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.
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Insight
Strategic orientation toward customers and innovation needs to be grounded, understood, and directed in response to the business strategic plan. Businesses that develop a comprehensive strategic plan will have the insight to know which strategic-orientation mode will best help them reach their goals.
Now that the economy is apparently in shambles, it may sound strange to assert that every business now needs to rethink its IT vision. Yet now's the time, for in chaos there often is opportunity.
Getting noticed by search engines is a problem common to all rich Internet applications (RIAs).
Search engines were not built with RIAs in mind, and they are not able to index RIA content. This is not a big problem for internal applications, but if you want Web-surfing prospects to find your RIA-based Web site, you have to make it visible to searches.
Developers of videoconferencing have struggled for years with the many problems involved in replacing the face-to-face meeting. While the reasons for videoconferencing are strengthened year by year, actual use of videoconferencing facilities has hardly kept pace. At the same time, new requirements for online meetings are emerging as we move into a collaborative, interactive, high-definition, high-bandwidth future.
Producing a successful product has more to do with satisfied customers than with code elegance. Even more important than meeting project time and budget goals, a successful product meets customer's needs and quality requirements. The adoption rate, whether the number of customers purchasing a product or the number of internal company customers using a product, is a key measure of success. Getting the business requirements right and then supporting the users upon delivery are essential ingredients for adoption.
I read with interest Jens Coldewey's recent Advisor (see "An Agile View of Software Engineering," 16 October 2008), as well as some others like it that come from the agile community these days. I agree with the principles of agile, that it can be considered an alternative draft of software engineering.
Everyone, eventually, gets somewhat comfortable. Be it with a car, a chair, a project, a job, or a business strategy, human nature drives us to strive for a comfort zone. Unfortunately, that's not a healthy place to be. We all remember 9/11, but it is with a memory that has been softened for many by the passage of time.
Often, I get into discussions with clients and students about IT planning and portfolio management. Recently, I had a discussion that touched one of my most serious concerns: an extremely short turnaround on strategic projects. Here's how the conversation goes:
Systems manager: "If we can't get an ROI of 18 months or less, we just don't do it!"