Every business is a technology business, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that every business is a digital business. Whether you work in a large corporation or a small firm, you probably work in a business that’s going digital. If anything, the past two years of the pandemic have accelerated our path to digital, with remote work and ecommerce pushing us all into digital modes of working and living. And yet, if you’re not a technologist, or if technology and jargon seems opaque to you, you might find it daunting to figure it all out. If you understand business but feel that you don’t understand digital and technology well enough, then you’re the person I wrote the book for.
If you’re a business leader, in a large or small business, you will increasingly find yourself making decisions that need to straddle design, technology, and data, related to your organization, and understand the regulatory aspects of digital trends. You will need to constantly update your view of the world, and use this to refresh your strategy and roadmap more frequently than you’ve done in the past. This book will help you as well.
Digital means many things to many people. Is it technology? Data? Design? Is it about mobiles? Big data? Agile methods? AI? Often, the answer depends on who you ask, but in reality, it’s all of these things. This book will arm you with a conceptual framework with which to understand digital. This will help you understand digital transformation in your business better, but it will also help you make more sense of your next small digital project. It will also give you a simple and robust execution framework (connect, quantify, optimize) to help understand digital cycles.
Along the way, I hope it will demystify a lot of jargon—why APIs are like Lego, or what exponential strategies are about. It is designed to give you a good starting point for your journey in understanding all the many facets of digital. I’ve written this book to be a jumping-off point for all these topics. This book should give you enough of an understanding and confidence to go looking for more information on the subjects that attract you.
This is not a text book. It’s meant to be an easy read. It doesn’t assume that you will read the chapters sequentially. Feel free to jump to any topic that’s been bothering you.
This is not a book for technologists, it will not dive deep into technology. This is also not a book about digital strategy—there are plenty of good ones out there. This is a guide to digital for managers, because doing digital is no longer an option. I hope it’s fun to read, it’s been fun to write.
Keywords
digital; Web; mobile; Web 2.0; Web 3.0; Semantic Web; IoT; XaaS; design thinking; service design; cyber security; containerization; API; voice interfaces; big data; analytics; decision making; knowledge management; data architectures; data science; AI; networks; machine learning; deep learning; ethics; agile; fail fast; sprint; scrum; target operating model; data ethics; graph database; exponential change; discontinuity; networks; disruption; servitization; culture; automation; productivity; robots; connected health; predictive health care; electronic patient records; identity; context; trust; customer experience; future of work; scale-free networks; omnichannel; attention deficiency; transformation; optimization; blockchain