Manufacturing, construction, and other industrial businesses can leapfrog from technology-lagging organizations to ones driving competitive advantages. A chief challenge is escaping legacy mindsets, especially in small and medium businesses where technology is a commodity component that’s bought once and used well past its depreciation date.
For current and aspiring digital transformation leaders, including CIO, CTO, CDO, innovation leaders, product managers, DevOps engineers, SREs, and data governance specialists. Topics: digital transformation, leadership, agile planning, scrum, DevOps, SRE, ITSM, AIOps, innovation, product management, data science, AI, ML, data governance, low-code, no-code, startups, digital marketing, social networking, SaaS, future of work, IoT, and culture change. Join our community of Digital Trailblazers!
5 Practical Technologies Every Ambitious SMB in Industrials Should POC
How Experts in Change Management Lead a Successful Digital Transformation
A couple of years ago, I led an agile transformation program for a major hospital system. Their vision statement was to pilot process changes and new technologies to improve patient experiences while simplifying work for doctors, nurses, and administrators. They asked me to train their project managers on agile methodologies and apply agile/scrum to several project types, including electronic health record system deployments and M&A integrations.
How Leading Digital Trailblazers are Pragmatic Vision Painters
Digital transformation leaders – people I call Digital Trailblazers – wear many hats, and one that’s come up several times during our Coffee with Digital Trailblazers is the role of vision painter. As a vision painter, we must understand business strategies, learn market needs, capture customer feedback, and identify technology opportunities. Our objectives include painting a future vision, and sometimes tailored ones for different stakeholders, to guide our organization on opportunities worth pursuing and learn their customer impacts.
3 Ways Construction Businesses Can Modernize With No-Code Dynamic Work Management
Ten years ago, I wrote an article for Engineering News Record on how construction businesses underspend in technology. I referenced Gartner’s survey of technology spending by industry, showing construction dead last, which was the same ranking it held the previous year.
Change Management: 10+ Ways to Ease Adoption in Digital Transformation
I invited several experts to my weekly Coffee with Digital Trailblazers to discuss change management, easing adoptions, and minimizing the productivity dip. Participants heard a change management playbook.
We used the
productivity dip
(illustrated below) as a reference model as it’s a useful tool to illustrate
desirable versus problematic change management programs.
3 Important Takeaways for Pioneering CIOs on the State of Agile
CIOs, CTOs, and Digital Trailblazers – we have a problem.
While many organizations have adopted agile methodologies, there’s a gap
between what leaders expect from these practices and what they deliver. This
year’s State of Agile report (the
17th of their annual reports) shows the gap is widening and
points to some of the underlying issues for technology leaders and
Digital Trailblazers
to address.
24 Ways to Avoid Painful Failures and 3 Success Drivers in Digital Transformation
Every year, a new round of surveys shows that 40-60% of organizations are struggling with digital transformation. One recent survey shows that 51% of respondents have not seen an increase in performance or profitability from digital transformation investments. Other early surveys quote that 70-90% of digital transformation initiatives have underperforming results.
How to Drive Digital Transformation and Survive as Your Company’s First CIO
I’ve spoken with several CIOs who were the first to hold the role and title at their organizations. It’s a unique experience, so I thought I’d share some thoughts.
When a new CIO comes on board, there’s often a mix of excitement and angst
among the leadership and staff. Leadership wants to believe that what drove
the need to hire a CIO materializes without too much time, cost, and
disruptive changes. The staff wonders who this new leader is and what they
will ask of them.
7+ Must Reads for Digital Trailblazers on Leadership, Innovation, and AI
This is my fifth year of sharing my top book reads of the previous year, and you can review my previous lists here: 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019.
This year’s list includes my usual mix of leadership, emerging technology,
and books about growing small businesses. I was in a cerebral mood compared
to previous years and missed reading any fiction books, but I did read
Patrick Stewart’s autobiography,
Making it So that trekies will love,
and Hertog’s On the Origin of Time,
which Stephen Hawking fans should read.
How Innovative SaaS CTOs use Gen AI: What Digital Trailblazers Can Learn
I just read about how CIOs are taking it slow regarding generative AI in the enterprise. “The hard thing about this is you don’t have data on people’s level of productivity,” said Sharon Mandell, CIO at Juniper Networks, while Kathy Kay, executive VP and CIO at Principal Financial Group, created a study group of “a combination of engineers and business people and are curating probably 25 use cases.” The article quotes a Morgan Stanley study finding that only 4% of large company CIOs launched significant generative AI projects.
How to Energize Your IT Career as an Innovative Digital Trailblazer
You should evaluate your career progression and goals regularly, especially in this super-charged world where generative AI impacts many job functions and more businesses are accelerating digital transformation initiatives.
If you aspire to grow professionally, take on more challenging roles, and
help your organization build competitive advantages with technology, data,
and AI, then becoming a
Digital Trailblazer
should be one of your career goals.
5 Digital Trailblazer Competencies: An Entrepreneur Architect’s Perspective on Leadership
2023 is coming to a close. I’ve had a difficult year and won’t be able to share details for a while, but I’ve had several close friends and colleagues to support me. Many of them join my weekly Coffee with Digital Trailblazers and contribute on stage to our discussion on digital transformation leadership.
This week, I’d like to introduce you to my good friend,
Tyler Johnson, a co-founder and
CTO of PrivOps. Tyler is a true Digital Trailblazer, showing both breadth
and depth of technology architecture, infrastructure, data, and security
skills. Tyler is an expert on data fabrics and security, and his patents
underpin the platform he developed at
PrivOps.
How Machine Learning Transforms Gray Work to Smarter Dynamic Work
Jamie knew she had plenty of work to do when she took the Director of IT role at a midsize HVAC services company.
Over the last decade, the company grew organically and expanded regionally by acquiring smaller service companies but had done very little to modernize its business operations. The business was largely running on a highly customized ERP, a basic CRM, spreadsheets, and emails, and she knew there was a significant opportunity to transform this gray work with automation and machine learning capabilities.
Best of 1,000 StarCIO Articles: The Informative Digital Transformation Must-Reads
A couple of weeks ago, I celebrated my
1,000th blog post, an achievement I am just as proud of as publishing my two books,
Driving Digital and
Digital Trailblazer.
In the post, I shared three time-tested lessons for digital trailblazers and
thanked many contributors to my weekly
Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.
IT Turnaround: Know these 15 Signs + 15 Tactics to Transform From Floundering to Winning Departments
“Look at your company as if it were your first day on the job. What would your first impressions be of how your business is operating?”
That’s my opening statement to Chapter 1 of Driving Digital, which is just as relevant to CIOs and IT leaders when considering a technology department’s performance. I read this statement to kick off a recent Coffee with Digital Trailblazers, where we discussed IT turnarounds, telltale signs of underperforming departments, and the tactics Digital Trailblazers take to turn them around.
Grateful Digital Trailblazers Reflect on Innovation and Lifelong Learning
I love this time of year in the United States when we have a brief pause from our complex lives and get the chance to break bread with family and friends. Thanksgiving means a lot more for me this year, but I will have to leave the story on why for another time.
Long-time fans of my blog will remember some of my other Thanksgiving posts
– two of the 1,000 articles I just celebrated. (See the
1000’th post here).