Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

The great rush to decentralize heirarchical decisionmaking in American corporations has been accompanied by a well-intentioned but hopelessly misguided faith in the power of teams to reach optimal decisions. In the realm of IT decisionmaking and governance, teamthink is as often a value killer as creator. Consider the ways this is so, first.

Effective coordination of the innovative minds, both within the company and externally, is necessary to tap the creative juices of the best contributors. This is a difficult problem, since we have created organizational silos that don't necessary welcome external inputs. An innovative culture has to be rebuilt and reconnected for effective communication and collaboration.

I bumped into an old friend at the Cutter Summit last month whom I hadn't seen for several years. He told me he was now a member of the nefarious three-time losers club as a CIO. When I asked what had happened, he described a consistent story of joining fast-growing, venture-capital-funded, small- to medium-sized firms, and having a wild ride for a couple of years. Inevitably, entrepreneurs in the firm would give way to professional management, and soon thereafter, so would he (my words, not his).

A friend of mine evocatively condemns many development organizations as "team ghettos." Designing a team ghetto is easy: organize developers into teams and organize management into silos over the teams, then watch the predictable inversion layer form between the two environments so that nothing ever gets across whole and unscathed -- not information, not people, and certainly not trust, honesty, and the truth about operations, competition, customers, progress, and results.

In the business world, one man's risk is another man's opportunity. So, too, risks that are insignificant for one type of business may be of major concern to another. The risks faced by an IT project are in themselves not unique. Any risk that can be postulated for an IT project can be identified in the risk environment of projects in other technical areas. What is different and generically characteristic of IT is its typical project risk profile. By their very nature, IT projects tend to exacerbate certain kinds of risk.

How do you measure your vendors' performance? On-time delivery? Reject rate? Lowest product cost? Quality of service? These are all important metrics; however, they may not provide you with sufficient information to determine the adequacy of your return on the investment you made with your vendors. Such metrics tend to focus on the tactical attributes of the relationship but don't necessarily help evaluate the broader strategic attributes.

Enterprise architecture (EA) has taken on renewed importance in the past few years. Yet this is in contrast to the fact that EA has largely had a history of failure to deliver on promised value. Much of this disappointment can be traced to a lack of alignment with business drivers and requirements. As enterprise architects, it is incumbent upon us to understand and address these failures and to deliver value that aligns with business goals.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is inherently a collaborative activity in which the buyer and vendor are equally well served by creating a partnership rather than a rigid "utility modeled" relationship in which the only concerns are payment, measurement, and specific service.