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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One of our clients regularly provides every business unit management team with a comprehensive portfolio management report and dashboard covering the entire IT spend, every month. This report and dashboard covers several global business units and many subsidiary units. The report and dashboard highlight important areas of concern: IT spend not aligned with strategy, IT spend that performed badly (e.g., service-level and quality), IT spend with significant business and technical risk.
Every so often, you may come across an article that says something to the effect that "CRM isn't a product or technology but rather an attitude or mind set." Well, I've been thinking a lot about this concept lately and have come to the conclusion that done correctly, CRM is indeed both a particular mindset and a technology. Here's an example that I hope demonstrates why it is both.
Recently, my colleagues on the Cutter Business Technology Council got into a very heated exchange on the state-of-the-art in software development. A couple of members of the Council were particularly disturbed by the level of knowledge in fundamental principles that some of their recent computer science graduates were exhibiting.
"The entrepreneur," said the early 19th century French economist J. B. Say, "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield."
For any company, moving from a successful product line that may be getting old in the teeth to a newer one is always fraught with difficulty. How difficult do you think it is to fundamentally change the nature of your business?
In Part 1 (see "Agile Project Leadership Circa 1899, Part 1," 30 March) we saw how Wilbur and Orville Wright demonstrated three of the six principles of the modern-day Declaration of Interdependence for agile project leadership (www.pmdoi.org) by tackling the largest uncertainty first (the control system), by approaching the problem in annual iterations culminating each year with fulfillment tests at Kitty Hawk, and by selecting
Our December 2005 survey on outsourcing business intelligence (BI) showed that the pricing model is the third most important factor when selecting a provider (following experience and cost). All pricing models are essentially based on the number of units of service provided multiplied by a rate per unit. Outsourcing contracts layer service level and performance criteria over this units-times-rate basis.
Some of the most instructive examples of the future of IT taking shape have, in recent years, been in the pharmaceuticals industry. Companies in this industry have long understood the importance of revenue-side IT investments. Many firms have invested billions in what is sometimes called "industrialized drug research."
Boards of directors have a lot of committees: compensation committees, audit committees, M&A committees, among others. But what about IT? Are there committees that focus squarely on the acquisition, deployment, and support of IT? Most companies do not segment IT as a unique activity. Perhaps this means that they see technology as more tactical than strategic. Perhaps they don't have enough expertise to actually staff a technology committee.