 By Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006
ISBN 13 978 0471 76858 6
258 pages
The Big Idea
A company’s failure to innovate sends customers to other organizations that provide better value and convenience. Today’s companies need a go-to resource that will help them maximize their use of information technology (IT) and understand it for what it is: an integral resource upon which business productivity, profitability, and efficiency depend if it is to succeed.
Introducing service orientation as a vision and philosophy that can greatly impact a business, this innovative new book equips the reader to:
- Best use technology resources to meet goals
- Unleash their “inner nerd” to embrace IT as part of their business as a whole
- Address the “mother of all business problems”: inflexibility
- Know the technological factors that pressure a business to innovate
- Understand buzzwords with Jargon Watch sidebars
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Why You Need This Book
This book offers a magna carta to CEO’s and small business owners that teach them to erase the line between business and technology, toward a new service-oriented approach which is a synergy of both.
IMPEDIMENTS TO AGILITY
Here are the key impediments to making business agility happen in today’s companies. Most of these impediments fall into three broad categories:
1. Complexity. Today’s enterprise environment contains many different people, processes, and departments that work in many different, and often conflicting, ways. Considering that many large organizations have been layering on such complexities for decades, it’s no wonder that many enterprises have an intractable mess on their hands.
2. Inflexibility. Companies tend to fall into the “if it works, don’t screw with it” mode of thinking, which works well when business requirements don’t change but significantly impedes agility when companies are faced with new situations. If businesses don’t change, they stagnate and their processes become stale.
3. Brittleness. This is the risk of failure and other problems that result from excessive complexity and inflexibility - the company cracks with the slightest of pressure.
Many small companies can’t deal with unplanned change because they simply have insufficient resources, they’re operating at their maximum capacity, or their centralized management is simply resistant to change. The challenge for companies both large and small, then, is to develop a culture, infrastructure, and resources that enable them to change on a dime as changing needs emerge.
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