radical technological innovation, Geary was a researcher, writer, and consultant who focused on organizational change, management control, and motivation.

Working on relations between business and IT, we often forget about the most essential problems in this area. Simply by working on models, we lose the real view and the context. It is beneficial to remind ourselves of the essential reasons problems between these two areas exist.

There have been a lot of announcements pertaining to open source BI (e.g., query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards) and data warehousing (data integration, data cleansing, etc.) tools over the past few years. But the big question on everyone's minds remains: to what extent are end-user organizations actually adopting open source BI and data warehousing tools?

IT shops generate oodles and oodles of metrics. IT hardware and software can spit out hundreds of operational metrics, mostly to monitor system performance and diagnose system errors. On the hardware side, routers, switches, and data devices produce metrics that let operators infer the volume and kind of usage patterns at work.

In today's world of increased competition, tightening finances, and fewer windows of opportunity, the need for innovation has never been greater. There is no time for the slow and thoughtful evolution of ideas. In order to respond to quickly changing market conditions and volatile environmental factors, what is required are dramatically new ideas, out-of-the-box thinking, and game-changing solutions.

In today's world of increased competition, tightening finances, and fewer windows of opportunity, the need for innovation has never been greater. There is no time for the slow and thoughtful evolution of ideas.