Digi get it?™ A new blog about topics in Digital management & governance.

Welcome to Digi get it?™ …A new blog about topics in Digital management & governance!

No, I’m not talking about practitioners of Digital Marketing… “Digital Experts,” “Digital Directors,” “Digital Marketing Managers”, “Digital Brand Managers,” etc. have been around for a couple of decades now…

I am talking about the practitioners of Digital innovation and transformation ala George Westerman, defined as:

“the use of technology to radically improve performance or reach of enterprises…using technical advances such as analytics, mobility, social media and smart embedded devices as well as improving use of traditional technologies such as ERP to change customer relationships, internal processes and value propositions.”

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s recap how we got here…

By now, we all know how Agile, DevOps, and Lean Startup approaches starting rocking the IT development and operations worlds as few years back…and there many knock-on effects from this….

You know an idea’s time has come when it starts to infect and influence everything around it!…

For example, some organizations began to realize, “hey, we have all these great Agile and DevOps initiatives going on, but we still have a change management process that is focused on a few big-bang releases a year…this is really limiting our Agile and DevOps progress…”

“Also, our Agile and DevOps folks would like to make dozens of changes to the website a week or even a day, but for each change, they are supposed to submit answers for a 150-point security checklist, which was better-suited to our big-bang releases and the waterfall-centric development of the past…”

…and the enterprise architects started to realize, “we need to change our architecture to better support and manage the kind of fast and continuous change that is happening with our DevOps teams…”

…And CIOs began to realize that their functionally-aligned organizational structures were also hindering their rapid change and innovation goals….and a lot of traditional IT orgs started morphing from what looked like this… this into something that looked more like THIS!

And that’s (one of many, I’m sure) short versions of how DevOps and Agile went from first rocking the development and operations world to rocking the world!

Of course, Digital’s rapid rise was fueled, not only by such DevOps- and Agile-inspired new practices all across IT and business, but the new approaches also combined with other key digital enablers like social, mobile, cloud, big data advanced analytics, internet of things, artificial intelligence, etc.

And as most of us remember, some industries and companies didn’t agree that these new approaches and rapid innovations were necessary…

…well, its either they didn’t agree or were caught by surprise…

And the Netflixes, Ubers, and AirBnBs of the world didn’t care–in fact, they were banking on it…

The digital and innovation accelerators I just mentioned combined to bring about this swift shift; chief among them: mobile with its simplified developer ecosystems, and cloud-based computing infrastructure and services which drastically lowered barriers to entry for start-ups.

In fact, these multiple innovation accelerators mean that you don’t own your roadmap anymore… not completely anyway.

The app economy, the start-up innovation frenzy, and other digital drivers means that almost anybody can quickly introduce innovation into your market space today and gobble up your market share before you can have time to react properly…

Many boards have also been blindsided by this since a lot of board members brought expertise honed in earlier phases of the web and/or other business or technological revolutions.  But many struggled to comprehend the speed and velocity at which this latest digital revolution has been striking.

Almost 70% of companies created before the year 2000 have still not mastered the basics of mobile!…And “disrupt-or-be-disrupted” realities mean that companies of any size must: 1) lead disruptive innovation internally, 2) match outside innovation, and/or 3) acquire innovation to keep pace or grow their market share.

Such new digital methods have been successfully applied in virtually every context, as digital industry guru Jez Humble writes:

“Agile methods and continuous delivery have been successfully applied to everything from mainframe systems in large financial services companies to embedded systems in consumer electronics, consistently delivering higher quality, faster delivery, greater business responsiveness, and reduced costs over the product lifecycle.

Any company that hopes to survive in the digital age must move beyond zero sum thinking. The recipe is easy to understand, but hard to implement; leaders must set and communicate clear business goals in terms of time to market, quality, and cost. They must then invest the necessary resources for everyone in the organization to collaborate so they can solve the problems that prevent them from achieving these goals. Nothing should be out of scope—enterprise architecture, process, budgeting, and governance, risk and compliance.”

And yet, with all of the great changes taking place over the last several years, I am still finding that many people in IT and the business are still struggling to understand Digital…or the difference between Digital and Digitization, for example…or what Digital means for things like organizational culture, strategy, policy and governance …what it means for the practices of managers and IT practitioners and consultants…

So, welcome to Digi get it? … where we’ll be exploring all things Digital. Watch this space.