Want to change the culture? Start with your front line support teams!

Imagine your customer is having a small crisis. In my case, I was on a flight that went through repeated delays; first when the aircraft needed maintenance at the gate, then when the pilot aborted the takeoff, and then a third time when the airline finally had us switch planes. All told, my flight was four hours delayed. It wasn't a crisis for me, but it was for some passengers that were more nerved by the aborted flight.

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Driving Digital is now an Amazon Best Seller

Two years ago I was just coming out of my last CIO role and started my new role as a consultant. One year ago my book Driving Digital: The Leader's Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology published and I officially launched my business StarCIO.

And today, I'm excited to announce that Driving Digital is an Amazon Best Seller in three categories; Information Management, MIS, and PMP Exams thanks to my supporters in Canada.

Needless to say, I'm super excited! A big thanks to all my supporters especially over the last couple of years.

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5 Ways to Improve Developer Productivity and Quality on Agile Development Teams

Many leaders that are new to scaling agile ask me about measuring individual developer and tester productivity since most agile metrics such as velocity are aggregate measures around a team's performance.

These leaders support team dynamics and some promote agile's self-organizing principles. But they also have significant demands from business stakeholders on the speed and quality of their deliverables. Even the larger sized organizations have relatively tight budgets and want to make sure they are getting value, productivity, and quality from the developers and testers on their team. Leaders ask questions on individual performance regardless of whether their teams are fully in house employees, a mix of employee and contractors, or are heavily outsourced.

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Part 2 of the Twelve Things I Learned from One Year After Publishing Driving Digital

About two months ago I shared my twelve things I learned from one year after publishing Driving Digital. But I only shared six of them and shared the remaining six with readers of the StarCIO Driving Digital Newsletter.

The first six included several important findings including: (1) more companies are developing proprietary software, (5) attend the right conferences to grow and learn and (6) leaders are still learning how to execute digital transformation programs.

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Laggards Beware! Why Transforming with Data, Analytics, and AI is Needed Today

Several posts ago, I committed to sharing thoughts on changing the culture, applying self organizing principles, getting more people in the organization to collaborate, and gaining adoption of new technologies. After attending the Strata Data Conference in New York, I realized how important and relevant these questions are today when considering how organizations should better leverage data, analytics, and now AI in decision making.

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Data, analytics, and AI solutions showcased at the Strata Data Conference

Two years ago when I reported from Strata NYC I shared how new data prep technologies were bringing data integration and data quality capabilities to business users. Instead of waiting for IT to ETL experimental data into the data warehouse or data lake, business users apply tools like Tableau Prep, Trifacta Wrangler, or Talend Data Preparation, to perform profiling, cleansing, and integrating data on their own.

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Strata Data Keynotes Day 2 on Dimming the Noise, Faster Data, and Becoming Boring

Here's my synopsis on a great start to day 2 of the Strata Data Conference. It began with a series of thought provoking topics; eliminating noise; driving faster data; successful data science by becoming boring.

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