Thought Leadership Categories BTM Exchange thought leadership topics provide members with invaluable management know-how on a variety of business technology management issues related to Agile Enterprises, Sustained Innovation, Extended Enterprises, Governance, Efficiency, Growth, Shared Services, Sustainable Socio-Economic Strategy, and more.
Editors' Picks  Collaboration and the Shared Services Organization
Shared Services: Management of complex, integrated enterprises may run more smoothly with the establishment of a Shared Services Organization. As companies have become increasingly more complex - but at the same time more integrated - the need for additional cross collaboration and more effective leveraging of the resources at their disposal has become increasingly significant.
Establishing a Foundation for Strategic Enterprise Architecture
Transformation: Enterprise architecture isn’t just technology. Some people assume that enterprise architecture describes only IT assets. By ignoring business architecture altogether, this misconception encourages companies to develop a road map that innovates IT but with no direct connection to business and process.
Achieving Business Agility through Convergence
Agility: Conventional wisdom says large, established companies cannot be agile. That's not the case.
Governance Beyond Alignment
Governance: An enterprise setting out to improve the way it manages business technology must realize that changing its governance and the organization will require time and attention.
Project Mismanagement, Pentagon Style
Strategy and Planning: Be clear on project objectives before falling in love with features -- or you could end up with an expensive dud.
Managing the Virtual Enterprise
Extended Enterprise: Measuring performance in an extended enterprise takes specific knowledge and management skill -- and makes technology into a commodity.
Is Your Technology Strategy Optimized for Risk Management?
Strategy: No investments can be effective in the long term without consideration of risk. Business risks can be both internal to the firm, such as rolling out an inadequately tested system, as well as environmental, in the form of an unanticipated natural disaster.
Are You Enabling an Agile Business?
Agility: Business leaders often use agility to describe their business plans and strategic initiatives, but it’s often little more than just a vision. Agility is something that requires planning and a full incorporation in business and management processes. It is philosophy and action. And most of all it requires courage and commitment. But what does "agility" really means to business, and how does it help achieve higher levels of efficiency and success?
The Importance of Language in Aligning Technology and Business
Convergence: In my 26 years of being a technology professional, I have seen the importance grow exponentially regarding the words we use and the way we describe the relationship of technology and the other functional areas in an organization. I have no doubt that to be successful with applying limited technology resources to the business challenges we will face over the next 15 years we will have to learn to make technology team members become integrated across the organization and this starts with the language we use.
Overcoming the Barriers to Operational Efficiency
Transformation: Today’s enterprises need managment tools to make sense of the technology, to rationalize investment decisions so that they are centered in operational excellence. They need to know when spending money makes sense and when it doesn’t. They need to trust that when they pay huge sums for technology it will actually work as intended.
The Power of Convergence
Convergence: Unifying the management of business and technology will sooner or later involve everyone in the organization, from the chairman of the board to the newest hire on the project team. It is not a temporary activity assigned to a committee; it is a new way of doing business. Convergence requires new roles and responsibilities, as well as a new mind-set and new skills.
Performance Soars When Business and Technology Converge
Agility: To enable agility, process improvements and innovation initiatives must span a firm’s business network. Agile enterprises know what they need to know and do what they have to do in order to respond and take advantage of changes.
Healthcare: A Nation of Luddites - A Management and Information Perspective
Innovation: You would never put up with anything as inefficient as the US healthcare system in your own organization. Maybe we should apply some of the principles you use to the problem.
The Case for Management Standards
Strategy and Planning: Anything that can be standardized, should be -- and that includes management practices. The paradox is that through routine and standardization we create an environment conducive to innovation.
The Speed of Business Today
Business Agility: Constant change is the new dynamic of the global economy, making agility more necessary than ever.
Repeatable Strategies for Business Technology
Strategy and Planning: Business technology management boosts performance at Coca-Cola Enterprises.
Strategy Execution for Risk Management
Risk Management: Risk management and IT continuity are complex and critical disciplines. No investments can be effective in the long term without consideration of risk.
Architecting Business Models
Architecture: Business models are serious business -- too important to leave to the marketers and pitchmen.
Beyond Alignment: Organizing and Governing for Performance
Transformation: Viewing technology as a strategic business enabler.
Becoming Better Business-Technology Leaders
Convergence: Business and technology strategies must converge, not just align. And leaders at New York-Presbyterian Hospital are demonstrating how the success convergence can bring.
