It's Official!

It's taken me a lot of time, but I can now officially say that -

Driving Digital is now Available

I'm super excited to announce that my book, Driving Digital: The Leader's Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology is now available at Amazon, at several Barnes and Noble bookstores, and other resellers.

Why Driving Digital?

When I spoke to digital leaders - CIO, CTO, CMO, Chief Digital Officers, and Chief Data Officers - when I met up with CEO, CFO and other executives - and when I talked to many participants in digital transformation programs - product strategists, marketers, application developers, data scientists, engineers, business analysts and countless others - many all knew how important digital capabilities were to the survival and growth of their businesses.

Many participated in developing digital strategies and invested in learning about customer journeys. Technologists were already practicing some agile development practices and engineers were moving some workloads to the cloud. Data scientists had access to new big data technologies and were producing insights while marketers were reaching new prospects using the latest digital marketing tools.

But .... Digital Strategy is Not Enough!

For many, these practices were operating independently. They were still early in connecting their digital strategy to digital transformation programs. They were discovering how to align discoveries around new market opportunities and customer experiences to their agile development programs. They weren't sure how to best structure DevOps programs to deliver the automation required to scale and support a growing number of integrated, customer facing applications. They didn't have sufficient data scientists to process existing data let alone handle new opportunities from IoT data or AI capabilities.

And ... Then there was Resistance

Practices are really important in implementing digital transformation programs and will get you from 25 to maybe 45 mph. But if you want to operate at 70mph then you have to navigate the curves, the speed bumps, and the occasional aggressive driver.

You have to create a culture that's ready to take on risk, to ask questions, and to have collegial debates on priorities. You need a much larger and more diverse leadership team that are actively meeting customers and prospects to understand opportunities and needs. You have to develop a much wider understanding of the competitive landscape and digital ecosystem to recognize new partnership opportunities and competitive threats.

Face the Possibility of Being Disrupted

And, you don't have time on your side

You have to consider the strong likelihood that your existing product lines may be disrupted by one or more new competitive options that offer more relevant experiences.

So with all this in mind, I set out to write a playbook on implementing digital transformation program. Driving Digital has many of my best practices stemming from my early career as a digital product focused CTO in startups and then going on to be a transformational CIO in analytics/data businesses in media, construction, and financial services.

I've been sharing some hints and insights on my blog the last several weeks. If you are a product manager, today's post discusses how to rapidly plan digital products. My post last week asks five five questions transformational leaders and PMOs should address when driving digital. Are you an agile leader? I shared several weeks ago three agile practices for driving digital transformation.

But most important.

Here's why YOU should be driving digital.