Blind Spot: A Leader's Guide to IT-Enabled Business Transformation

A blind spot can be described as a subject that is obscure or unintelligible to otherwise sharp and intelligent people. Information technology (IT), unfortunately, is that kind of subject to many business leaders. I say “unfortunately” because IT can either enable or disable an enterprise to sustain vibrancy and success in the 21st century.

This is becoming more apparent every year, particularly to those successful, large, 20th century enterprises in which IT has become an expensive inhibitor of the speed and agility required for competing in a global, supply-chain-driven, customer-centric economy.

Blind Spot: A Leader’s Guide to IT-Enabled Business Transformation
describes a framework developed and enriched by Charlie Feld over the last 30 years in a variety of organizations, including Frito-Lay, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot, and Southwest Airlines. This framework demystifies technology, serves as a foundation and confidence builder, and is durable through the eras, across industries, and is simple in nature. This way of doing things is woven into a management system that has been proven to work in many large enterprises.

The framework—focused on business leadership—defines and describes the principles and mechanisms for an IT-enabled business transformation:

• Why - Why do anything?
• What - What should we do?
• How - How will we do it?
• Who - Who will lead and manage the change?

If you embrace this framework, you will dramatically improve your business agility, reduce the risk of the journey, and increase your probability of success. And if there’s a time that you cannot afford to fall behind in modernizing your business, that time is now.