War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age

As an enterprise changes its way of working with digital technology, it will come up against resistance from both culture and bureaucracy. Such resistance is a necessary part of transformation, since both culture and bureaucracy are simply forms of institutional memory. In digital transformation, you’ll replace today’s bureaucracy and culture with

Jim Highsmith is on target when he says, “Productivity measures in general make little sense in knowledge work.”13 Designing good software and infrastructure, solving business problems, and creating IT strategies are knowledge work.

Employees will be nervous in the face of transformational change. You can help overcome that nervousness with a steady hand, a clear vision, and a commitment to the urgency of transformation.

Alternatively, lose the notion of projects entirely and build incremental capabilities in a steady flow.

The challenge, therefore, is not just to create an innovation; it’s to create a constant stream of innovations, to make innovation a normal part of doing business every day. And that can best be done if we overcome the duality of IT and the business.

A digital company is one in which every employee has the opportunity to be an entrepreneur, as Ries puts it.10 Instead of forming an innovation team with the privilege of breaking the rules, the enterprise should set the rules—processes, practices, bureaucracy, people, management culture, and everything else—to support all employees in being innova

IT investments made to cultivate new growth opportunities, for example, will be hard to fund because they’ll never seem to have as good a business case as those that increase profit in existing business lines.

The job of the change agent becomes much easier when you stop suggesting that your enterprise take more risks. Instead, you can carefully identify the real risks and craft an Agile strategy to manage them.

“Goals should not be about building products or delivering project scope. They should explain why such a thing would be useful . . . [they] should present the problem to be solved, not the solution,”