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A New Practical Guide To A Successful Digital Transformation

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Digital transformation has taken over the business world in recent years, upending incumbents while creating new opportunities for established companies and startups alike. But many organizations stumble in the pursuit of digital-driven revenues and operations. A new guide to the digitally perplexed, written by an experienced business technology executive, provides valuable instructions on how to successfully navigate the digital tsunami.

Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation through Technology by Isaac Sacolick is a timely, engaging, and practical roadmap to developing and implementing digital strategies. It shows how to make the culture of the organization more digital-friendly, generate growth through new digital channels, create digitally immersive and rewarding experiences for customers, develop new competitive advantages, and drive new operational efficiencies.

Sacolick has first-hand experience with the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation. Currently, founder of consulting firm StarCIO, he has served as CIO in different industries and as CTO for a number of startups. He has both the practical experience in managing business transformations and the ability to articulate clearly the lessons he has learned. Sacolick has written extensively about a wide-range of emerging digital technologies and top business methods, from agile management practices and big data to social networking, digital marketing, and enterprise collaboration.

Practical advice regarding digital transformation is sorely needed. While 41% of organizations surveyed recently have an enterprise-wide digital strategy in place (up from 27% in 2015), 48% said (in another survey) that problems with digital tools were “directly hindering” the success of their IT strategies, and another 75% said they had “low levels of confidence” in their ability to fix these problems.

An increasingly popular way to fix the problems is to consolidate all responsibilities for digital strategies under one senior executive, frequently called the Chief Digital Officer (CDO). 25% of surveyed organizations now employ a Chief Digital Officer, up from 7% in 2014. Still, 43% of these organizations report that the biggest impediment to digital success is resistance to change.

The required change increasingly comes from the top. “The battle for the playroom has gone digital,” was how one publication described the recent appointment of Niels Christiansen as CEO of Lego after nine years as CEO of Danfoss. At Danfoss, by focusing on digital transformation, he increased sales and turned the firm into a global leader in energy efficiency. "Niels managed to transform a traditional industrial company into a technology leader," Lego’s Chairman Jorgen Vig Knudstorp told Reuters. Mattel, competing with Lego for the title of the world’s largest toymaker, hired earlier this year its new CEO from Google and is focused on a similar digital transformation strategy.

These new toymakers CEOs serve as prominent examples that digital know-how is now more important than industry experience and has become a job requirement at the top of the organization. Sacolick’s book is a must-read for the business and technology executives managing the digital transformation of their organizations, whether they are CEOs, Chief Digital Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Marketing Officers or any manager, at any level, seeking guidance as to which digital tools and practices to deploy and how.

Digital transformation, according to Sacolick, is about “looking at the business strategy through the lens of technical capabilities” and how a digital lens changes the way the business operates and generates revenues. Providing a comprehensive framework for conceiving and doing digital transformation, the book goes in detail through four major steps:

  • Making the IT team grounded in digital practices—Agile, DevOps, and the tools creating new digital platforms.
  • Enabling practices that capture ideas from employees, feedback from customers, and digital insights from other sources, with the goal of developing a pipeline of digital initiatives.
  • Developing the foundations for successful digital execution—data science skills and digital product management practices.
  • Driving digital growth and culture—gaining early adopters and leading the organization to think digital first and become smarter and faster.

“Once you are smarter and faster,” says Sacolick, “the threat of new digitally native competitors and startups may feel less intimidating.” Seeing the world through a lens of digital opportunities and knowing how to overcome digital transformation challenges are keys to business success today.

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