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
Budgets serve an a priori planning and communication role as well as a control and monitory a posteriori role. I hope that you will find this issue of CBR packed with useful data that helps you prepare your own IT budget (planning role) and survey-based ammunition that helps you back up your decisions with evidence (communication role). As always, the insight and guidelines brought to bear by our contributors should help you refine your own thinking about the appropriate course of action in your own organization.
As corporate networks push above Gigabit Ethernet, a whole new range of applications, once confined to special networks and limited usage, is coming into view. Broadband -- combined with real-time support as specified in IPv6 and provided on all of today's switches and routers -- makes it possible to stream audio, video, and massive application files around the enterprise without heavily impacting users. But what are those applications?
The budgeting process is of critical importance to IT and business professionals in our subscriber base; it is perhaps even more important nowadays as we begin to see a recovery in IT spending and, increasingly, a shifting of priorities away from a narrow focus on cost cutting and efficiency. It is within this context that we at Cutter Benchmark Review decided to take stock of current budget trends and priorities. We wanted to do so at a time of year when we could get good data (i.e., your organization has begun to think about its next budget and the priorities it wants to pursue), provide useful results (i.e., this issue comes out before you have closed your cycle), and offer practical guidance.
The budgeting process is of critical importance to IT and business professionals in our subscriber base; it is perhaps even more important nowadays as we begin to see a recovery in IT spending and, increasingly, a shifting of priorities away from a narrow focus on cost cutting and efficiency. It is within this context that we at Cutter Benchmark Review decided to take stock of current budget trends and priorities. We wanted to do so at a time of year when we could get good data (i.e., your organization has begun to think about its next budget and the priorities it wants to pursue), provide useful results (i.e., this issue comes out before you have closed your cycle), and offer practical guidance.
The budgeting process is of critical importance to IT and business professionals in our subscriber base; it is perhaps even more important nowadays as we begin to see a recovery in IT spending and, increasingly, a shifting of priorities away from a narrow focus on cost cutting and efficiency. It is within this context that we at <em>Cutter Benchmark Review</em> decided to take stock of current budget trends and priorities. We wanted to do so at a time of year when we could get good data (i.e., your organization has begun to think about its next budget and the priorities it wants to pursue), provide useful results (i.e., this issue comes out before you have closed your cycle), and offer practical guidance.
The budgeting process is of critical importance to IT and business professionals in our subscriber base; it is perhaps even more important nowadays as we begin to see a recovery in IT spending and, increasingly, a shifting of priorities away from a narrow focus on cost cutting and efficiency. It is within this context that we at Cutter Benchmark Review decided to take stock of current budget trends and priorities. We wanted to do so at a time of year when we could get good data (i.e., your organization has begun to think about its next budget and the priorities it wants to pursue), provide useful results (i.e., this issue comes out before you have closed your cycle), and offer practical guidance.
Executive Update
A Democratic Revolution in Business Intelligence?
Putting the power of useful information into more hands in the organization has been a goal of business intelligence (BI) efforts beyond reproach, but what obstacles has achieving this objective created from a technology and management perspective? "Data democratization" in the BI domain is a trend worth watching because it reveals how chaotic and raucous democracy can be.
In a recent set of columns, I have been thinking aloud about the state of systems thinking and training in IT. I say systems thinking and training because there's been too much focus on computer science education in recent years. In the process, we have focused far too much on programming and programming tricks and far too little on systems and how to design systems and databases to accomplish important business functions that are easy to build, test, deploy, and maintain.