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Tag: chief digital officer

  • Chief Digital Officers Driving Digital Transformation

    Chief Digital Officers Driving Digital Transformation

    The chief digital officer has always been a position that has struck me as a bit awkward as part chief marketing officer and part chief information officer. Since the CDO position started gaining traction about five years ago, most industry watchers have pegged it as a temporary role that would be displaced after the urgency of the early digital transformation efforts were complete.

    The CDO being a transient position is still the prevailing view, but history has shown the popular opinion at any given time is not often the correct opinion. A survey released this week by digital services provider Mindtree found that the CDO may have more staying power than conventional wisdom suggests.

    The survey, conducted among 323 global businesses and IT professionals in the U.S. and U.K. who work under a CDO, found that 76% of respondents believe the CDO position is becoming more relevant since the role was created. Only 7% believe the CDO role is less relevant today.

    Eighty-one percent of respondents agreed that their organization likely needs a CDO. Mindtree’s survey also found that respondents believe their CDO has been effective at championing business-driving digital initiatives, including providing seamless digital experiences to customers (27%) and creating new business models (20%).

    The survey found, not so surprisingly, that at 70% of respondent organizations, their chief digital officer comes from an IT background. And of those organizations, 84% claim to have made significant digital progress since their chief digital officer took their reins. Somewhat fewer organizations (73%) whose chief digital officer came from a non-IT background cited that they have made significant digital progress.

    Still, challenges remain for CDOs if they are going to continue with their success. The survey found that about a third of organizations’ resistance to change is the largest obstacle in the way of chief digital officers, and 38% said they need to collaborate better across business units and find new digital talent in order to succeed.

    The number of enterprises with a chief digital officer has grown significantly. According to the most recent annual Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, the percentage of enterprises with a CDO rose to 48% in 2018, up from only 25% in 2017. Still, the survey showed that most of those positions (about 90%) had chief digital officers in temporary positions, with one in five choosing instead to have their CIOs perform chief digital officer duties.

    Whether or not the chief digital officer becomes a permanent corporate fixture or proves to be a bridge position, as enterprises play catch up with their digital transformation efforts, remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: the work they are doing today is vital for the long-term success of the enterprises their working for.

    — George V. Hulme

  • DevOps: State of the Art in 2017, and Why CDOs Should Care

    DevOps: State of the Art in 2017, and Why CDOs Should Care

    Nine years after the term “DevOps” was coined, the following two questions seem still open:

    From the perspective of the industrialization of work labor also in the software industry, the answer to the first question appears very clear to me: DevOps is the third (digital) revolution of software and IT services, where CI/CD was equivalent of the second industrial revolution as elaborated in more detail in this article. Chances are high that further transformation can be expected to merge it with the fourth industrial revolution, as stated here: “DevOps will underpin the 4th industrial revolution.” That is also why chief digital officers (CDOs) should be in contact with DevOps teams in their organizations.

    Now, I see two important things have happened end of 2016: First, the establishment of DevOps Express, as 14 leading enterprise vendors have recognized the importance of interoperability of their tools for leveraging DevOps stack. The demand for this—the second important thing—has been (in my opinion) totally confirmed by CA’s infographic going viral, which maps a broad selection of tools around the software development life cycle. Adding the lifecycle view has been definitely an improvement beyond an overview of tools as proposed in the Periodic Table from XebiaLabs. Still, we are not done. Let me explain why.

    The next challenge I see is there is yet no agreement within the community what is—or could be—a reference DevOps toolchain (meta) model or process (meta) model. Is it:

    • “Plan, Develop, Test, Release, Operate,” as suggested by CA, or maybe
    • “Plan, Create, Verify, Package, Release, Configure, Monitor,” (Wikipedia) or
    • “Requirements, Development, Build, Testing, Deployment, Execution” (Len Bass et al.)?
    Source: Wikipedia, DevOps toolchain

    In the seminal book, “Continuous Delivery,” this life cycle was suggested as “Commit stage, automated acceptance testing, automated capacity testing, manual testing, release.” While we talk so much about culture in DevOps, we should recognize the need to align on a high-level view on the DevOps life cycle that is well-understood and accepted by most stakeholders.

    To have a track of all this and attract other collaborators, I have created an open format (SVG) infographic and published it as a GitHub project. Dear colleagues at the DevOps Express consortium, this is your call! Let’s join forces and accomplish this together.

    Next Steps

    After we will have (I hope so) a community-accepted DevOps meta-model toolchain setup and all important tools in place on the ecosystem, many more interesting questions will appear:

    • Which of these DevOps tools leverage open APIs to reduce risk of vendor lock-in?
    • Which tools belong to which generation of systems, leveraging optimization of human labor?

    Why DevOps is also CDO’s Business

    The fourth industrial revolution builds on digital process data, right? So if we aggregate all that data spread across and produced by the DevOps tools, we could get useful and holistic analytics and insights about IT in much faster time than we can imagine today.

     

    About the Author / Peter Muryshkin

    1Peter studied M.Sc. in Applied Computer Science and works in management consulting roles focusing on complex analysis and customer satisfaction, like IT Business Analyst and Change Manager. His current scientific research focus is digital transformation applied to the field of software engineering in large distributed organizations. Connect with him on LinkedIn.