Why YOU Should be Driving Digital!

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On August 24th, my book Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology will be available!

You probably guessed that I would eventually author a book. The book covers some of the themes that I’ve covered here on Social, Agile, and Transformation including agile management, DevOps, architecture, portfolio management, data science, product management, and organizational culture. But unlike a blog, it provides a sequence that explains why these practices are important in implementing transform, what specific practices to mature, and how to go about leading them in your organization.

Why Driving Digital?

Driving Digital:
The Leader’s Guide to
Business Transformation
Through Technology

This journey began a few years ago when I was interviewed by Gil Press for an article that he would later title, 5 Things To Do When You Lead a Digital Transformation. At the time, I had just started hearing about digital transformation and quickly realized it’s something that I had been working on almost my entire career starting with the newspaper SaaS company that I joined in the late ’90s.

My career took me to be CIO at several different organizations that were facing disruption and required evolving the product set to address new market needs. What I learned is that organizations require a fundamentally new set of practices and capabilities to drive digital and enable a smarter and faster business transformation.

These topics are covered in the book’s chapters –

The Transformation Imperative
Agile Transformational Practices
Technical Foundations for Transformation
Agile Portfolio Management
Transforming to a Data-Driven Organization
Driving Revenue Through Digital Products
Driving Digital: Smarter and Faster

Why digital? Here’s what happened to newspapers, here’s what industries are most likely to be disrupted by digital and here’s why digital business capabilities can cause industry disruption. Most businesses require a digital strategy and plan to rebuild their digital businesses or face some form level of disruption.

My book takes you on a “bottoms up” journey, starting with fundamental agile transformational practices and ending with more strategic capabilities like digital strategy, product development, product marketing and organizational culture.

Why YOU should be Driving Digital!

Digital transformation requires leadership at all levels. If you’re the CEO, you need to embrace a strategy and realign the leadership team. If you’re a CIO, CTO, or CDO (Digital or Data), you have a large number of practices to enable that drive transformation. If you’re the CMO, you need new ways to prioritize customer segments and to experiment with digital marketing to reach them.

But digital transformation is not just about C-level leadership!

If you’re a developer, you should understand how to improve agile practices so that thecan align with digital strategy and execute product roadmaps. If you’re a data scientist you should be establishing practices that enable a data driven organization. If you were an engineer in the data center and now overseeing cloud infrastructure, you have to be enabling DevOps practices to automate and scale. If you’re a product manager, you have to help connect digital strategy to product roadmaps and deliver product enhancements that wow customers. If you are a marketer, an operations manager, or a financial analyst – all your practices are likely to have growing importance but changing practices and technologies as digital becomes a more significant business driver.

What’s Next in Driving Digital

It doesn’t end with the book. Over the next several weeks on this blog, I’ll be sharing new insights on DevOps, CIO leadership, and many other topics introduced in the book. I’ll be speaking on many topics this fall, and sharing new insights on my blog at CIO.com, Driving Digital Transformation.I hope to hear from you on your thoughts and questions! – find me as @NYIke, sign up for the digital transformation newsletter, or contact StarCIO.

Published on:

July 9, 2017

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My company, StarCIO, provides leadership, learning, and advisory programs for companies looking to accelerate delivering business value from digital transformation. Contact me if you’d like to learn more about partnering opportunities.

Join us for a future session of Coffee with Digital Trailblazers, where we discuss topics for aspiring transformation leaders. If you enjoy my thought leadership, please sign up for the Driving Digital Newsletter and read all about my transformation stories in Digital Trailblazer.

Coffee with Digital Trailblazers hosted by Isaac Sacolick

Digital Trailblazers! Join us Fridays at 11am ET for a live audio discussion on digital transformation topics: innovation, product management, agile, DevOps, data governance, and more!