Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

We hope the insight provided in this issue gives you an enlightened perspective on the current and future cloud computing market and the guidance required to make well-informed decisions on the strategies and technologies that will provide your organization a competitive edge.

This article tries to take a very pragmatic viewpoint about cloud computing: what are the things we have learned? What do most reasonable analysts and users now agree on, as opposed to questions to which the jury is still out? What should you spend time worrying about, and what should you consider settled, for good or for bad? Finally, with various lessons learned, what should you educate your managers or clients about, so they don’t waste their time or yours?

A truly successful digitization project will change a company to its core. Thus, product-to-service transformation is probably the best example of the pervasiveness of digital technologies.

In this article, we draw attention to the benefits of including a mechanism for the wholesale trading of contracts in delivering cloud services to mirror that of delivering electricity. Plus, we argue that it is possible for the cloud market to avoid the plethora of mistakes experienced in the many deregulated wholesale electricity markets globally. We also detail features from certain electricity markets that have led to attractive market attributes, such as increased competition, price transparency, and increased resilience to external shocks. Moreover, we leverage the analogy to explain how we can replicate such features for a global IaaS cloud computing market.

This Advisor reflects on the technology evolution of data warehouses and data lakes as well as the evolution of computer-assisted decision making, including data exploration, analytics, and decision support. Arguably, the data warehouse still serves an important purpose and will continue to have a significant place in the IT infrastructure. It is important, how­ever, to consider new technologies to support the need for real-time data, dynamic data warehouses, self-service business analytics, and algorithmic decision making.

For a scrum team to be successful, it is important to learn of and solve problems as they occur. As we work together, we express how we’re doing, what’s in our way, and our concerns so they can be addressed. It’s an ongoing process of improvement from sprint to sprint. There are as many team dynamics as there are teams, so sometimes getting started is awkward if people feel uncomfortable opening up. As we explore in this Advisor, sustained success demands a brave willingness to be “all in.”

During this on-demand webinar, you'll explore how to overcome the barriers to innovation using a Breakthrough Incubator model. You'll learn how to use a breakthrough incubator—an external partner that manages networks of collaborators—to accelerate the creation of new business propositions, and to overcome the barriers to innovating radical, non-core products and/or services at your organization. (Not a member? For a limited time, guests can watch the recorded webinar here.) 

Gone are the days that an organization could plan for sustainable competitive advantage and build a five-year (or even three-year) strategic plan. The business environment has become ever-more chaotic, dynamic, and disruptive. Enter agility, as the new capability to develop transient competitive advantage with shorter planning and execution cycles. Welcome to the age of “agilification.” In this Advisor, the authors touch on the important interplay among leadership, culture, business architecture, and digital architecture.