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
I teach a course to graduating seniors at the University of North Carolina on IT planning and management. We recently finished the course segment on understanding the current state of IT and had begun the segment on developing an IT strategy. I was talking about the usefulness of creating a vision of the future state of IT for this purpose, when a student asked me what the difference was between a vision and a goal.
Executive Update
Mainframe Rehosting: Look Before You Leap
INTRODUCTION
The mainframe mammoths have no doubt served their masters well over the decades and are known for their legendary reliability and stability. However, during today's times of tighter budgets, attention naturally turns to these expensive computing resources in order to reduce costs. Additionally, the need to address changing business requirements more quickly and the need to cater to a broader spectrum of end users make it pertinent for these legacy systems to be modernized.
Hundreds of articles have been written about an industry-wide problem that I like to call the "IT-business disconnect," or the gap that exists between business and IT. It's an issue that consistently receives a lot of press because it costs companies around the world billions of dollars in lost productivity annually.
Hundreds of articles have been written about an industry-wide problem that I like to call the "IT-business disconnect," or the gap that exists between business and IT. It's an issue that consistently receives a lot of press because it costs companies around the world billions of dollars in lost productivity annually.
Hundreds of articles have been written about an industry-wide problem that I like to call the "IT-business disconnect," or the gap that exists between business and IT. It's an issue that consistently receives a lot of press because it costs companies around the world billions of dollars in lost productivity annually.
You're probably thinking, the last thing our industry needs is another article about IT organizations being out of sync with their companies. In the past decade, there have been countless articles written about this problem, known as IT-business alignment or what I like to call the "IT-business disconnect."
Sharing risk information is an organizational challenge. Telling management, team members, and even family what bad things may happen can be a lesson in frustration. On the one hand, we are supposed to have a measure of what doctors refer to as "professional detachment"; while on the other, we want to empathize, sympathize, and relate to the potential negatives. But there is a "gospel" in sharing the negatives: there is a bright spot associated with invoking bad news. It's a matter of basic management communication.
Outsourcing continues to raise expectations and pose challenges for all organizations. Time and again, even experienced organizations run into massive problems, suffer from slow organizational learning, and work in a reactive rather than an anticipatory mode. Many outsourcing initiatives are conducted with inadequate forethought, albeit rarely intentional.