EPISODE #75: What Is Digital Transformation 2.0?
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When it comes to digital transformation, as the saying goes, we may all be in the same storm, but we’re not all in the same boat. Just ask any 2 people and you’ll get 3 different testimonials reflecting an incredibly broad spectrum of experiences & outcomes. For senior IT leaders captaining their operations vessel, what should they know to best navigate the turbulence of this technology tempest and ensure their enterprise makes it to safe harbor?
For insights we turn to Isaac Sacolick, who much like a beacon guiding travelers through treacherous waters, advises CIOs on how best to avoid the unseen hazards that could sink one’s digital transformation initiative. In a wide-ranging discussion we learn what constitutes Digital Transformation 2.0, his frank advice to IT leaders on overcoming robophobia, and the people-centric direction he sees automation heading towards as the next big thing in digital transformation.
Guy Nadivi: Welcome, everyone! My name is Guy Nadivi, and I’m the host of Intelligent Automation Radio. Our guest on today’s episode is Isaac Sacolick, President and Founder of StarCIO, a consulting practice specializing in digital transformations. Prior to founding StarCIO, Isaac was a business unit CIO at McGraw Hill, including their publication BusinessWeek. Isaac is also an accomplished author with an Amazon bestseller called “Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology”. When he’s got some downtime, Isaac serves as a Contributing Editor at InfoWorld, and has authored over 700 articles. As one of the higher profile thought leaders out there on digital transformation, Isaac possesses a wealth of expertise on how to use culture, collaboration processes, and new technologies to change corporate business models. It’s just the kind of subject matter we love digging our teeth into on the podcast, so Isaac has joined us here today to talk some shop. Isaac, welcome to Intelligent Automation Radio.
Isaac Sacolick: Guy, I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me, and really excited to be talking about automation today.
Guy Nadivi: Isaac, you do a lot of consulting to organizations about digital transformation. What do you recommend to CIOs on how best to secure continuing budget allocations for digital transformation initiatives when digital transformations have already been underway for a few years?
Isaac Sacolick: That’s a great question, Guy. When you think about the first year investment that CIOs have to make, that’s exactly how some of the executives and even the board can perceive a digital transformation investment, even though we’ve been doing this for about five years now. And they come in with that mindset that they’re going to make a one or multiyear investment around technology, and that they’re going to catch up with data and analytics, and apps are going to be modernized and customer experiences are going to be improved on, and they’re going to give the CIO some money to go do this, and then they’re going to go back to doing their day jobs. And that’s, in fact, a problem statement that digital transformation is trying to address, right? Today’s way of working, today’s business models are going to evolve significantly. They have for the last five years. They will continue for the next five years. ROI against these investments that we’re doing are going to take a few years to materialize.
And so, you think about that CIO, you made a case for in investment in 2018, you did a follow up one in 2019. Now we’ve been through COVID the last year and a half, and now you’re coming back in 2021 and saying, “I need more money for investment.” I think it’s really important for CIOs to make sure that the executive group, this SLT, really understands the vision behind every one of the investments. What is the strategy? What is the long term play that these investments are trying to do? What’s the culture that you’re trying to achieve? What are some of the processes that you’re trying to change in the organization and the mind set around them? That vision should include, whether you call them KPIs or OKRs, they need to include other metrics other than financials to provide indicators back to a group about progress, right? Other than deploying a new technology or seeing a new experience, how do we know things are working?
And then as the IT team and their partners are delivering new capabilities, you really have to be able to market wins, right, put on a marketing hat and celebrate wins, be able to showcase what people are accomplishing, and then use your stakeholders to secure evangelists, right? It’s not just good for IT to celebrate the wins. We need the CMO, the CFO to come up and say, “This investment really made an impact on how we’re operating.” So, if you communicate vision, if you share OKRs and KPIs, if you’re marketing your wins and you’re securing evangelists, when you come back next year, no one’s going to be surprised that you’re looking to do the next step in the investment around transformation.
