Success

Improving the Odds for Success — What We Do

The broad acceptance of this digital economy has fundamentally changed competition and the way in which companies conduct business. It’s redefining the core economics of business and the definition of service. As a result, a new group of leaders are emerging; a new Global 1000 that is being created from both the existing Fortune 500 and start-up companies.

Leadership in this economy requires the ability to mobilize the company for change and capitalize on the transformational potential of emerging technologies and the human spirit. This transformation requires the integration of the customer, operations, employees and suppliers. Creating new competitive advantage involves the integration of business strategy and technology that enables both customer centricity and operational excellence on a global scale.

Large enterprises face a daunting task of transforming while dealing with legacy technology, structures and assets on a massive scale. This combined with large organization dynamics, which are change resistant, requires strong leadership from both the business and IT. To accomplish this requires the adoption of a robust management framework that can help mobilize and sustain a multi-year business modernization journey.

Over the years, to improve their odds for success, organizations often reached to the Feld Group as their general contractor to help manage their strategy and implementation.  The Feld Group was acquired by EDS in 2004, which was subsequently purchased by Hewlett-Packard in 2008. In September 2008, Charlie Feld retired as a senior executive vice president and member of EDS’ Executive Committee.

In 2009, Charlie launched The Feld Group Institute, a leadership development firm that is using all of the learnings out of the decades of running IT organizations.  This new institute model is initially being applied at FedEx, Southwest Airlines and Bank of Montreal.  All extremely healthy enterprises, working on developing their IT leadership teams and continuing to remain on top of their industries.  The foundation of the knowledge base and training framework has been captured in his new book called Blind Spot: A Leaders Guide to IT Enabled Business Transformation.

It is Charlie’s passion to extract the learning from the first 50 years of IT from many IT leaders so that future generations of business and IT leadership can continue to build the body of knowledge for this new profession.  Up until now, each organization has had to learn from their own mistakes.  This is not meant to compete with the many fine universities, consulting firms and institutions that continue to refine the frameworks and mechanics for building and operating IT systems.  This institute will be focused on collarobation between IT leaders, past, present and future, that have operating experience.

These leader-to-leader forums will be both physical and electronic leadership development programs, briefings, coaching, articles, blogs, etc. contributed not just by Charlie Feld but also by other CIOs and CTOs.