Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

This Executive Update attempts to clarify the disconnect between the “no project” Agile camp and project managers by exploring seven areas of software development. In addition, two case studies highlight the unique differences.

The difference between an organization that survives and thrives following an incident versus one that flounders can be summed up in one word: preparation. In this Executive Update, we outline a multipronged approach for best practice organizations that focuses on continuous process improvement.

In the first Advisor in this series, we explored enablers that we have found to be critical in driving successful digital transformation efforts. We believe these enablers can be unified into a powerful toolkit to facilitate successful transformation when assessed against three specific personas and observed through three distinct lenses. In this Advisor, we introduce these personas and lenses, offering additional insight into the human side of digital transformation.

This article gives us the complete context of what governance means, considering the data lifecycle (create, store, use, etc.) and the cognitive hierarchy of data, information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. The authors also look at the elements contained in a formal data model and what these ele­ments tell us about the governance actions that need to be taken when data is accessed, modified, or deleted.

This article describes what good governance means for public sector institutions that are embracing open data initiatives. While these organizations make data accessible to increase government transparency and promote economic empowerment, they face addi­tional responsibilities in terms of data quality, privacy compliance, security, and more.

Michael Atkin depicts the conflicting demands on the CDO, who must cover “operational data management” as well as “data management for analytical insight.” He shows how caring for the quality of the data, understanding its provenance and pedigree, minimizing the transformations, and adding semantic understanding of the data are part of the new responsibilities of the CDO 2.0.

While issues around data and information governance are starting to get the attention they deserve, business and technology leaders still need help finding their way through all the conflicting demands. We invited several authors to present their perspectives and recommendations on this complex web of issues.

Generally, business transformation results in designing a target business operating model (BOM), or in other words, a new “business design.” To implement the target BOM is to operationalize the business strategy. With each transformation cycle and new target BOM, there is a shift in decision making depending on changes in the organizational hierarchy and ways of working. To make sure that this shift occurs smoothly and is working as expected, it is imperative to continuously measure the BOM’s effectiveness both in terms of current and predicted performance.