Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Before January passed, I wanted to use the opportunity to make a few comments on what might happen in the enterprise architecture arena in 2004. Let me start by making a broad general statement: 2004 is going to be a major year for enterprise architecture.

The ultra competitive nature of today's business environment is driving companies to optimize the processes that impact their financial and operational performance. As a result, many companies seek to apply performance-driven management techniques to streamline their day-to-day business operations and facilitate better decisions across the organization.

Let's say you're in the midst of developing a new product or refining an existing product, during the course of which your team will be creating valuable new inventions. A decision is made that it probably makes sense to patent at least some of these inventions.

Change. To an individual, this small, one-syllable word can bring about a lot of fear and resentment. To a company, change directly impacts the bottom line. Because change involves risk, it is important that software process improvement (SPI) is properly managed to both reduce an individual's anxiety toward that change, and also to provide the company with a competitive advantage.

When a company has 90%+ of any market, it is difficult to get it to pay attention, but Microsoft really needs to since it is killing us in ways it doesn't understand. Recently, I've been having conversations with a number of CIOs and with Microsoft's users. The CIOs are convinced they are doing a good job, but many of their users are unhappy.