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
Despite the rapid growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market, many enterprise decision-makers and application architects are still trying to figure out whether this new software solution model is viable and fits into their existing environments. This point was brought home during a Roundtable discussion during Cutter Consortium's recent Summit conference.
Successful projects have several common characteristics, including an active sponsor, engaged users, and an effective project manager. (Some projects might have these and still fail for other reasons, but I have never seen a successful IT project that didn't have these characteristics.) The most challenging criterion to fulfill is a sponsor -- and this is where many content management system (CMS) projects create the conditions for failure.
As the IT applications development business grows, the frequency of projects requiring multiple teams for their execution will also grow. In fact, with the added need for globalization affecting nearly every application, most, if not all, IT development projects will involve more than one team.
The recent revelation that the ultra-secret US National Security Administration (NSA) has amassed a gigantic database (some say it is the "biggest database in the world") covering "every call made in the USA" raises several privacy issues that are pertinent both to government and to industry.
A FOUR-STEP METHODOLOGY
This Executive Update outlines a methodology developed by me and my colleagues to help assess the commercial potential of specific technologies. It involves the following four steps toward developing a plan for the exploitation of alternative technology opportunities:
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Technology trends analysis
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Market identification and business case development
Many problems with outsourcing deals stem from the supplier taking over activities that were not well understood by the client organization prior to engaging the supplier. Very early in the outsourcing lifecycle, the activities that are candidates for outsourcing are identified by the organization. But it is not enough to just target the services; a detailed understanding of the targeted services is essential or the organization faces the risks of providing inaccurate information to its suppliers.
INTRODUCTION
Outsourcing contracts can be notorious because of their complexity and the inability of parties to interpret them in a reliable manner. But the contract conditions represent only one type of document that parties deal with in an outsourcing arrangement. Along with the contract, three other key documents -- service-level agreements (SLAs), price schedules, and procedure manuals -- comprise the basic suite of governing documents.
My advice regarding business technology strategy often repeats itself, not in terms of the same recommendations to different companies but in terms of the big questions that need to be asked of all organizations as they try to optimize their technology investments.
This Executive Update outlines a template -- a 5x7 matrix -- that can be used to launch business technology strategy assessments.