Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Do you have a formal plan for the business you do with each of your strategic vendors? A plan that not only describes the nature of your joint business relationship but also defines the obligations, commitments, and investments that will be made by both parties? A plan that clearly states the strategic objectives of the partnership and the metrics by which initiatives will be measured? A plan that has been jointly developed by both parties that defines the "skin" that both partners bring to the game?

Over the past few years, I have been working with companies to alleviate the risks they face in creating business-IT alignment. From the plethora of publications available today on this topic, I recognize that most IT organizations are working quite diligently to achieve an optimal business-IT alignment as a measure toward their cost-cutting efforts. In my opinion, these efforts are not being exerted to create mere harmony or coexistence between business and IT organizations.

I was talking recently with a colleague who is involved in a business performance management initiative. The subject quickly turned to one of the most important challenges associated with such an effort: identifying key performance indicators (KPIs). This Advisor summarizes what we discussed.

Successful application development and maintenance (AD/M) outsourcing relationships are contractually governed by a series of measures that monitor the performance and level of service provided by the outsourcing vendor.

The open source software development movement brought the IT world to attention with the creation of the Linux platform. An "innovation ecology" grew out of developers' enthusiasm for the possibilities of this technology as thousands of code jocks around the world contributed innovations and functionality to the Linux OS and Linux-based applications.

Organizations are under the constant threat of disaster and must implement an effective business continuity plan (BCP) that includes pre-incident preparation, analysis, mitigation, and recovery. When properly implemented, BCPs minimize business interruptions, allowing for seamless continuation of operations.

A friend of mine asked me recently whether I knew of any list of rules for project managers that he could review to help him with his next book. I pointed him to the list of 100 rules from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Project Manager Jerry Madden, but it got me thinking about what might be on my own list and why.

As I write this, hurricane experts at Colorado State University have announced a revision to their May 2006 prediction that nine hurricanes could potentially threaten the US to "only" seven, three of which are likely to be severe. This forecast is down from the five severe hurricanes that they had predicted in May. A cooler tropical Atlantic Ocean and a warming eastern Pacific are the reasons they give for this revised forecast.