Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

You are not your code. If someone finds a bug in your code, that does not (necessarily) represent a flaw in your skills. And flaws in your skills, should they exist, do not represent flaws in you, the individual. These are truisms, of course, but bear with me for a bit.

Responsibility for completing a mission and the resources needed to pursue it traditionally align with organizational boundaries. However, conditions and circumstances that drive the business environment, such as globalization and the fast pace of technological change, have led to increased collaboration and partnering among organizations.

Technological advances in the past 30 years have triggered fundamental changes in business practices. In the past, responsibility for completing a mission and the resources needed to pursue it neatly aligned along organizational boundaries. However, a one-to-one alignment among missions and project teams is no longer as common as it used to be.

Businesses must be vigilant about data security in today's global information-based economy. The dependence upon IT in this type of environment and the risks that are an inherent part of IT make it necessary for technology leaders to know the data protection laws and regulations that exist now more than ever before.

Risks in business process offshoring are extensive. Since, often, awareness of risks can mean avoiding them, managers lacking offshoring experience are particularly vulnerable. One way to understand the dimensions of these risks is to view them through the prism of the offshoring lifecycle, which defines the totality of decisions and actions that must be taken from the offshoring idea on the front end through a steady state relationship with an offshoring service provider (OSP) on the back end.

Stories of project and system failures due to miscommunication between business and IT abound, and despite a variety of real or perceived solutions -- be they business, technological, social, or other (including combinations of these) -- complaints, mostly from business stakeholders but also from IT, persist.

Offshoring and risk are inextricably bound together, but many offshoring initiative failures are avoidable if organizations take the first step to understand those risks. Comprehension of the nature of those risks is the necessary first step in mitigating them and is a process that, it turns out, is quite easy.

Most project and system failures occur as a result of miscommunication between business and IT. For example, Computerworld [1] recently described a failed application project for the Irish Health Service Executive that was budgeted originally at US $10.7 million for three years. Ten years and $180 million later (the price of a brand-new, 600-bed hospital), work on the project was halted.