Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Digital transformation is not an end point; it is just a beginning. It is imperative to continuously evolve your digital solutions to keep meeting the needs of your users and your market.

This edition of The Cutter Edge discusses how leaders can prepare themselves for the changes in the software industry; how to master sustainability as technology continues to evolve; what's up and coming with blockchain, and more!

To succeed in the future, we must make difficult changes to move our organizations into the 21st century — and creating real teams is the answer.

We are increasingly hearing about the role of the CCO — the chief customer officer — who has the authority to ensure that the organization provides a unified and seamless customer journey/experience across all customer channels and guides the adoption and dissemination of CX practices and technologies. But just how standard is the role of the CCO among organizations?

Complex technology projects require a pushback against biases, oversimplifications, and the need for certainty that will inform many proposed solu­tions. The role of dissent is to harden and strengthen these proposals and to identify the right course of action among them.

Kaine Ugwu presents a series of tips, tricks, and techniques to approach the development of a digital architecture. He offers some clear guidance on putting the experience of customers at the heart of the architecture, positioning digital as a strategic approach to reimagining business models and infusing the organization with agility. Ugwu proposes a prag­matic use of industry reference models and pinpoints the key areas that need to be addressed to kickstart this process.

Mark Greville proposes an alternative to the command-and-control theater that is governance (particularly technology governance) in most large organizations. He offers examples of business-model-assassinating decisions from previous generations and lays out a path toward a scalable, sustainable, useful governance approach that avoids the bureaucracy typically associated with governance. The article explores decision dynamics and proposes the method of public self-governance to break up complex governance structures, eliminate governance body queues, accelerate change, and drive accountability and transparency via a modern, decentralized approach.

Dinesh Kumar comes at digital architecture from the perspective of business capability maturity: the readiness of any organization is a function of the maturity of a set of digital business capabilities. He goes on to describe the DigitalCMF, including the business capability domains, the digital business capabilities, and various assessments and tools within the framework. He outlines a roadmap using capability engineering as a way forward to assist organizations on the journey to a digital future.