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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Increasingly, governance risk is becoming the "fifth risk" that corporations must include in their enterprise risk management (ERM) portfolio that already includes strategic, operational, financial, and insurable risks. The move to couple risk management and governance can be seen clearly in the COSO Enterprise Risk Management -- Integrated Framework [1].
Shortly after reading Agile Project Management Practice Director Jim Highsmith's recent Advisor about whether iterations must be short to be agile ("Agile Isn't Short Iterations," 23 February 2006), I watched a video with my family called "The Wright Stuff" about the Wright brothers' clearly agile project leadership in development of the flying machine (www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wright/).
Managing core competencies is much more difficult than simply outsourcing those areas that have proved troublesome to manage. Managing core competencies involves taking a very long view of an enterprise's strategic interests, especially its key knowledge areas. Nowhere is that more in play than in the area of IT.
In our last Advisor, we began a discussion of the benefits of employing properly crafted dashboards to provide transparency into every aspect of IT's business (see "Dashboards Are Critical for IT Management -- A Lot of Dashboards, Part 1," 22 March 2006). "Manage IT like a business" is a recent mantra. Dashboards provide the means.
At last Windows Vista (the operating system formerly known as Longhorn) has reached beta, and Microsoft is confident that the client version will enter production by the end of 2006. However, the server (which for some reason is still called Longhorn) will not be generally available until 2007.
Reputation is a major corporate asset that is often valued much more than the tangible assets of the corporation itself. Buying a corporation's reputation is as important a consideration as buying its assets. When Phillip Morris bought Kraft Foods for US $13.1 billion, it wanted Kraft's reputation and was willing to pay four times Kraft's physical assets to get it.
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.
Anyone running a complex business requires regular information about key operational, sales, and financial matters. A CEO we know remarked, "If you don't have the right data, how can you manage the place?" Otherwise, you're relying on luck and momentum.