What a Snow-Locked Water District Taught Me About AI
A 1980 SCADA system in Pascal solved the same problem every failed AI rollout in 2026 is failing to solve. The buzzword changes. The rule doesn’t.
Digital transformation gets written about by consultants who never ran the systems underneath it. These articles come from the other side. I led enterprise transformations at a national retailer, from paper to computing, warehouse automation, a VAX-to-AIX migration, and a private cloud. The real work is infrastructure, people, and process, not the buzzword.
A 1980 SCADA system in Pascal solved the same problem every failed AI rollout in 2026 is failing to solve. The buzzword changes. The rule doesn’t.
TL;DR Most digital transformation advice assumes a tech company. I ran it for a retailer, a company whose actual business was selling things, not building software. That is different, and
TL;DR I ghostwrote three digital transformation books for executives, and it taught me something running transformations did not. Each executive did it completely differently, at a scale far bigger than
TL;DR Do digital transformation in this order: people, process, technology. People first, always, which means asking what happens to each person. Do they get retrained? Retired? Where do they go?
TL;DR The hardest part of running technology was not the technology. It was that leadership spoke business and I spoke tech, and neither of us understood the other. I did
TL;DR Legacy systems do not die because a strategy wants them gone. I had to keep ancient systems alive for years, including one running on hardware that could no longer
TL;DR Most digital transformations fail for an unglamorous reason: poor testing. Everyone tests whether the system works normally. Almost nobody tests what happens under real load, or what happens when
TL;DR Digital transformation is plumbing. The buzzword makes people picture something exciting, but the real work is infrastructure, done one component at a time. I led enterprise transformations at a
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Two tech techies share disaster stories from computing’s early days—when radio killed mainframes, bulls sabotaged networks, and one dot crashed companies.
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