Guy Nadivi: As we’re recording, the world is still mired in the midst of a global healthcare crisis. Isaac, what changes have you observed about digital transformation initiatives since the COVID pandemic began?
Isaac Sacolick: That’s a great question, Guy. It’s something I actually talk about in my recent keynotes. I’ve been calling it digital transformation 2.0. Going back to your last question, if you think about, 2019 was the last time we really had a strategic plan put in front of the board about growth and about changing the business model, because 2020 of course, we were stuck in COVID. And now here we are in 2021, and the world is really different. And we’re not really sure if we’re going to be, “back to normal” in 2022 or 2023. What are permanent changes? But when I characterize digital transformation 2.0, this is this next wave, post COVID, what has changed? I’ll just share a few examples.
I think one of them that every organization is trying to figure out is, what is its hybrid working model? Are you going to ask people to come back to the organization, back to the office full time? Are you going to be okay and open to 100% remote working as some companies have done, or are you going to be somewhere in the middle? And for most companies, it’s likely that you’re going to be somewhere in the middle. And so, the types of collaborations, right? How do you get teams in a room to discuss a new way of interfacing with customers? We used to do that by getting people in a room. We used to do our standups in Agile by getting people in a room. These are all things that are very different today. And so, our initial investments and practices around collaboration to support remote work, they have to evolve to something that’s a little bit more permanent. So, I think that’s one thing I would highlight.
I think the second thing is just the impact of supply chains. Supply chain’s heavily disrupted, whether you’re talking about computer chips in your cars, or, I’m sorry, hotels that can’t get bedding because it’s stuck on a barge outside of Los Angeles. So, when you think about that in the scope of digital transformation, we used to think that the products that we need, the components for our products and services would be there, that we would be able to negotiate price, but there would always be almost infinite supply for things that we’re buying. And today we know that’s not the case. So, we’re choosing what we’re putting into our products a little bit differently. And I think the third area I would highlight for this group is our picture of what emerging technology is from two years ago, whether you think about AI, automation, or you think about IoT, all those technologies have evolved significantly over the last two years. And so, what we thought was emerging tech two years ago is not so emerging anymore. There are platforms, there are technologies, there’s practices to bring many of these areas to mainstream companies. And so, I think companies have to be a lot more aggressive around their investments in what we used to call emerging two years ago, and how it’s going to impact their business over the next three years.
Guy Nadivi: Earlier this year, you wrote an article titled “What CIOs Can Learn From Low-Code Platform CTOs”, which advocated empowering citizen developers with no-code solutions. Why is citizen development so important today in IT operations?
Isaac Sacolick: It’s a great question. Let’s first talk about citizen development and low- and no-code solutions in general. I’ve never met an IT department and a CIO that’s come back and said to me, “Isaac, we have all the scales, all the people to meet all the demands for application modernizations, for integrations, for automations, for all the data and analytics that we want to provide. We just can do everything everybody’s asked for.” I first encountered that as a CTO about 20 years ago. It was around when the internet bubble burst, just showing my age a little bit there, Guy. And I woke up and I said, “You know what? I need to get into getting more efficient in my data center. I need to consolidate some things. I need to modernize some applications. I need to integrate my back office. And I can’t do this by taking my Java developers off of customer facing applications and start putting them on things that are going to improve the back office.”
So, I went looking for platforms that today we know as no-code and low-code solutions, but I went looking for them 20 years ago. And my history, I built customer-facing applications out of them. I brought them to at least two dozen different organizations for different reasons. And a lot of it is really just taking technology and expanding the number of people who can work with it, and just the productivity that you get out of these platforms. And when you talk about IT Ops, right, IT Ops is one segment where I think there’s tremendous opportunity around using low-code technologies.
