3 Ways Data Governance Leaders Can Promote Their Careers

Seeing data governance functions pigeonholed into compliance and data security responsibilities drives me a little nuts.

First, it misses the key business value proposition of data governance, which should be on helping people in the organization, customers, and partners leverage data in decision-making in reliable and compliant ways. I advise chief data officers and governance leaders to call the function proactive data governance and focus on data quality, reliability, timeliness, and data trust. These are the offensive aspects of the role as they deliver business value, as opposed to taking a defensive posture and focusing on what regulations and compliance require.

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How to Sell Innovation Strategies to Executives: Prepare for Debate and Seek Decision

One CIO shared this feedback with me after reading my book, Digital Trailblazer. “Isaac, I wish you had written more about your experiences with the Board and the strategic leadership team (SLT),” she said.

Even seasoned CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs want advice on navigating their CXO/SLT and CXO/Board responsibilities because even with some experience, it never feels like you’ve mastered developing relationships that lead to faster and easier decisions. For aspiring digital transformation leaders, your first experiences with the SLT and Board can be nerve-racking.

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5 Ways Ambitious DevOps Engineers Can Advance Their Careers

DevOps engineers have much to offer their organizations beyond developing CI/CD pipelines, configuring infrastructure as code, enabling AIOps capabilities, and other engineering practices that align with dev and ops objectives.

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How to Co-Create on Innovation: Focus Executives, Employees, and Partners on Learning

 In my recent post on agile co-creation, I said, “Co-creation requires a shift in mindset, contracting, and operating model.”

The shift can be paradoxical for business leaders who view partnering as a tool for throwing problems over the fence and managing a project or service at arm’s length. I’ll tackle how to partner with solutions and service providers in the future, and in this post, I advise on co-creating with partners on innovation programs.

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No More Email! Atlassian Demos How to Transform to a Collaborative Future of Work

Just over ten years ago, the CEO of Atos proclaimed an end to internal emails and began shifting collaboration to new social networking tools they were developing internally. Even before then, when I was CIO at Businessweek, I heard about a similar program at TCS from their CTO, Ananth Krishnan, and wrote about how CIOs must put Enterprise 2.0 high on their agenda.

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Drive a Transformative Culture with Diverse Leaders and Empathetic Teams

Chapter 8 of my book, Digital Trailblazer, is titled “Transformative Culture, Empathetic Teams, Diverse Leaders,” and I went through several rewrites and revisions to get the stories and lessons right. I just released the Driving Digital Standup video on this chapter, as it’s one of the most important reads in the book.

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How Data-Driven Organizations Overcome Culture and Technical Barriers

Experienced technology and data leaders shared their experiences establishing data-driven organizations during a recent Coffee with Digital Trailblazers episode. I host the event Fridays at 11 am ET, and while we’ve discussed many leadership topics tied to digital transformation over the weeks, this was our first episode where we focused on data practices.

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