Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In this Executive Update, we will take a brief tour of both the strengths and weaknesses of blockchain technology in the abstract, working toward a framework for thinking about its other potential uses. It’s likely that the future will see many and varied uses for blockchain. Understanding how and when to take advantage of the technology will help your business advance into the future more effectively.

Developments in the technologies we use to share and recall life events are likely to create an explosion of business opportunities within the next one to three years.

Can you afford not to see significant architectural changes occurring in and around your industry? Perhaps changes in other industries may also stimulate thinking along different lines? Do you have people who think about architectural changes and dominant designs? Does your organization cultivate such people and enable them? These are important questions when the ground underneath shifts rapidly, but maybe the most important questions in this Advisor are: Do you know, or do you really know? And, do you have the ability to know the difference enough to act upon it?

If we don’t as an IT community start to stop excusing IT failure — or, worse, normalizing it as a success in disguise — then as IT becomes even more embedded into our daily lives with the Internet of Things, we'd better get used to living with very mediocre systems. And we had better not complain when the public decides that the reputations tech workers deserve are lower than those of politicians.

Measuring and calculating the cost of change can affect many of our decisions.

Some perceive that business architecture and enterprise architecture do not have a place in digital transformation. These perceptions are typically based on misconceptions, including that the business and technology environment changes too fast for architecture to play a role or that architecture slows or constrains the process of transformation. However, when successfully deployed and business value-focused, a business architecture practice is a critical enabler for digital transformation.

The values contained in the House of Lean for the 21st Century give us guidance as to the mindset required to succeed, but it takes concrete practices to bring these values to life. Given that leadership is the foundation of Lean, the effective Lean leader needs to form habits that align to the pillars that support the goal. In this Advisor, we explore the habits needed to build a pillar of respect for people and culture.

Since the business context is continuously changing, an organization’s efforts to innovate cannot be based on rigidly defined goals; instead, they must be driven by a set of guidelines for activities that can produce business value.