Is Your Enterprise Digital Ready? - Summer Time Reading Recommendations

Sometimes it is better to make sure that other people think that they had the idea first. As Information Professionals are not always believed when they try to persuade their business colleagues that they need to change their ways, if they are going to get the best out of their Digital Strategies and Investments.

The truth is that there are some fundamental issues to address which separate Good or Average performing companies from Excellent ones when it comes to exploiting IT or Digital investments and transformations. Proponents of Digital Strategy, Agile and DevOps often raise them, but due to the fact that these issues are being raised in a technological context, non IT colleagues tend to either listen and not hear or just dismiss them as the mad ravings of techno boffins.

Key among these are:

1. Having a "Real Business Strategy" based on deep market insight and how to disrupt or exploit it in your favour;
2. Working as a Team within a healthy Business Culture;
3. Adopting Design Thinking to help empathise with customer needs, really understand what you are trying to address and then to creatively address options and iterate design to create elegant and well targetted solutions rapidly, whilst embracing leraning from failure as a critical part of the approach;
4. Systems Thinking to understand the end-to-end process, identify and manage critical business bottlenecks and organise around product or work delivery, instead of hierarchical functional silos.

A large part of this is really concerned with taking an ego-less multi-functional team approach to addressing what is really needed and then pursuing continuous delivery, automation and improvement in small steps. 

Fortunatley there are some great business books on some of these subjects which evryone should be encouraged to read as they address the issues from a more general business perspective and introduce the key concepts that all the Digital Geeks are so keen on.

My recommendations are:

Good Strategy Bad Strategy is a great expose on how to do Strategy properly. Most readers will recognise many of the bad examples which are lacerated by Richard Rumelt (one of the leading fathers of Business Strategy) in what is a fairly easy and entertaining read.

Winning Teams Winning Cultures  - addresses a lot of the key issues in building a positive enterprise culture. This comes from Larry Senn (of Senn Delaney a culutural change consultancy) and Jim Hart who are long time practitioners in the field of cultural change. It's an interesting book, because just like democracy it is difficult to bomb culutural change from 40,000 feet into an organisation. It requires authenticity, long term commitment and sytematic sweating by the management team to achieve.

The Human Constraint - the author (Angella Montgomerry) takes the principles advocated by Demming and Goldratt and updates them to apply to all businesses (not just manufacturing) in the practical adoption of system thinking and the Theory of Constraints to business in general.

Finally there are plenty of sources on Design Thinking available on the internet. The UK Design Council publishes the Double Diamon model which provides a simple model for explaining the process. I recently saw a great webcast by Ileana Stigliani, fom Imperial College Business School, on the subject Unleash Innovation Through Design Thinking

(see: https://www.ivyexec.com/professionals/classes/details/unleash-innovation-through-design-thinking ).