Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Leadership and teaming skills are front and center in times of rapid change. Meet today’s constant disruption head on with expert guidance in leadership, business strategy, transformation, and innovation. Whether the disruption du jour is a digitally-driven upending of traditional business models, the pandemic-driven end to business as usual, or the change-driven challenge of staffing that meets your transformation plans — you’ll be prepared with cutting edge techniques and expert knowledge that enable strategic leadership.

Subscribe to Arthur D. Little's Culture & Leadership Newsletter

Insight

Today, enterprise resource planning (ERP) is used more to drive business improvements and the operational efficiency of organizations, and any delays or budget overruns in implementing projects could affect the business. In enterprise solutions projects where such package implementations and rollouts are carried out, an inaccurate effort estimate is said to be one of the key causes of significant time and cost overruns. Hence, estimating the effort with reasonable accuracy is crucial for successful implementation of the package.

In the recent Advisor "Generally, Role Specialization Aids Agile" (26 November 2008), Cutter Fellow Jim Highsmith argued that the idea of generalists in agile projects doesn't scale and that the focus should be more on collaboration than on trying to staff a project from ge

The current economic climate seems to be taking its "risk toll." It's not that organizations are now forced into situations where they have to take risks that they would not otherwise take. In fact, the exact opposite phenomenon seems to be occurring.

The rapid growth of the software as a service (SaaS) market, along with the closely related cloud computing industry, is attracting a proliferation of players that is creating a buyer's market for customers and raising concerns about an inevitable industry shakeout.

Because nearly every organization has become heavily dependent on technology and many organizations have been dissatisfied with the ROI of their IT operations, they are looking for new ways to acquire and administer their IT systems and business applications.

A business needs outstanding leadership to successfully navigate through today's complex, competitive world. Identifying and understanding the strategic orientation of your business toward customers and innovation is one thing; however, it is quite another to successfully reorient the organization in another direction.

In Part I of this Executive Update series, we described the four components of the enterprise innovation chain (value innovation, management innovation, business model innovation, and invention) and how this concept relates to Cutter's annual survey on innovation practices by comparing the results of our 2007 and 2008 surveys. 1 Here in Part II, we continue our examination of the key findings.

The myth surrounding agile projects goes something like this: a small team of developers who can handle any coding task (database, business logic, user interface, middleware, etc.) works hand-in-hand with the end user who talks with the development team about the details of the work requirements. The small-team-filled-with-generalists model may work for some small projects, but it doesn't scale.