Thought Leadership Archive

The principles and practices of the agile movement are quickly moving beyond the IT department and into how firms run their day-to-day business. This new way of organizing and running business gains further impetus by the headlong rush to use digital transformation to gain competitive advantage, which often requires changing a company’s operating model

There is a clear talent shortage in the US, and this is particularly true of specialized skills (engineering and IT), which are at the center of the competitiveness of the US economy. The current Administration is intensifying this skills shortage by restricting companies’ ability to import talent through H-1B visas. The unintended consequence of

A problem afflicts many companies undertaking transformation: they aren’t ready for innovation. But they need innovation to change their competitive positioning in the market. Today, many companies want their IT organizations to partner with the business to create opportunities for innovation and supportive services that drive transformation. And they look to their procurement chief

In a recent blog post, I explained that companies need to reconceive their services as an evolving journey and need to rethink how they manage services. That’s because services are becoming more strategic in a digital environment and require ongoing commitment and focus to ensure they deliver on their promise. Their evolving nature makes

Buying services is no longer a matter of decisions that stand independently, like buying technology or products. In the past, many companies had the misconception that services are “one and done” or that they could be built and then be fine or at least fine for three or four years. But that’s not the

Why do digital transformations experience more failure and face more peril than companies anticipate? Why do they take far longer than anticipated? With apologies to Einstein, I believe we can understand the answers to these questions by viewing them through the lens of “GUT” – (General Unified Theory) of digital transformation – and how

Organizational exhaustion is the deadliest enemy of companies undertaking digital transformation. It may be hard to believe, but one reason this happens is that companies do a lot of work to prepare for an unknown objective. Therefore, they effectively dissipate their commitment, resources, money and energy in areas that don’t bring value. This exhaustion

Unfortunately, two common situations in digital transformation cause CIOs (or others leading the transformation) to deliver little or no business value. An Everest Group study last year found that 73% of the digital transformations that we studied failed to provide any value whatsoever, and 78% failed to achieve their business objective. Put another way,

Leading service providers in India are going through substantial change due to executive leadership churn. The question is: is this bad? To answer, let’s look at what’s driving the churn and how long it’s likely to continue, and why. Take Cognizant, for example. The firm has gone through leadership change for some time. First,

The need to change is coming to the HR world, and it’s happening quickly. It will necessitate substantial changes in the HR mind-set, the way HR groups are organized, the supporting technology and the amount of resources invested in HR. What is driving this incredibly changing universe of HR? And what does it mean