Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

This article takes agility out of its normal domain of product development into the world of research, where its use is not at all obvious. They outline the cultural blockers, note the obvious mismatches to ordinary agility, and describe how they adapted both the ceremonies of traditional agility and their own culture to form an effective final mixture.

This article describes what had to be done in a company of 2,000 people across 10 countries to introduce agility. It summarizes the company’s shift in three areas: from methods and tools to principles and mindset, from resource efficiency to flow efficiency, and from scattered experiences to continuous innovation. You will notice in the emphasis on first changing the mindset.

During this on-demand webinar with Mike Rosen, you'll discover why your organization should use a business architecture and value delivery–based approach to digital strategy. And you'll learn why provisioning the platform based on next-generation application, information, security, and technology architectures is critical.

In this Advisor, we describe some of the more popular cognitive development platforms and services that are currently available. Although some cognitive development platforms are available for on-premise deployment, the ongoing trend is for providers to offer their cognitive products in the form of cloud-based environments that give companies the opportunity to license various API-based cognitive services for use in their own enterprise applications or commercial products.

Agile is never done. Without a conscious commitment to sustaining new ways of working, teams can fall back into old habits. Plus, staff turnover or growth brings in individuals who weren’t part of the original shared commitments. Naysayers find evidence that something’s not working — one more reason to subvert change.

Lean companies develop their capabilities and processes continuously as part of their culture. Continuous improvement allows them to align their activities flexibly, according to business strategy. Due to this holistic alignment, these companies achieve relatively high-performance levels compared to their competitors.

Michael Gleeson discusses how public health agencies and emergency managers can leverage the digitization of contact tracing of airline passengers at risk from a biological outbreak. He outlines the increased risk of infection and spread, facilitated by the increased numbers of airline passengers globally. A global framework to prepare for and respond to a biological threat, natural or otherwise, spread via air travel, can be achieved through the digitization of contact tracing using a collaborative approach among the airline industry, public health agencies, and EM practitioners. Identifying and locat­ing at-risk passengers in a fast and efficient manner is paramount to limiting contagion spread.

Theresa Jefferson and Gloria Phillips-Wren discuss modeling for disaster response. This is vital for practitioner/manager decision making to reduce the impact of a natural or man-made disaster. The authors examine the concept of technology embeddedness, noting that emergency managers must trust the technology and show a preference to use it prior to an actual disaster; the time to integrate technology into disaster recovery operations is not during a disaster. They explain how to effectively appropriate, integrate, and use modeling technologies for disaster response and, therefore, recovery.