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.
Recently Published
In the barrage of advice on how to successfully manage a business process offshoring project, a crucial piece of advice can be lost: manage the project as if it were a capital investment requiring a business case, including a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis.
When are you supposed to build an economic value model to justify a proposed information technology investment? Whenever your boss says to.
That's the obvious answer. A subtler one rests in building a decisionmaking framework that helps guide organizations in determining the appropriate occasions to undertake an investment assessment.
A friend of mine runs a company that provides remote back-up and recovery. It's a very nice little company that makes money and provides a valuable service to its customers. About a year ago the company piloted its technology at my university. The results were great. They quoted us a price of around US $14 per month per user for automatic, almost limitless back-up with guaranteed recovery of any file within hours. Good stuff.
Advisor
The Scourge of E-Mail Spam
Will there ever emerge a total and complete solution to the scourge of e-mail spam? The open, ubiquitous spirit of e-mail is under true assault by the morons and nitwits who continue to pound businesses and residences with unwanted, unsolicited messages. Where the force of law continues to fail in helping to solve the problem means the ingenuity of technology must save us from this pestilence. One technological answer, amidst a standards war, is slow to adopt.
In my last Advisor (see " Collaborative Leadership Basics, Part 1: Why Is Collaborative Leadership Required for Agile Environments?" 6 July 2006), I began this series by offering some thoughts about why collaborative leadership is necessary for agile environments.
"Can-do thinking makes risk management impossible. Since acknowledging real risk is defeatism, the risk management function in a can-do organization is restricted to dealing with those smallish risks that can be mitigated by quick action. That means you confront all the risks except the ones that really matter." (Tom DeMarco, Why Does Software Cost So Much? .)
Conducting audits of outsourcing deals is not something every organization focuses on. There are usually so many operational fires to be put out that review and compliance processes can easily be overlooked. Imagine, however, if you never reviewed your staff: they may become disinterested and unmotivated, and (worst of all) you may not know what they are actually doing! Outsourcing arrangements are no different.
The word "service" crops up all over the information technology world. There's service-oriented architecture, managing IT like a business (meaning a service business), the "service catalog" coming out of the ITIL community, service-level agreements (SLAs), and so forth.