The IT department is the lynchpin that turns technology vendor offerings into value for business, individuals and society. The CIO is the most critical person in this most critical of junctures. That’s how I see it. However, many organisations sit on a spectrum, where this is one extreme and the other being that the CIO […]
I am a firm believer that organisational transformation, not simply change, is a bad move. Overhauling business models will just unsettle your people and put your existing cash flows at risk. Swapping from a business that works, at least for now, to something else that might work is akin to betting the farm. Parallel universes […]
Les Digerables Like the film industry, there is a growing genre of business that can be classified as ‘Horror’. The protagonist is the traditional business leader who through their organisation’s success has taken his eye off the ball. The antagonist is new technology, or more specifically ‘new’ new technology. Consider this a theatre production. Seemingly […]
In the previous five posts, I have focused on the issues associated with organisational transformation to the digital age, as well as on the key elements that will determine the extent to which your organisation will thrive in the digital age. In this post, I will focus on the steps you need to take on […]
In the previous post, I focused on reconciling the changing nature of careers with the changing nature of business. In this final post in the Biz 4.0 series, I will lay out the key realities of digital transformation. The earlier posts in this series explore each reality in more detail. The world is changing For […]
It is wonderful to live in the current period of technological growth. The gradient of the growth curve is literally rising before our very eyes. But it appears that many organisations are oblivious to this reality. Most established businesses appear to be actively sidestepping anything that might deliver exponential growth. Most likely, being established, and […]
It strikes me that MBA courses, which were largely designed with the industrial economy in mind (the administration bit is the clue), are due for an overhaul. Now that we are entering the digital economy we need to create leaders who are digital leaders. Some MBA programmes in years gone by have addressed this by […]
Many organisations are process-oriented. Their service delivery is industrialised and whether it is a factory or an office the people are more often than not organic cogs. Such organisations are selling efficiency and ultimately are judged on cost. Of course as the market opens up to the wider world, the cost play becomes a race […]
Post industrial revolutionary Seth Godin wrote an interesting post recently on the difference between failure and mistakes. There is something weak about failure and there is something apologetic about a mistake. And that’s perhaps why we tend to feel more comfortable about making a mistake than failing. But according to Seth mistakes come about as […]
Given the extent that organisations rely on IT, one would hope that the processes for developing and delivering the associated services ran in a predictable manner. This suggests a factory model and thus the aim is to continuously focus on efficiency with the end game being total automation. This is the preferred model for technology […]