The world changed on June 26, 2018. It happened quietly. Few people even noticed. But that was the day that, after more than a century, General Electric, the last original member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, was removed from the index. GE was one of just a dozen firms that Charles Dow included in his list in 1896. The company appeared alongside giants such as American Tobacco, American Sugar Refining Company, and Tennessee Coal and Iron, companies that dominated what Carlota Perez, an … [Read more...]
IT: The Biggest, Baddest Bureaucrats
This post is an excerpt of Mark Schwartz's The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. IT Bureaucracy: Not Fooling Anyone Among the biggest, baddest, bullyingest bureaucrats in a large enterprise are the IT folks. Yes, us, the very IT folks who so hate bureaucracy when we find it imposed on us. Your password, we say, must be in a format that guarantees you’ll never remember it, and you must change it every few … [Read more...]
The Battle of Borodino: Business as a Complex Adaptive System
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. In War and Peace, Tolstoy writes of the battle of Borodino, in which Napoleon (sort of) defeats Russia and wins the opportunity to watch Moscow burn, though not much more. The day before the battle, he walks the battlefield and gives his commanders orders for the disposition of the troops—orders which are, for the most part, ignored. During the battle, he stands in … [Read more...]
Unlock Your Enterprise’s Digital Transformation by Changing Your Relationship with Technologists
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. Leaders of digital transformations often look around their organizations and see heads nodding. Everyone seems to agree that change is needed to survive in the digital age. Everyone understands that it’s urgent and that there is a risk of being disrupted if the company doesn’t transform quickly enough. Capital markets are demanding growth and innovation, while the board … [Read more...]
Managing an Evolving Transformation—A Scorecard Approach
Mirco Hering is the author of DevOps for the Modern Enterprise. This blog post was originally published on NotAFactoryAnymore.com. I have been speaking over the last couple of years about the nature of DevOps and Agile transformations. It is in my view not possible to manage them with a simple As-Is To-Be approach as your knowledge of your As-Is situation is usually incomplete and the possible To-Be state keeps evolving. You will need to be flexible in your approach and need to use agile … [Read more...]
