Business StrategyWhy You Don’t Put All Your Eggs in AI
In finance, the first rule is diversification. The same rule applies to technology, and most companies are breaking it by betting everything on AI. Here is the case for spreading the risk.
Category: Digital Transformation
Conversations with leaders driving digital transformation: modernization, adoption, and the human side of technology change, hosted by a writer who led transformations before writing about them.
Business Strategy
Digital TransformationWe Did Digital Transformation Before It Had a Name
Nobody in the room called it digital transformation, because the term did not exist. We had a retailer running accounting, HR, and payroll on paper, a mandate to computerize all of it, and years later the industry invented a name…
Digital TransformationGetting People Off Paper: The First Fight Is Never Technical
Nobody stood on a desk. The resistance was quieter and more durable: ledgers kept in bottom drawers, spreadsheets shadowing the new system, a steady preference for the world people knew. Underneath it all was a fear nobody said out loud.
Digital TransformationRetraining Beat Fear Then. It Is the Answer to AI Panic Now.
I have watched a workforce fear a new technology before, and I watched the fear dissolve. It did not dissolve because of reassurance, town halls, or enthusiasm campaigns. It dissolved because we retrained people, and training is the only answer…
Digital TransformationPeople, Process, Technology, In That Order
I ghostwrote a book built on the people-process-technology framework, and I had unusual material to test it against: my own transformations. Sorted honestly, every crisis that threatened them was a people problem or a process problem wearing technical clothing.
Digital TransformationThe Big-Bang Cutover That Almost Rolled Back
Friday we were on the old platform. Monday we were on the new one, and it was buckling. We stood at the edge of a rollback with the whole company standing on a system that could not carry the load,…
Digital TransformationBarely Tolerable: Surviving the Weeks After Go-Live
The Gantt chart crescendos to cutover weekend, and the boxes after it say 'stabilization,' thin little boxes, drawn by optimists. Then you go live and discover what those boxes contain: weeks of triage, expectation management, and a system running on…
Digital TransformationSix DBAs, Six Months, Open Checkbook
The migration budget covered the conversion, the cutover, the infrastructure, the testing. The real bill arrived afterward, by invoice: hundreds of SQL queries that had to be re-optimized for the new platform, by six specialist DBAs, over six months, on…
Digital TransformationThe Server Under the Desk
We were hunting for a machine during a disaster recovery effort. Systems were talking to it, work depended on it, and it was not in the server room. We found it under a user's desk in accounting, running decade-old software,…
Digital TransformationEverything Means Everything: Scope in a Real Transformation
People ask what our transformation covered, and the honest answer sounds like bravado: everything. Accounting to SAP, HR and payroll to SaaS, merchandising to a real system. The completeness was the hardest-won property of the program, and the point of…
Digital TransformationDisaster Recovery Is Part of the Transformation, or It Is Not One
A DR plan is a set of precise claims about a specific environment. A transformation is the deliberate, wholesale changing of that environment. Put those two sentences together and you see the problem most transformation programs never address.
Digital TransformationWhat Executives Get Wrong About Transformation Books
He wanted the technical depth in. His goal was the attention of management. We fought it chapter by chapter, and the balance he reached got him promotions and speaking engagements, which is how I learned the battle every technical author…