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
How much do senior (nontechnology) executives know about IT? Not much, I would argue, and here's the worst part: they seem to know less and less over time. In fact, I believe that senior executives know less about IT today than they did 20 years ago.
In Part 1 of this Advisor (see "Organizational IT Asset Management Framework, Part 1," 4 May 2006), we wrote about the operational risk management framework for IT asset management (ITAM), which consists of a policy, standards, and processes. We conclude our discussion in this Advisor.
As any software customer knows, it is extraordinarily important to spell out all of its rights in the license or development contract. The customer's ability to withhold payment, take possession of source code, or even terminate the contract, among other important terms, are usually spelled out in black and white.
In a recent Enterprise Architecture E-Mail Advisor ("EA Maturity Models," 15 March 2006), I introduced a variety of different models that are being used to evaluate enterprise architecture programs. Just like many EA programs that unfortunately go down the "EA for EA sake" path, we often take a "maturity for maturity sake" approach, forgetting that the maturity model is there for a purpose.
I'm hearing increasing talk (again) about how organizations need to extend BI capabilities to their rank-and-file employees. To date, however, most companies have found this "BI for the masses" movement difficult to carry out. True, the growing popularity of digital dashboards and scorecards have helped extend -- in somewhat limited fashion -- BI capabilities across the enterprise.
Just when I was beginning to think that the market's view of Google is far too optimistic, the company does something really smart: this time Google bought a company called @Last Software, which makes a product called SketchUp. This is quite a coincidence, since for the past five or six months, I've been telling all my friends that they really need to look at SketchUp because it is one of the slickest products I've seen for a long, long time with one of the most inventive user interfaces I've ever seen.
Many organizations have a policy for fixed assets; however, this policy is driven usually from an accounting perspective, not from the perspective of the operational risks associated with these assets. Controlling the organization's IT assets requires an operational framework that complements the accounting-based, fixed-asset policy.
A Google search of the phrase "achieve an ROI of" returns a sea of URLS from IT vendors promising that an investment in their product means a return on investment. As organizations grew more conscious of the need to fold the language of finance and profit into IT investment assessment, it was predictable that vendors would adopt the language of economic value into their sales and marketing efforts. Are these claims more than rhetoric?