Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

This article focuses on the challenge of over­coming resistance to change during the digital shift process and advocates for organizations to build a culture of continuous learning and education into its strategy of innovation and performance development.

As we explore the idea of “making a digital shift,” we must focus primarily on the front end of the process: the hard thinking required at the C-level. We also need to tackle the reasons it must be at that level. Next, it’s important to examine the ways to keep up the momentum and stay on track in managerial, not technical, terms.

We feature five articles in this CBTJ, covering a wide range of issues relating to the digital shift — from securing executive-level buy-in during the transition and overcoming organizational/cultural inertia to creating a holistic overview of the enterprise and mapping the digital value-creation process.

Recent research by Cutter Consortium shows that organizations view CX as appropriate for a number of use cases and domains. In this Advisor, we look at three of those areas: customer engagement, customer relationship management, and customer self-service and advisory systems.

According to Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Mike Rosen, there are three main roadblocks to digital business: 1) Lack of an agile architectural approach; 2) Limited data accessibility, integration, and quality; and 3) Inability to accommodate new requirements for speed, scope, and scale. Discover practical strategies for approaching and tackling these roadblocks in this short, on-demand session.

In this Executive Update, we assess how a gradual transformation from traditional IT/network units to a more functional organization, using the example of telecom operators, will address several legacy constraints in adopting new technologies. Effective implementation of such a project reduces costs and organizational redundancies and provides the further push to digitalization.

In the webinar, “Overcoming the Industry 4.0 Skills Shortage,” Barry M. O'Reilly discussed the skills shortage that is both inevitable and predictable when businesses try to solve problems with Industry 4.0, which is less about automating old processes and more about inventing a new world in which computing drives business rather than mirrors it. It is apparent that we cannot simply continue as we have in the past. Educating engineers faster, matching them to jobs more easily, and simply doing “the same old thing” has not solved the earlier skills crises — and Industry 4.0 presents even tougher challenges than what we have experienced thus far. In this Advisor, Barry shares some responses to questions following the webinar.

I often describe the strategic risk management of emerging technology and disruptive business models as a combination of continuity and change. Striking the balance is often difficult in a high-stakes, rapidly changing environment. However, one should find comfort and guidance in the fact that while the tech­nical components change, the principles of risk manage­ment remain the same. The trick is to understand the technology enough and apply the appropriate mitigation strategy to de-risk the solution while striking a balance between business value and the assumption of too much organizational risk.