Amplify Your Value - Great Book for CIO and IT Leaders

At some point in your IT career, you might be asked to step up and take a more leadership role in the IT organization. Maybe you were managing a small group of engineers or leading a team of application developers when a spot opened up at the more senior levels and you were asked to fill it. Then, one day you find out that you have to develop AND present an IT strategic plan. The first time you do this, you'll probably feel something like this -

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Twelve Things I Learned from One Year After Publishing Driving Digital

I'm celebrating the one year anniversary of Driving Digital: The Leader's Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology. Since then, it's been a wonderful year of speaking, writing, advising and consulting on everything tied to digital transformation from strategy to agile, devops, data governance, low code, AI, product development and other related topics.

To commemorate this anniversary with you, I thought I'd share some of the things I learned this last year as an author, speaker, consultant, teacher, and president of StarCIO.

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What is Data Governance? Data practices that address risk and drive opportunities

I don't like the term 'data governance'. People - and especially leaders don't know what it means and often put up mental walls whenever they hear the word 'governance'. Governance is bureaucratic. It slows organizations down and creates tension. Why would anyone want to back a governance initiative especially one tied to data?

But anyone leading data efforts knows data governance is a long term investment that's critical to organizational success. It not only addresses risk but is a platform to drive alignment and new capabilities.

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How to Prioritize DevOps Practices and What Applications to Apply Them

I'm not your typical DevOps evangelist. I don't believe continuous deployment is right for every business as it requires significant technical maturity to enable this level of automation. It's far more important for organizations to align their release management practices to business need and then prioritize the work on CI/CD that reduces the most manual, risky efforts tied to integrating and delivering applications.

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Cluttering the User Experience with too Much Code

I have a friend, a colleague. Let's call him Joe.

Joe wants the best for his customers and his organization. He knows customer experience is critical and he recognized his organization hasn't been the best at it. People come to their site because they have to get something done. And customers loathe having to but must as part of running their own business. So they've put up with the occasional outage, slow page response time, or error message after submitting a form.

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On Frankenarchitecture, DevOps, Strategic IT, and the Culture of Digital Transformation

I've received some smart and interesting feedback on my blog posts via LinkedIn. So this week, I'd like to share some of that feedback.

On Frankenarchitecture

I posted on 12 warning signs of bad application architecture and received some good suggestions to add to this list:

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5 Things Digital Transformation Leaders Should do this Summer

Last year, I posted 5 things CIO should do this summer as a reminder to CIO to get out of the weeds and smell the roses. So this year, here is a follow up post on what digital transformation leaders should do this summer.

And not just CIO! CDOs (digital and data), CMOs, and all of the key leaders driving different aspects of the transformation program.

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