Digital to the Core

The race is on to become a digital enterprise. Every organization has a plan for updating products, technologies, and business processes. But that's not enough anymore. With disruptive startups outperforming industry stalwarts, executives everywhere are pushing greater growth and innovation. Staying competitive demands a complete digital transformation.

In Leading Digital, authors George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee highlight how large companies in traditional industries - from finance to manufacturing to pharmaceuticals - are using digital to gain strategic advantage. They illuminate the principles and practices that lead to successful digital transformation. Based on a study of more than 400 global firms, the book shows what it takes to become a digital master.

 How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years we've been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn't matter - that it can't provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research to include data collected from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance - and what drives it - using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research, making the information accessible for listeners to apply in their own organizations. 

More than ever, the effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. For decades, technology leaders have struggled to balance agility, reliability, and security. The consequences of failure have never been greater - whether it's the healthcare.gov debacle, cardholder data breaches, or missing the boat with Big Data in the cloud. And yet, high performers using DevOps principles, such as Google, Amazon, and Netflix, are routinely and reliably deploying code into production hundreds, or even thousands, of times per day.

We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs. MIT's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd.

Blockchains are new technology layers that rewire the Internet and threaten to side-step older legacy constructs and centrally served businesses. At its core, a blockchain injects trust into the network, cutting off some intermediaries from serving that function and creatively disrupting how they operate. Metaphorically, blockchains are the ultimate non-stop computers. Once launched, they never go down, and offer an incredible amount of resiliency, making them dependable and attractive for running a new generation of decentralized services and software.

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle, New York Times best-selling author of The Talent Code, goes inside some of the most effective organisations in the world and reveals their secrets. He not only explains what makes such groups tick but also identifies the key factors that can generate team cohesion in any walk of life. He examines the verbal and physical cues that bring people together. He determines specific strategies that encourage collaboration and build trust. 

Remember the '70s? Way back then, IT was a mainframe that sat in some room and only a few people had a key. Flash forward a decade, and IT was a limited set of systems irrelevant to the vast majority of employees and customers. But today, all of the sudden, technology belongs to everyone. Because of the suddenness of this revolution in technology adoption, most IT organizations have not had enough time to evolve into a "comfortable integration" with the rest of the company.

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.