Celebrating Two Fantastic Years of Driving Digital

Two years ago I received my "author's copies" of Driving Digital: The Leader's Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology. The picture you see here is just after I opened the box. What a thrilling moment it was!

For two years I have been keynoting events, meeting with leaders, leading StarCIO Driving Digital Workshops, writing this blog, and contributing articles to CIO and InfoWorld on the changing nature of leading transformation programs.
It's been a blast. So much so that I'm working on a number of follow up Driving Digital programs! Look in the near future for Driving Digital training programs in agile and data transformation. Later this year I hope to get some video content available to Driving Digital Newsletter subscribers. And for those wondering, yes, I am working on a new book albeit very slowly.

Last year I celebrated the first anniversary of Driving Digital with a post on Things I Learned from One Year After Publishing Driving Digital which had six learnings, followed up by a second post covering six more. Here they are in brief:

1. More companies are developing proprietary software
2. A one day workshop can dramatically improve team culture
3. Meeting new people on social media is highly rewarding
4. Technologists read books in print!
5. Attend the right conferences to grow and learn
6. Leaders are still learning how to execute digital transformation programs
7. Killing spreadsheet abuse is a significant opportunity and obstacle
8. The young people in your organization are frightened
9. DevOps is the new IT operating model
10. Organizations are struggling with prioritization and portfolio management 
11. AI will be a part of everyone's business
12. Data integration and management practices are core business capabilities

So this year, let me follow up with three more learnings:

1. Agile is become an enterprise standard for transforming businesses

The origins of agile are in transforming software delivery organizations off waterfall project management approaches that were largely failing. Many other organizations, especially marketing and operational teams have also adopted agile processes including scrum, kanban, and other variants to help prioritize work, minimize work in progress, and improve the reliability of delivering outcomes.

More leaders today are looking to extend agile practices well beyond IT and other departments. They're looking to adopt agile mindsets and transform to agile cultures by bridging bottom up agile practices with top-down planning and portfolio management practices.

Some further reading:

• What's enterprise wide agile transformation and why CIOs should lead it
• What Drives Agile Teams to Become Agile Organizations
• We are doing agile, but are not Agile

2. Aligning Business and IT on Architecture is Critical for CIOs to Climb out of the Tech Debt Abyss

One of the easiest ways to get a group of CIOs chatting, venting, and offloading pain is to drop the "tech debt" bomb. Our architectures are plagued with legacy technologies that can't be easily supported, systems that can't be integrated, and code that few people can maintain. 

Now bring up architecture and you'll see their eyes light up. Microservices! Serverless computing! APIs! Low code! Mobile first! And then the debate will begin on the appropriate architectures.

One thing that's certain is that IT leaders are working hard to align their tech organizations on future state architectures and business teams on the need to replatform. But it isn't easy.

Some further reading:

• How to Capture and Manage Technical Debt in Agile Development
• Agile Mindsets: Don't try to get a perfect architecture; Plan to get it wrong
• How devops practices prevent legacy platforms

3. If data is the new oil, DataOps and proactive Data Governance must be a priority

AI and machine learning are the shiny trophies every CDO and CIO want to deliver to their organizations, but both leaders quickly admit that their lack of integrated data sources, cleansed data, and mastered data is a significant barrier.

And while data governance over the last few years has been driven by regulation and compliance, CIOs are now driving proactive data governance and DataOps to have data ready for analysis, machine learning, and new customer experiences.

Some further reading:

• How dataops improves data, analytics, and machine learning
• 5 Ways to Kickoff Data Governance in Self-Service BI Programs
• Best practices for developing data-integration pipelines

Readers! Thank you for reading my blog and newsletter! I plan to take a little bit of a break this summer. You'll see less frequent posts from me as I gear up for the next phases of Driving Digital. 

Reach out to me on Twitter @NYIke or on LinkedIn if you'd like to chat!