Why YOU Should be Driving Digital!

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
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 - 
  1. The Transformation Imperative
  2. Agile Transformational Practices
  3. Technical Foundations for Transformation
  4. Agile Portfolio Management
  5. Transforming to a Data-Driven Organization
  6. Driving Revenue Through Digital Products
  7. 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.

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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.