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
Being a global enterprise with a large portfolio of services and solutions has some distinct advantages, but it is not without its challenges. At IBM, we sell and deliver products and solutions across the globe, at every level of the organization, and to almost every size of business. As a result, we are continually trying to expand our reach and improve our ability to communicate and collaborate with clients.
THE VIDEO GAME CULTURE
Video games have become a huge part of not just the entertainment marketplace, but of life today. Anyone who has kids can testify to the power of video games to engross their child's attention for hours (and hours) upon end. And it's not just the preteen set. On college campuses, in coffeehouses, in airports, and, yes, in office cubicles, people of all ages are increasingly playing video games. All this activity adds up to a huge market.
Even though the use of virtual worlds has increased rapidly during the past year, these environments remain in a very embryonic state. Technical issues of platform stability and security continue to result in service unreliability and interruptions. As they're currently implemented, virtual worlds don't offer high levels of security assurance. Issues such as identity management, confidentiality, and integrity of communications are not addressed adequately. This article takes a closer look at the issues and challenges facing virtual worlds.
Some years ago, I was working on a data warehousing project for a large bank in the US state of Texas, where one of my roles was reviewing the data model that the users and consultants were coming up with. I was charging a fairly high rate, for that time anyway, and the user manager became a little concerned that he was being billed for my work but hadn't seen me around much.
In most organizations adopting agile methods, the techniques used for program and portfolio management are still predictive and "waterfall": yearly budgeting cycles and capacity planning, and heavily matrixed resource management. It's no surprise then that despite adopting agile methods for their projects, many organizations have yet to exploit their full benefits at the portfolio level.
The odds of that? That's like being struck by lightning.
Is it? Is it really?
The English language is rife with metaphors. We do comparisons and analogies on a ritual basis. However, when the topic arises, I'm reminded of a college mate of mine, Jack Shepherd, who used to challenge similes on a regular basis.
While it can be very personally rewarding to learn about other cultures and interact with people from different places, from a project management perspective, these factors must be thought of as risks that should be actively mitigated and monitored. The business impact leads to, as a general rule, increased costs and schedule or product delivery delays.
Traditionally, the main purpose in building a business case for an IT project is to obtain approval for the financial spend. However, in addition to obtaining funding for the investment, the preparation of comprehensive and robust business cases provides organizations with other important advantages.