Today I celebrate my 400th post on Social, Agile, and Transformation. It’s been an incredible journey starting from my days of being a hands-on CTO at a social media travel startup, through three careers of being a transformational CIO in data businesses, and now as President of StarCIO, author of the Amazon best seller Driving Digital, speaker, and contributing editor at CIO and InfoWorld.
Several people have asked me, “Why do it?” Others ask, “When do you have time to write?”
From my days going back to the University of Arizona where I was a teaching assistant, I’ve always had an interest in teaching, sharing, and inspiring. When I learn or experience something useful, I try to write it up in ways that others can learn from my experiences. I stay true to my passions in driving digital transformation, seeing organizations excel with agile practices, helping organizations become data driven, improving quality and speed with automation, driving growth with new digital products and services, and finding new competitive value with emerging technologies like AI and IoT.
To celebrate this 400th post, I’m going to recap the last hundred based on the articles that have received the most reads. If you’ve missed any posts, here’s a good chance to catch up!
Transforming any organization starts with “bottoms up” practices, that is, practices that engage experts and emerging leaders of the staff to experiment, take measurable risks, learn from mistakes, and iterate toward goals. This is why the first practice I cover in chapter 2 of Driving Digital is agile, and why I’ve covered agile planning, agile development, and agile data practices thoroughly here with over one hundred posts.
If you’re new to agile, start with the video I produced with InfoWorld on how agile development is like running a restaurant kitchen, the most viewed agile post on my blog. From there, I share a number of best practices:
When it comes to transformation, practices only get you so far. Organizations need to develop competitive advantages through their proprietary data and strategic, innovative use of technology. To do this, I’ve covered topics around self-service BI (or citizen data science), low code, data integration and streaming technologies, artificial intelligence, and IoT. The top reads are
Don’t just trust me. Talk to any leader that’s led a digital transformation program and they will tell you that it’s getting people on board with the programs, changing the culture, and adopting new mindsets that makes or breaks a transformation program. I share many examples of how to change the culture in the final chapter of Driving Digital, and in small bites here on the blog. The top reads are
I write about four posts a month which means that I’ll be celebrating the 500th post in a little over two years. A lot can happen between now and then!
Certainly, expect me to continue writing on all the themes I already cover. Enterprises have been adopting agile, moving to the cloud, and learning devops but are far from competitive with the velocity, innovation, and quality of customer experience that startups more often achieve. The largest tech companies are demonstrating significant achievements with machine learning and artificial intelligence, but most organizations are still in early experimental phases. Both of these suggest that there’s more to learn, experience and write about transformation, agile, devops, analytics, AI and product development.
But what about some new questions? Here are some things that intrigue me that I will be covering
Onward!
Several people have asked me, “Why do it?” Others ask, “When do you have time to write?”
From my days going back to the University of Arizona where I was a teaching assistant, I’ve always had an interest in teaching, sharing, and inspiring. When I learn or experience something useful, I try to write it up in ways that others can learn from my experiences. I stay true to my passions in driving digital transformation, seeing organizations excel with agile practices, helping organizations become data driven, improving quality and speed with automation, driving growth with new digital products and services, and finding new competitive value with emerging technologies like AI and IoT.
To celebrate this 400th post, I’m going to recap the last hundred based on the articles that have received the most reads. If you’ve missed any posts, here’s a good chance to catch up!
Transforming IT starts with Agile and Devops
Transforming any organization starts with “bottoms up” practices, that is, practices that engage experts and emerging leaders of the staff to experiment, take measurable risks, learn from mistakes, and iterate toward goals. This is why the first practice I cover in chapter 2 of Driving Digital is agile, and why I’ve covered agile planning, agile development, and agile data practices thoroughly here with over one hundred posts.
If you’re new to agile, start with the video I produced with InfoWorld on how agile development is like running a restaurant kitchen, the most viewed agile post on my blog. From there, I share a number of best practices:
- For developers and managers, read 5 ways to improve developer productivity and quality
- For product owners, here’s my 6 easy ways to drive meaningful MVPs
- For devops engineers, I share 5 recommendations on devops CI/CD pipelines
Roll up your sleeves to win with data and technology
When it comes to transformation, practices only get you so far. Organizations need to develop competitive advantages through their proprietary data and strategic, innovative use of technology. To do this, I’ve covered topics around self-service BI (or citizen data science), low code, data integration and streaming technologies, artificial intelligence, and IoT. The top reads are
- Why low code? Please don’t write another line of code without reading this!
- Why automation? Tech organizations should improve customer experience by automating incident response.
- Why consolidate platforms? Here are 12 warning signs of bad application architecture
- Driving analytics? Then consider proactive data governance that address risk and drive opportunities
Transformation requires leaders that can drive mindset changes
Don’t just trust me. Talk to any leader that’s led a digital transformation program and they will tell you that it’s getting people on board with the programs, changing the culture, and adopting new mindsets that makes or breaks a transformation program. I share many examples of how to change the culture in the final chapter of Driving Digital, and in small bites here on the blog. The top reads are
- 5 driving digital predictions for 2019 which include developing relationships and adopting outside-in learning programs
- One very hard part in leading transformation is figuring out how fast or slow to drive change
- If the last two posts haven’t gotten your attention, then please read the #1 reason why digital transformation efforts fail.
What about the next 100 posts?
I write about four posts a month which means that I’ll be celebrating the 500th post in a little over two years. A lot can happen between now and then!
Certainly, expect me to continue writing on all the themes I already cover. Enterprises have been adopting agile, moving to the cloud, and learning devops but are far from competitive with the velocity, innovation, and quality of customer experience that startups more often achieve. The largest tech companies are demonstrating significant achievements with machine learning and artificial intelligence, but most organizations are still in early experimental phases. Both of these suggest that there’s more to learn, experience and write about transformation, agile, devops, analytics, AI and product development.
But what about some new questions? Here are some things that intrigue me that I will be covering
- How and whether medium and smaller organizations can compete with the “big boys” around data and technology. Low code platforms are just the start!
- What will new business models, products, and customer experiences evolve to as the ecosystem of data services, analytics capabilities, and artificial intelligence because the underlying infrastructure and digital currency?
- How will technology platforms evolve as the foundations for developing applications leverage more machine learning and require less (no) workflow or user interfaces?
Onward!
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