Like death, taxes and network downtime, bad contracts are a fact of life for most IT leaders. Deals that once seemed fair and equitable can sour over time for various reasons, such as the availability of a better or lower-cost technology or a vendor’s reluctance to live up to contract requirements. “Most often, there’s a…
Salesforce.com’s $15.7 billion bid for Tableau Software has many organizations wondering how the proposed acquisition will impact their operations. According to industry analysts, it all depends on how your enterprise makes use of their respective platforms. Users of Salesforce’s CRM platform have all subscribed to its software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, putting their data in the cloud…
When Craig Wheeler joined Beate Uhse Group, a German retailer of sex toys and erotic lingerie, to become its chief digital officer, the company was already in the throes of change. Six months later Wheeler became its CEO, and now finds himself dealing with a restructuring, a rebranding and a rebuilding of key IT systems…
A past client recently asked this question: Our change management process works well when we use it to make adjustments to projects, but it falls apart when we pursue transformational change. How can we be so good at some changes and so bad at others? The simple answer can be found in the words of…
If today’s mantra for innovation is to celebrate failure as a catalyst for success, how do legacy enterprises fine-tuned to reduce failure become innovative organizations? A new book from Deloitte and MIT Sloan Management Review, The Technology Fallacy: How People are the Real Key to Digital Transformation, addresses this question to helps organizations understand how…
Data science may never be easy but it’s getting easier to dive in. Buzzwords like “machine learning,” “regression,” and “dimensionality reduction” are just as challenging to understand as ever, but the widespread desire to reap the benefits of these techniques has resulted in several good tools that create assembly lines for data that are ready…
Ecosystems often conjure childhood images of animals and plants working together. These essential symbiotic relationships taught us the importance of balance, inter-dependence, and supply and demand. Within our modern work environment, more companies are beginning to realize the competitive advantages of altering their solo strategy for one that embraces ecosystems as a method of bringing…
The rise of cashless and cardless retail transactions suggests consumers are growing comfortable with paying for products from accounts linked to portable devices. How quickly these commerce modalities go mainstream is an open question, but Mastercard is leaving nothing to chance. The global payment network is not only preparing for digital commerce ruled by recommendation…
The need for speed is rapidly transforming IT. Tasked with moving as fast as — or even faster than — the business, IT has adopted a host of new strategies for delivering tech capabilities quickly. Central to this shift has been a movement toward agile development, which has heralded a multitude of changes to the…
Don’t talk too much about your personal life. Don’t come across as overly aggressive. And never, ever check your phone. This is just some of the advice job experts give applicants interviewing for a position. But when it comes to filling engineering roles, employers might need a little wisdom of their own. After all, tech…