Few companies will admit to not having a digital strategy, and any company that has been around for a while will also have a digital transformation programme. Indeed an entire industry of digital change consultants have emerged over the past few years to help the rest of us navigate the minefield of uncertainty.
But what is all the hype about? Here are a few books that summarise the essential considerations relating to digitalisation. They cover some of the top-level business, strategic, marketing, organisational and technology considerations of digital transformation. If there is one thing you take from this post, it is that digital transformation can only ever be a company-wide, cross-domain activity – not something left to the IT or marketing teams.
The Digital Transformation Playbook – David Rogers
For those wondering the relevance of digital strategies to their roles, and particularly for those execs who believe that digital disruption has no part to play in their industry or function, The Digital Transformation Playbook is a must-read. As is to be expected by a faculty member at Columbia Business School, the theoretical underpinnings of the book are impeccable. Of particular interest is a re-framing of disruption theory that is more relevant to consumer products. Rogers distinguishes between disruption to a company’s offering and to its operations, or what he calls a value network. Digital platforms and technologies have the potential to severely disrupt both of these. The book is rich in case studies, from the well-known (e.g. Netflix) to the less well understood (e.g. Warby Parker).
As befits a book strong on digital economics, much emphasis is placed on platform theory and the changes in business models that have emerged over the past ten years. The underlying drivers of platforms – their inherent scalability, the value they provide to both service providers and consumers and “winner takes all” economics of platforms such as Google and Facebook are explored in detail. Importantly the book highlights the shift in thinking from value chains (relevant in the physical world) to value networks (in the digital world).
Additionally, few people will have missed the claims about data being “the new oil” or “a company’s most valuable asset”, but in many cases may fail to grasp what it means in their specific industry or company. One of the invaluable contributions of this book is to provide practical means for understanding how to treat data as an asset, and the various ways in which it can be used not only to provide value to your company but to provide the underpinnings of a digital transformation programme.
Given the breadth, scope and credibility of this book, miss this at your peril.
The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
As much as a manifesto as a book, this book fired the starting gun that really kicked off lean development practices. Although focused on Ries’ experience in running startups, the approaches popularised in this book have found their way into product development organisations and tech companies large and small. Although agile practices barely get a mention, the genius of this book was to show the symbiosis that exists between agile software development and an iterative, experimental approach to finding the best product-market fit. As such, this approach was ideally suited not only to startups but also to companies of any size dealing with the uncertainty brought by disruption and rapid technology changes.
Terms like “to pivot”, and “minimum viable product”, which will go on to be abused by managers were first popularised in this book. However, Ries’ most significant contribution has been the embedding of the iterative Build – Measure – Learn cycle, which when coupled with agile processes, has become the bedrock of modern product development. Although Ries went on to write a follow-up, The Lean Startup remains the mandatory starting point for anyone seeking on embarking on a tech transformation journey.
The Lean Enterprise – Jex Humble, Joanne Molesky and Barry O’Reilly
As the Lean Startup Movement drew many disciples amongst tech startups, scepticism remained as to how relevant the approach was to large enterprises, which operate with thousands of employees, complex programmes spread across the world and annual budgeting cycles. Not only does The Lean Enterprise put to bed any doubt that lean development principles can scale for use in large companies, but it also makes the compelling case that Lean Development is indeed the only way large companies can compete when faced with disruptors.
While this book does not bring in any radically new approaches, it shows how lean startup principles, the business model canvas, agile development, continuous integration and deployment can all work symbiotically. Emphasis is put on the concept of flow, demonstrating the similarities between intangible work such as software development and physical goods being manufactured in a factory. The same techniques that can reduce work-in-progress and backlog of work in a factory have applicability in the world of software development.
Often ignored, a company’s financial management processes can make or break a digital transformation project. The authors make the compelling case of separating programme financial budgeting from annual budgeting cycles and provide some practical examples for how to prioritise and fund innovation projects. Equally important is the interrelation between organisational structure and culture and the architecture of products they create, and it is no surprise that the authors are big fans of cross-functional teams.
The DevOps Handbook – Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois & John Willis
It is safe to say that agile has well and truly eaten the world. There are very few software teams that do not subscribe to some form of agile development practices. Equally important, but perhaps, less well understood is the concept of DevOps, the bringing together of development and operations teams together to increase the speed of development and the quality of products created. For decades, development and operations have operated as very distinct silos, with different objectives, metrics and cultures, often sitting in distinct companies. The DevOps approach is to bring product, development, test and operations teams together with the aim of creating more cohesive company cultures and more resilient products.
Like in Lean Enterprise, the DevOps Handbook lays into the inefficiencies and corrosive cultures that are inherent to organisations built around functional ‘silos’. The antidote, naturally is an organisation built around cross-functional teams focused on achieving market or product outcomes. Equally important is the technical architecture adopted. The authors are great fans of loosely-coupled software architectures where services are largely independent of each other, communicate via standard APIs, which allows them to be updated and deployed into production with no impact upon other parts of the system.
The loose coupling described above is one half of the equation that leads to fast deployment of software. The other half is to ‘automate everything’. From building and configuring environments through automating testing at all stages, onto monitoring live systems, manual procedures should ideally be banished from all stages of the software creation process. When all these practices are brought successfully together, software release becomes a low-risk, almost mundane activity, which hopefully banishes for good the stress associated with large high-risk, big-bang software deployments.
Architecting for Scale – Lee Atchison
You may create the most compelling, ground-breaking tech product, but it will not be worth much if your users cannot access it. Without service availability, not only will your users be unable to access your products, but you will likely suffer severe reputational damage. Think about recent outages to mobile operator O2 and British Airways. Not only did they result in multi-million-pound bills, but the companies are still suffering the impact to their reputation. Moreover, many systems start suffering just as they hit growth – failing to cope with the increasing demands being placed on them. Twitter’s ‘fail whale’ is probably one of the best examples of this. Architecting for Scale addresses the twin topics of scalability and resilience, arguing that these need to be built in from the outset, rather than being bolted on as an afterthought.
The book addresses both the management practices as well as technical tools required to create and operate high-availability services. At the heart of the book is the importance of designing systems with failure in mind. Whilst second-nature to engineers working in the physical world, failure analysis is often overlooked in purely digital operations. This is something that the new kid on the block can learn from some of the so-called traditional engineering industries.
Structured approaches to risk management and mitigation are presented as well as how to structure service tiers and service level agreements. On the technical side, the authors sensibly assume that most of their readers will be interested in using public cloud infrastructures such as AWS. Once again, microservices-based architectures are championed. The book provides an overview of the benefits of distributing functionality for resilience as well as a brief exploration of serverless technologies. While this is a fairly concise book, it provides a well-rounded starting point for exploring the importance of good architecture