Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders
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Insight
With an almost evangelical fervor surrounding it, the steady flow of rhetoric concerning alignment of IT with the business side of the organization assumes that if the IT organization pushes for it, business units will enthusiastically embrace it. Often this is not true, and IT managers must prepare for those occasions when the technology organization is truly ready to transform how it interacts with business units when everyone else isn't.
Customer collaboration is a cornerstone of agile development, but it is also one of the more difficult aspects of implementing agile. Of course, lack of customer involvement isn't unique to agile development -- software developers have had problems in this area ever since software entered organizational life.
"Many project managers [PMs] still find the complexity of planning and delivering projects in a constantly changing environment often requires competencies that their formal training has not equipped them with," notes Guest Editor Rob Thomsett, in the May 2008 Cutter IT Journal issue's call for papers.
While often the "Green Revolution" in IT consists of well-intentioned projects to minimize damage to the environment, a darkening trend in the data center could transform fluffy and fuzzy corporate environmental attitudes into a more focused, bottom-line disposition where energy strategy becomes a key component of disciplined IT management.
Last month, we wrote an Advisor titled "Is Our IT Superior to the Competition's? No???" It was triggered by the just-published Cutter Benchmark Review article (see "Linking IT Budgeting, Governance, and Value," Vol. 8, No. 7), in which we report that only 27% of managers of large companies believe their IT is superior to that of their competition.
When I've been involved with clients trying to establish an EA function, they usually fall into one of two categories: either they basically have no architecture occurring at the enterprise level, or they have a fairly new practice in place with a handful of people having some amount of experience and/or knowledge of architecture.
With this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review we focus on a very tangible problem that all modern organizations face: maximizing their investments in Web site design. How to maximize the ROI of a Web presence is an important challenge for organizations since, today, the Web is a key customer-interaction touch point for all but the very small firms. Web sites are one of the primary engines through which customers transact with an organization, access support services, and engage in after-sales service.