Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Business Objects has thrown its hat into the software-as-a-service space with the announcement of crystalreports.com. Crystalreports.com is an on-demand report sharing platform for organizations using Crystal Reports. Basically, it provides a common location for users to upload reports and then specify who can access them.

I teach a graduate course on business technology optimization at Villanova University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA). As I handed out a take-home exam to my students, it occurred to me that the exam might be an interesting instrument with which to check the state of the business technology relationship -- and some special projects -- at your company as well. Let's look at the exam questions and then discuss what they're really asking.

A common sight at sporting events and shopping malls is the spectacle of a person or family, hands shielding eyes, searching frantically for the vehicle that they know they parked in a given location. In all likelihood, the vehicle has not disappeared or been stolen or repossessed -- but that doesn't make it any easier to find once it has been lost. A little preparation, of course, could have prevented the vehicle's location from being forgotten.

How do you know whether or not you have an excellent strategic alliance? What are the critical success factors that contribute to a productive, enduring, and profitable alliance? Does the very nature of the relationship mean that you always must work with the same partner? How does the concept of "coopetition" 1 apply to strategic alliances?

Corporations do not form alliances -- people do. [1]

Collaboration is as essential to business operations as competition, if not more so. When groups of people bring their ideas and skills together to contribute to a single project, powerful synergies can emerge to create better ideas, better plans, and better projects. Today, as organizations increasingly focus on their core competencies, collaboration is becoming ever more important. Why? Because organizations must work with both their outsourced services suppliers and their supply chain in order to remain in business.

Most IT organizations are cost -- not profit -- centers. Senior executives (except for the CIO and CTO, of course) are always trying to reduce technology expenses. A friend of mine -- a CIO at a major insurance company -- gets a memorandum every quarter from the CEO asking him to reduce technology expenses by 10%. He keeps telling him that if he were able to reduce technology spending by 10% -- quarter after quarter -- eventually technology would be free. This silly dance has been going on for years.

There are individuals afraid to begin the risk conversation in any organization. Why? I hear it from our client personnel time and again. "We're risk averse around here. Management doesn't want to admit there are risks. They tell me to come with solutions, not problems, and then they tell me that I should have warned them about the risks." These are not uncommon complaints and concerns. What's tragic about them is that they stifle the risk conversation in an organization.

This is the third in a series of E-Mail Advisors on agile integration and the second to deal with organizing (see "Agile Integration -- Making Agile Work in Organizations," 2 March 2006, and "Agile Integration -- Organization and Empowered Teams," 6 April 2006). The six organizing guidelines presented previously are: