Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Global sourcing is the hallmark of the 21st-century organization. As New York Times best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman articulates so brilliantly in his latest book The World Is Flat [1], China -- along with other low-cost country sourcing (LCCS) phenomena -- is fast becoming part of the global supply chain through the convergence of technology.

The US government has mandated federal agencies to create a transition plan for migration to IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) by February 2007 and to comply with the edict by mid-2008. Given the paternity of the US Department of Defense (DoD) in establishing the Internet as we know it, one would expect rapid acceptance in the private sector, but, of course, one would be wrong. Migration to this advanced networking protocol has proceeded slowly, and there are many reasons why.

I always enjoy the annual Cutter Summit conference. At this wonderful event, I have a chance to talk to a lot of old friends and Cutter clients and, most important, I always meet and learn from people who I haven't heard from before. This year was no exception: there were great talks about wikis, open source, and technology roadmapping planning. However, there was also something I find distressing: there was still an inordinate amount of discussion about code and coding.

Given how besieged organizations must feel today by both the growth in the incidence of information security breaches and the types of information security breach techniques that result in those breaches, the knee-jerk reaction is to throw money at perceived problems -- or at breaches that have already occurred -- in the hopes that this will constitute effective risk management. A more level-headed approach is to balance information security spending against actual risk.

In an earlier Advisor (see " Management's Performance Levers," 29 June 2006), I discussed the fact that, over the last four to five years, I've worked with a significant number of product companies in implementing agile development and project management practices.

Shared services and business process offshoring have in common some basic principles around the focus on value and accountability, so is the existence of a shared services (SS) model the optimal condition for organizational readiness in business process offshoring?

Last year, I submitted to you three perspectives for aligning business and IT in delivering business value: setting the right ground rules to begin the initiatives ("Setting the Ground Rules," 20 July 2005) and developing effective IT strategies to get business organizations engaged from the early stages of alignment initiatives ("Developing Effective IT Strategies," 3 August 2005), and recognizing the complexitie

A recent discussion on the NewGrange list server [1] began with the question, "Is there really anything that a project manager does that is more important than risk management?" As the discussion unfolded, there was a general consensus that a risk-centered perspective would definitely stand any project management in good stead. With that in mind, I would like to suggest a few risk-centered activities that are in keeping with an agile risk management.