5 Ways Vision Statements Drive Achievable Digital Transformations

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post describing why your organization's digital transformation may be floundering. Digital transformations are not "moves to the cloud, CI/CD pipelines, or centralized data lakes," but do "use culture, collaboration processes, and new technologies to change the business model."

Now most of the CIO and IT leaders that I speak to have a pretty good idea of some of the changes needed in their organizations. Some are looking to move their ERP to the cloud, establish proactive data governance, or upgrade employee experiences using a low-code platform.

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Fundamentals of MLOps, ModelOps, and Successful Machine Learning Lifecycles

In the state of AI in 2020 report, 50% of respondents assert that their companies have adopted artificial intelligence in at least one business function. Excluding what this report labels as "high performing AI companies," only 17% of all other respondents have a clearly defined an AI vision and strategy.

Who are the high performers? The high performers claim that 20% or more of their organizations’ enterprise-wide earnings in 2019 were attributable to using AI. Not surprisingly, only 8% of respondents self-assessed their companies as high performers.

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5 Ways IT Leaders are Adjusting to New Operational Normals

You gain many insights speaking to heads of NOCs and IT operations about the changes in their roles, strategies, and operating models over the last year. I was fortunate to participate in BigPanda's virtual roundtable that included leaders from the travel, retail, electrical utility, and gaming industries – in other words, industries dramatically impacted by COVID and its aftermath.

What an inspiring discussion! Here were four highly seasoned IT leaders from different industries facing complex challenges and working with very diverse technology architectures. These leaders were most responsible for the longer-term operational impacts on their businesses’ customers and employees. Yet, there was a lot of commonality in how they responded to the crisis and transformed their operational strategies. It required changes to their leadership mindsets, how they interacted with business executives, and their use of technologies, data, automation, and AIOps.Here are five ways these leaders transformed their responsibilities over the last year. 

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How to Fix Bugs, Raise Team Happiness, and Improve Developer Productivity

DevOps helped dev and operational teams bridge a deep moat between the speed agile dev teams want to deliver releases and the site reliability, performance, and security charted to IT Ops and SREs.

But are applications working better for end-users? Is enabling frequent deployments to quickly address bugs, defects, and errors sufficient to improve software quality? Are developers more productive and happier a decade into CI/CD, IaC, and other DevOps transformations?

I've been writing about the need to automate more testing, implement continuous testing in CI/CD, and shift-left security as agile development and DevOps best practices. Now I have some data showing how important error monitoring and testing are today.

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Your Digital Transformation is Floundering? Revealing Why

Sorry folks, your efforts to move to the cloud, create CI/CD pipelines, or centralize a data lake is not digital transformation. Nor are projects to get your organization on Microsoft 365, establish unified communications, or develop microservice architectures. 

And watch out for vendors who are selling products that "deliver digital transformation."

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Celebrating 500 Posts on Driving Digital Transformation

This is my 500th post on this blog, Social, Agile, and Transformation (and almost 700 across all websites), so I hope you will celebrate this milestone with me!

I started this blog back in 2005 when a friend told me that my startup needed to be "plugged into the blogosphere." I interpreted that to mean that I should start a blog and called it CTOtoDevelopers. I imagined using the blog to share technical best practices, and my first posts on application logging and on using agile to develop coding best practices remain classics.

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How to be a Program Manager in Agile Organizations

 "We don't need program managers," said the agile leader.

Let's think about that for a few seconds. Surely, many of the responsibilities we expected of program and project managers have shifted since the pre-agile world. 

But we're also executing and far more complex initiatives today that include partners, integrations, digital transformations, new innovations, security considerations, safety factors, data requirements, experience differentiators, and other success factors.

In this week's 5 Minutes with @NYIke episode (#20!!), I share five roles for program managers in agile organizations. 

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