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.
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Ten to fifteen years ago, a lot was being written about the concept of coopetition. This was just at the beginning of the huge growth in technology -- capabilities, products, companies, and, of course, stock value. Well, things have cooled off a bit since then; however, the concept is just as relevant today, if not more so. We just don't hear much about it because most companies have learned how to better manage their relationships with vendor partners.
Experimentation is essential to the growth of all organizations. It fuels the discovery and creation of knowledge and leads to the development and improvement of products, processes, and business models. Without experimentation, we might still use rocks as tools and live in caves. With breakthrough technologies, it is now possible to perform a greater number of experiments in an economically viable way to accelerate the drive toward innovation.
A good friend of mine, who was quite active in the AI community in the late 1980s and early 1990s, asked me an interesting question the other day: "When did rule-based systems go from being 'expert systems' to 'business rules management systems'?"
The "human side" of an outsourcing deal may be difficult to visualize at first, but if the fears and apprehensions of your staff are not managed well, it may not be long before it is the leading problem your organization faces. In some outsourcing deals, employees have not only refused to work, but they have deliberately sabotaged the process itself.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Trends Advisor entitled, "Why You Might Not Want to Sell Your Google Stock Just Yet" (4 May). In that column, I pointed out that Google had made an acquisition of one of the more interesting 3D tools that I'd seen in recent years: SketchUp. Because it is so easy to model things, especially buildings, I speculated that Google had pulled off a coup.
Corporate scandals leave a long, bitter aftertaste. While last month's convictions of Enron's Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling may signal the end of the most notorious corporate scandal of recent times, it has not signaled the end of the problems associated with poor corporate governance.
Knowledge transfer represents a critical stage in the transition phase of a business process offshoring (BPO) project. Often, the offshore service provider (OSP) staff, although skilled, might lack specific expertise unique to the specific business processes they will oversee. It is vital that the offshoring organization establish a structured, disciplined knowledge transfer program to ensure that OSP personnel are adequately prepared to assume daily business process management when that day arrives.
Projects sometimes happen to deliver a product that meets every requirement specified but ultimately appears not to address important needs of the stakeholders. Certainly there are many possible causes for that. In this Advisor, I focus on one cause that I believe is not always properly understood -- partly because of the flawed notion of quality of IS systems. The problem I will address is that of requirements quality and responsibility for requirement analysis in the context of IS procurement.