Monthly Archive:: June 2017

IT faces two realities: a legacy environment and a digital environment. When your company commits to a digital future, your legacy environment doesn’t go away. But adopting a bimodal strategy is not successful. Here’s the reality: digital transformation is a game changer that requires changing your business model; therefore, you must drive change into

Is innovation to improve competitive positioning at the top of your company’s agenda? A common approach is to look at the technologies leading companies use to transform their business, then set up an incubator or innovation lab (either internally or externally in a service provider’s business) and provide funding to experiment with the technology.

The promise of Lean Six Sigma is continuous improvement and that it will deliver business performance improvement by 3% every year. That was great in a business world where 3% was enough. But not today, when organizations can gain performance breakthroughs of 40-60% or more. Plus, Lean Six programs didn’t enable organizations to change

As I’ve been working with companies that are in the process of digital transformation, nearly all mention a common challenge: “How can we create a budget for digital transformation initiatives for a multi-year digital journey?” I’ve blogged before about funding for digital initiatives veering off track due to the complex, cross-functional nature of a

I don’t know about your company’s situation; but having looked at literally hundreds of outsourcing contracts, I see that they all have something in common. The original intent was a one-time shift to transform and improve an operational aspect. Unfortunately, IT outsourcing contracts sort of poured concrete around the outsourced processes. Thus, the quest

What if the foundations upon which your company built its business shift suddenly and you’re forced to reevaluate long-established strategies and investments? That’s the situation as the business world embraces digital technologies and digital business models. Accompanying this disruption is the inconvenient truth that most companies fail to overcome the huge challenges and achieve

Businesses are moving into a software-defined world with usage-based service contracts and an “Everything-as-a-Service” ecosystem of providers. But there’s a problem: Contracts have not kept up with the desire to buy things in an as-a-service model in an ecosystem. Thus, the contracts provide no accurate way to account for usage adjustments that need to

Hackathons, or hackfests, are getting a lot of buzz for being a collaborative, crowdsourced way of generating new product or service ideas. Sometimes they’re even touted for ideas that drive change and create a competitive advantage. But if that’s what you have in mind for a hackathon at your company, prepare for a letdown.