This is my 200th post!

I reserved this post to highlight why I named the blog Social, Agile, and Transformation. I renamed it a few years ago when I was thinking about my career and accomplishments in startups as a CTO and now as a CIO for the last seven years. At the time, I was also reflecting on something a key adviser said to me, “Isaac, you’re not a CIO”. I’m not? Yes, I am, but not the infrastructure, cost focused CIO that exemplifies many enterprise CIOs.

I selected Social, Agile, and Transformation as key values for the roles I play, some more than others, including the startup CTO, the technology business strategist, the collaborator, the software architect, the head of the PMO, the data scientist, the product developer, the performance engineer and the CIO. More specifically

Social – Today’s leader needs to be collaborative and be able to work across all levels of the organization. Innovation practices and tools are designed to bring forward the best ideas from the organization, but even better opportunities emerge when collaboration among individuals from multiple organizations solution and experiment. This is so important, that leaders need to demonstrate collaborative practices so that they can be emulated by managers, teams, and individuals.

Agile – Agile is a collaborative, disciplined practice for executing. It is especially successful practice when there is uncertainty in requirements and leveraged by teams to learn and modify priorities. The technology leader that embraces disciplined agile practices will find that they can execute on a wider range of projects and have a better relationship with business leaders.

Transformation – Innovation, disruption, culture and character are all fundamental values organizations target – but it’s transformation that the technology organization can drive. Transformation is a mind set – that the team is driven by change, charged to improve things and driven to apply new technologies, techniques, or practices that enable the organization to “switch tracks” through transformation.

In short, Social + Agile leads to Transformation.

Some of my favorite posts:

• Strategic Agile Thinking: Balancing Value, Innovation, and Research is a framework for using agile practices to perform business experiments and R&D new technologies to drive innovative solutions.
• Two posts on innovation and collaboration; Top 5 Reasons Why Agile Development Spurs Innovation and Agile Estimation and Architecture Leads to Collaboration and Innovation.
• I cover several transformation areas in technology.
  • My series, Shifting to a Market, Program and Platform Organization illustrates how disciplined agile practices in collaboration with product owners leads IT organizations to be more market driven.
  • My favorite Big Data posts include Top 5 Tools of Big Data Analytics and the post on 10 Attributes of Data Driven Organizations.
  • Earlier this year, I covered several posts on the CIO/CMO relationship and the new world of digital marketing automation.
• Finally, if you’re a CIO or aspiring to be one, my favorite posts on this role include My First 100 Days as CIO along with my Top Tips for New CIOs. Also worth checking out, 10 Things Enterprise CIOs can learn from Startups on Innovation and Disruption.