About two months ago I shared my twelve things I learned from one year after publishing Driving Digital. But I only shared six of them and shared the remaining six with readers of the StarCIO Driving Digital Newsletter.

The first six included several important findings including: (1) more companies are developing proprietary software, (5) attend the right conferences to grow and learn and (6) leaders are still learning how to execute digital transformation programs.

Today I share the remaining six with all of you. I hope yo enjoy!

7. 7. Killing spreadsheet abuse is a significant opportunity and obstacle – This is a key theme in my Driving the Data Driven Organization talk that really resonates with CIOs and CDOs. Manual work to keep spreadsheet data updated … calculation errors … hard to collaborate with others on a model … difficult to understand complex models and formulas. What’s to love? You might want to review one of my classic posts on this topic, dear spreadsheet jockey, welcome to Big Data
   8. The young people in your organization are frightened – I had the opportunity to speak to several millennial audiences this year about what digital transformation is and how to find ways to participate. Many are lost in their organizations; they know a transformation program is in progress but don’t see an on ramp on how to participate. They know they have to develop their skills, but not sure what the best options are that align with organizational needs. This creates fear – and the best thing leaders should do is engage and communicate with their organization. Find the emerging leaders and drive talent!
   9. DevOps is the new IT operating model – If you think DevOps is largely about the change in IT culture that drives collaboration between Dev and Ops on being agile, automation, and operational excellence then you are right. If you think developing CICD pipelines (with continuous testing) and Infrastructure as Code are key practices, then you are right again. But that’s not where DevOps ends! DevOps practices include shift-left security implementations, application monitoring, and integrated service models. Put all these practices and culture changes together and that’s one high performance IT organization!

From Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology by Isaac Sacolick

7. Organizations are struggling with prioritization and portfolio management – After moderating a panel on the agile enterprise and speaking to others afterward, the one thing I can say all organizations struggle with is prioritization. Too many projects … no methodology to prioritize … no discipline to say ‘no’ or ‘later’. But I have an answer and dedicated a chapter to it in Driving Digital.
8. AI will be a part of everyone’s business – While AI is riding a nice climb on the hype curve, many organizations are starting to realize impact and others are kicking off programs. If you look at more tactical AI applications, they focus on pattern recognition, identifying outliers, clustering and segmentation, natural language processing/generation, and recommendation engines. What business doesn’t need to leverage these types of algorithms?
9. Data integration and management practices are core business capabilities – If software is eating the world and every company is a technology company, then the ability to organize to integrate and manage data sets is the new fundamental core competency.