Transformation in Challenging Times
Transformation: Transformation is the management challenge of the 21st Century. We are living in a transformative age, and no industry is immune to waves of change.
Hope and Change for IT?
Leadership: How will Barack Obama's administration affect IT spending in the trenches, where technology decision makers are dealing with strapped budgets and a shaky economy?
When the Economy Stumbles, Information is Like Gold
Convergence: The convergence of skills becomes a very relevant element for a company's survival," Hoque says. "You can be specialized in data gathering, but you must also understand how that data will be analyzed and ultimately translated into a risk decision to ensure success. It becomes a truly horizontal process, where you have several areas in the enterprise playing key roles. You need a holistic approach for both the governance and investment (technology) processes.
Will it Be Change, or Just Hope?
Transformation: The technology challenges President-Elect Barack Obama faces are similar to the ones CEOs grapple with every day. But they also shine a new light on critical infrastructure, security and healthcare issues. How will he handle them?
New World Value
Technology Trend: The Strategic Impact of Business Application Suites in Today’s Corporate Environment. Traditional formulas for calculating the value of integrated application suites are expanding as enterprises discover a need to better account for the upside growth potential and flexibility afforded by new technologies. An exclusive report from BusinessWeek Research Services
Driving to the Future
Business Agility: The U.S. auto industry’s pleas to Washington for a bailout are a perfect illustration of the forces making management in the twenty-first century a hair-pulling exercise, writes Baseline columnist Faisal Hoque. We are witnessing a dizzying restructuring of a global industry, with new players popping up anywhere and everywhere, even given the high barriers to entry to the game of making automobiles.
Main Street Innovation
Innovation: The small to medium-size enterprise, or SME, may be part of the solution to the financial meltdown.
Living on Borrowed Time
Investment Management: Our response to the economic events playing out today should not be panic, retreat or budgetary ax wielding. Instead, we should adopt the management tools necessary to lead a 21st century organization.
Transfer of Risk Under Life Insurance Contracts, Part One
Risk Management: This first installment reviews the tenets of interstitial federal common law that say federal courts cannot create common law where Congress has spoken, and then by reviewing the extensive discussion of transfer of risk in the legislative history focused on experience rating and so-called mortality neutrality.
Financial Meltdown: A Management Perspective
Investment Management: After the meltdown on Wall Street, fingers are pointing in every direction. We are seeing yet another national feeding frenzy of recrimination. The lenders and the borrowers and the pundits all now say we should have seen it coming. The politicians have leapt in to solve a crisis they had a hand in creating.
Leveling the Playing Field
Emerging Markets: The developing nations are not just becoming sources of innovative ideas. Goldman Sachs estimates that China will account for 36% of the growth in the world's gross domestic product between 2000 and 2030.
Governing the Extended Enterprise
Extended Enterprise: The concept of the “extended enterprise” is hardly new. What distinguishes the extended enterprise today, of course, is knowledge: of the customer, the supplier and new business ideas in the minds of anyone, anywhere.
CIO-Career or Profession
Leadership: Those of us who have made the leap to upper management are, in all humility, self-made successes in that we had no formal training in how to succeed as a senior executive within large corporations. For me, that formal training didn’t exist 40 years ago. And, shamefully, it still doesn't exist today.
The Journey Toward Shared Services
Shared Services: If you have implemented a shared-services organization or contemplated doing so, you are not alone. Most companies have. If you’ve been less than ecstatic with the results, you are not alone, either.
Is Your Head In The Clouds
Technology Trends: Cloud computing is a fitting term for something shrouded in mystery and hard to grasp. Adding to the confusion is the plethora of buzzwords that surround this concept: grid, utility, service-oriented architecture (SOA), service management, software as a service and platform as a service."
Making Business and Tech One
Convergence: Imagine showing up for work one morning and discovering that the computer that had been on your desk isn't there. Nor is a computer on any other desk. No e-mail. No Internet connection. None of the documents you were working on yesterday.
How Converging Business and Technology Pays Off
Convergence: It’s no secret that in too many companies, the business and technology sides have had trouble working together. But with technology now a strategic force — the engine of innovation and adaptability — it is critical that organizations seek business/technology "convergence".
What Are You Trying to Change?
Change Management: You know your company has to change, and you’ve put together the requisite task force. It has finished its work, and now you’re standing before your chief lieutenants or in a town hall meeting of all employees.
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