Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Recently, I had a conversation with a senior VP of software engineering who said that certain "macroeconomic trends" were going to influence the direction of his software development strategy. Reading between the lines: the CFO was going to cut budgets in the face of the current economic downturn.

Ambiguity: source of headaches, grinding teeth, and any number of other managerial complaints for which big pharma has yet to offer us a pill.

Ambiguity: source of excitement, the thrill of the chase; the product of change, and the lair of innovation.

One of the ugly truths behind the desire for powerful enterprise software is that the business people expert in the processes the software will oversee don't know how to program and the programmers who build the software know nothing of the business processes around which the software will be built. Into this void have come a number of project methodologies in which programmers and business experts collaborate to deliver a product that sometimes in the end takes too long to build, is rife with bugs, and which everyone dislikes.

Leveraging an M&A transaction requires both parties to put politics aside and make decisions in the best interests of the merged entity. A merger offers a rare opportunity to rationalize the IT portfolio, allowing the companies involved to seize the moment for their competitive advantage.