It's time for one of my favorite yearly posts where I share my top reads of the previous year. You can see my past posts of top books of 2020 and top reads of 2019. I also published my favorite books on digital transformation storytelling.
Pictured below are my top reads of 2021.
Every CIO I know is balancing two humongous-sized beach balls. One ball represents driving innovation, improving experiences, and delivering data, analytics, and AI capabilities. The CIO wants to fill this ball with helium and make it easy for agile, self-organizing teams to collaborate, experiment, and release changes quickly.
The other ball represents the reliability, stability, performance, and
security of mission-critical business services – from the ones that run core
operations down to the pilots and POCs the dev and data science teams are
innovating.
What is digital transformation in 2022 and on? What should be on your digital transformation roadmap, and how should this in-pandemic world impact your digital strategy?
I've been speaking about transformation leadership in several keynotes since September 2021and asking CIOs, CDOs (chief digital officers and chief data officers), and the digital leadership reporting to them to rewind and retrospect their strategies.
How should we look back at 2021 and 2020, and how should we think about what’s critical to win in 2022? I believe we’re at the inflection point defining what digital transformation 2.0 will be about over the next five years. But before I share this with you in an upcoming post, I wanted to see what some experts are predicting for 2022.
The predictions fall into several categories that have always been critical
to digital transformation, like personalizing customer experiences. Others
are ripples from the pandemic, including supporting talent, hybrid working,
and enabling hyperautomation. And then, there are a few that point to a
future of API-driven ecosystems and democratizing AI.
It's been a busy year for everyone. I hope you're taking time this week to take a break and refresh. I'm doing the same because I know next year will be big. Big for everyone!
So for this week's post, I'm recapping the top five that I published this year. I had over 100 articles published this year and only half on this blog. so please sign up for the monthly Driving Digital Newsletter where you can track all my writing and to the 5 Minutes with @NYIke video channel to follow my how-to videos. You can also browse 15+ years and 750+ articles of my writing on this dashboard.
We’ve been practicing agile for twenty years since the manifesto was published and transitioning to DevOps cultures for about ten of them. And IT Ops predates these best practices going way back to the days of mainframes in pre-web data centers.
So why aren’t we aligned yet?
IT is hard – really hard. We’re trying to improve customer experiences,
develop digital products, automate workflows, become more data-driven, and
bring AI, IoT, and other emerging technologies to production. At the same
time, business leaders expect near-100 percent reliable systems, the bad guys
are creating tougher security issues, and tracking all the dependencies across
hybrid clouds, microservices, and integrations aren’t getting any easier.
Is your organization looking to accelerate digital transformation and become more data-driven? While many tools and practices are required to transform businesses, experienced leaders seek digital transformation force multipliers and select data catalogs to improve data quality, grow analytics capabilities, and help instrument change across the organization.
Almost all organizations pursuing digital transformation strategies have top
priorities to improve customer experiences and enable data-driven
capabilities. Most business leaders recognize that the products and services
they offer today need to progress considerably over the next months, quarters,
and years based on changing customer needs and business opportunities.
