41 Questions ever Business Leader should ask>

41 questions every business leader should ask

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Change is the only constant in the world, there’s no doubt about it. Today more than ever, businesses must face – and effectively manage – rising change and complexity. Uncertainty is everywhere we look. From marketplace shifts to surprise disruptions, managing this new reality is not an easy task.

 

If you think about our organizations today, they are all part of a dynamic business network of relationships with customers, partners and suppliers that shape the way we do business. Consumer expectations are escalating and competitors and partners of any size can arise from anywhere around the globe. This business environment presents both challenges and opportunities to leaders. But we’ve all seen many recent examples of companies that have failed to change with the business environment. Companies like Borders and Blockbuster that failed to manage change and innovate.

 

Bottom line is that the time is up for sitting on the sidelines. Is your business agile enough? You must constantly innovate and transform your business in order to survive and be successful.

 

As you consider the processes that make your business run, here are 41 key questions you should ask yourself:

1. Does your organization change effectively when it needs to?
2. How does your organization manage change and complexity?
3. Are your major business processes stuck in silos?
4. How are your business processes affecting your business?
5. Do you business processes fuel innovation?
6. Are your business processes interconnected and adaptable enough?
7. Can you make the right decisions quickly or even automate them?
8. Does your infrastructure perform optimally amidst change and uncertainty?
9. Can you embrace new application and service delivery models like cloud and mobile?
10. Does your business quickly and easily make people and process connections?
11. Do you govern new application development projects to ensure they properly align to company goals?
12. Are your process improvement goals linked to appropriate success measures?
13. Do your systems take so long to change that they slow business response?
14. Does IT budget and resource constraints restrict your ability to deliver?
15. Are you writing Java code to supplement tools that already exist?
16. How much is that costing you in productivity and development costs?
17. Do you ensure your data is consistent and does not get lost in the event of failures?
18. How much time is spent restoring data integrity?
19. Do your Cloud applications provide you the enterprise information your business demands?
20. Would integrating these Cloud applications with your on-premises systems enable your business to be more agile?
21. How current is the information your customers see when they sign on to your website?
22. How current is the information your CSRs use to service those customers?
23. How quickly are you able to provide new offers to your customers based on the way they interact with your business? Within seconds? Hours? Days?
24. A key component of your infrastructure is down RIGHT NOW. Your organization cannot fulfill critical business functions. Do you know what it is? Do you know how to fix it? How quickly can you restore service?
25. How do I utilize my IT operational information to optimize my business services?
26. Do your IT Development team and IT Operations team share the same end-goals? (They should!)
27. Does your organization use an enterprise architecture (or IT roadmap) to ensure business goals are supported by IT?
28. Is your application performance tuning often an exercise in educated guesswork?
29. Are changes introduced to the production and test environment often poorly governed?
30. How do I support better decision making throughout my IT & operations organizations?
31. Are you looking to decrease your IT and/or Operational costs or improve time to market?
32. What steps do you take to avoid being late to market and on budget?
33. Do your development and operations teams use different tools and teams speak different languages?
34. Is it difficult to manage effectively across development and operations organizations?
35. Are your security measures for networks, servers, databases, and applications governed as part of an integrated process?
36. How long does it take you to build and deploy an entire release of your system? How many people are involved? How often do you need to redo it?
37. Are your mainframe and distributed development teams currently creating and delivering cross-platform applications?
38. Have there been any problems in these efforts with testing, deployment, etc.?
39. What percent of your budget is used for maintenance efforts as opposed to new project development?
40. Are maintenance efforts affecting your ability to deliver projects on time?
41. Are there project delays due to waiting for mainframe resources like operations staff or mainframe cycle?