These days no business strategy seems complete unless it is qualified by the adjective \u201cdigital\u201d.<\/b>
How do we view the current and ever-changing plethora of ideas and models that fill our in-boxes every day?
The current big idea is \u201c digital transformation \u201d \u2013 which often gets used in different situations to mean a number of quite different things. We\u2019ll come back to that in a moment.
If we are developers or in service management\/operations, we all get bombarded with imperatives around \u201cdigital transformation\u201d, as well as many flavours of agile, lean and supply chain memes, in addition, of course, to the regular technical\/enterprise themes, such as ITSM\/ITIL, BRM (business rule management) and SIAM ( service integration and management ). What we thought we knew \u2013 about enterprise architecture or ITSM or COBIT Prince2 and TOGAF a few years back \u2013 all seems to be lost now in a morass of \u201cologies\u201d, \u201cisms\u201d and other new shiny things.
So how can we make sense of this \u2013 do we simply ignore new ideas until they start to impact or bite us? What criteria do we use to decide when a new thing is important and relevant for us? How, in particular, can we absorb new ways of working into our existing models?
One thing to be aware of is context \u2013 your view and level of interest in the need to \u201ctransform\u201d will depend on what sort of organisation you are currently in and where you sit within it. It can be easy in a large process-driven organisation to simply shrug off new ideas as being too difficult or \u201cnot done here\u201d. Also, your view of, say, SIAM will depend on your situation, whether you use a managed service provider or have a retained IT operation.
For many new initiatives, there are no right or wrong absolutes \u2013 only relevant opportunities and threats.
While we hear so much about \u201cdigital\u201d transformation, what we really need to focus on is \u201corganisational\u201d and \u201cpeople\u201d transformation. In technology, we need to develop our skills in terms of people management, communications and organisational change in order to really understand and achieve value.<\/p>\n