The Hard Job of Driving Value from AI
Generative AI arrived quickly, with bold promises dominating headlines. But anyone who has lived through past technology shifts knows the real story: the hard job of driving value is not proving it can work – it is adopting it to transform how companies work. Just as with PCs, e-commerce, or mobile, impact will not be fast or easy. Customers, colleagues, and friends — nearly everyone I exchange perspectives with is already using GenAI to work faster, smarter, and better. That matches findings from a recent paper by Andrew McAfee and colleagues, which shows the technology delivering rapid productivity gains across…
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Building a Digital Business Platform with Microsoft Tech
Microsoft’s digital business platform vision integrates modular applications, flexible infrastructure, and AI technology. Key components include Dynamics 365 for composable architecture, Dataverse for unified data services, and Microsoft Fabric for analytics. Power Platform enables low-code development, supporting scalable and compliant solutions within a vendor-neutral ecosystem, including integration with SAP systems.
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Digital Business Platform
Legacy architectures and technical debt slow digital transformation, increase costs, and hinder agility. A Digital Business Platform addresses these challenges by integrating composable business architectures, common data services, AI-driven analytics, and centralized DevOps. This platform-oriented approach accelerates innovation, simplifies IT management, and enables scalable, secure, and efficient digital operations for modern enterprises.
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Transformation Strategy: An Execution Toolbox
Digital intensity and transformation management intensity influence revenue growth and profitability in different ways. This toolbox equips leaders to integrate superb transformational execution with their digital strategy, enabling them to achieve up to 26% greater profitability than their competitors.
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Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology
Most business executives think – often reflected by who they bring to the room when you discuss the topic with a CEO – that Digital Transformation is about technology. It is not. Certainly, top notch technology capabilities are a critical ingredient in all Digital Transformation success stories, but there is a lot more to it. This is the purpose and central theme of this blog: debunking the notion that technology is the most important factor in making a start-up or centuries old companies more competitive with digitally driven innovation, and expanding the field of view of executives to include the…
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Digital Maturity
Digital Maturity indicates the relative development of a company and organization’s competency in key areas to establish present-day standing and help identify opportunities for improvement and priorities for investment. This is usually accomplished running a Digital Maturity Diagnostic to determine whether an organization is lagging, competitive or leading based on a set of factors: e.g. Digital Strategy, Leadership and Culture, Digital Skills, Customer Centricity, Technical Competencies, Data & Data Analytics, Project Delivery, etc. Academic researchers and consulting outfits have developed the models, and then applied them to large pools of organizations to determine relative maturity by company, sector, geography, etc.…
➔Do you need a Chief Digital Officer?
One of the hottest topics CEOs face when tuning their leadership teams to embark in a Digital Transformation is deciding if they need a Chief Digital Officer. They do. These are the four reasons why. One: responsibilities The Digital leader is concerned with strategy and models, change management, digital business outcome and supporting the rest of the business leaders develop their digital skills and agendas. She or he is the “sherpa” facilitating the development of the roadmap and nudging the transformation, understands technology profoundly but does not have to be a technical expert. The IT lead executive on the other…
➔The Digital Innovation Hub
The Digital Innovation team is the source of vision, knowledge and experience in how technologies will transform the way a company does business. It is the hearth of the Transformation program and will cement the ability of the organization to innovate identifying and adopting future technologies beyond the initial change initiative. Name and purpose While the name may change depending on company size and convention (e.g. Digital Innovation Center in larger corporations, Digital Innovation Team in smaller ones, Digital Excellence Center after becoming a Digital leader) the purpose is similar: a compact but assertive group of specialists to lead the…
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Digital Transformation: A Framework 