And when you think about this, the businesses has expected automation in IT for 20 years. You think about just being able to reset a password, or moving data from point A to point B, or being able to make sure your backups are running. All these things, when you flash back 10, 15 years ago when I was a CTO or a CIO, I had to get Unix developers, Unix engineers, Microsoft engineers scripting these things in code to be able to do all these automations. And some of them were relatively straightforward, but a lot of them, if I got into a proprietary platform, if it had a lot of exceptions to them, and a lot of if-then logic, I ended up with code that was 100, 200 lines in length that I was lucky enough that the person who wrote it was able to write the code, getting somebody else to support it and enhance it over time became just as challenging as building software in itself.
So, you think about low-code applied in the automation space, in IT spaces. And now all of a sudden, instead of figuring out how to connect to AWS or Azure and automating something in there, it’s coming to me out-of-the-box. It’s allowing me to orchestrate when I want to run that particular activity. It’s handling the exceptions and failures around us, and it’s doing it in a visual paradigm so that when somebody builds it, somebody else can support it. And so, all of a sudden, something that was hard to do is easier. Something that I could do a handful of these every year, I could do probably three or four times as many of these. I could support them easier. And that’s a big part of why low-code and no-code in the IT operations area is so important today.
Guy Nadivi: There’s a lot of talk these days about a labor shortage due to the pandemic. How can CIOs prevail over this labor shortage and attract employees with the requisite skills necessary to become citizen developers who can be instrumental to digital transformation efforts?
Isaac Sacolick: So, that’s a great question, Guy. I think what you have to think about here is two dimensions when I think about skill sets. First is, again, if I have 10 people or 1,000 people in IT, there’s so much bandwidth, there’s so much productivity I can get out of this group. And again, I don’t have all the bandwidth for all the technology needs that I’m trying to do. So, I’m trying to expand the scope of what I can cover. Now, coming into the workforce, there’s a lot of people who are more digital-centric. We call them digital natives. They’ve been using technology their entire lives, but they don’t want to work in IT. They want to work in marketing. They want to work in operations or sales. And they come in, and they see whatever level of capability IT has been able to deploy, and saying to themselves, “I think I can do something better than this. I think I can automate more. I think I can become… Take something and make it more data centric and put the right dashboards out so that people can make decisions around this.”
This is the charter of a citizen development and no-code type platform. And what you’re really doing is taking your 10, 100, 1,000 people in IT and expanding the number of people who can work and operate with technology. You’re providing self-service capabilities to them, and you’re allowing their subject matter expertise to be fulfilled by the appropriate platform and the appropriate governance for them to be able to self-serve technologies around it. So, that’s the citizen equation. When you look at the low-code equation, now I’m taking things that probably need to be built, supported, enhanced, managed in IT, and we’re finding ways to do this with greater productivity, right? So, think about my previous example, right? Instead of writing 200 lines of scripting, I’m going to put four or five objects down on a worksheet and be able to connect the workflow together. That’s productivity. I’m not getting in writing lines and lines of code.
It’s becoming easier, right? And this happens a lot on the development side. But low code, instead of having to find a full stack developer with 10 years of experience that knows how to write microservices or serverless code, and now all of a sudden, I’m building something that’s very application-centric, very user experience-centric, and I’m working in a low-code platform or a platform with low-code capabilities to be able to enhance and support the development activities. And then lastly, I talked about this on the previous question, the ability to support and enhance. When you give a developer somebody else’s code, and they open it up in the IDE or in the browser or in a notepad, and they’re looking at thousands of lines of undocumented code that maybe someone did a code review on, but probably not, and they’re trying to figure out how the heck does this thing work, and they’re spending 70% of their time figuring that out before they even start making changes to it. And then they’re paranoid about making those changes, because maybe there’s no documentation, maybe there’s no unit tests around it.
When I live in a low-code environment, I really do believe a picture’s worth a thousand words. I think in low-code, a picture’s worth a thousand lines of code maybe. And so, I can bring that developer in. I can bring that system operator and have them look at an end-to-end workflow and say, “Okay, I understand how this is working, and I can be much more productive supporting, maintaining, or enhancing that particular workflow.” So, two different dimensions here, I think, that low-code and no-code provide.
Guy Nadivi: As a digital transformation consultant and CIO advisor, when you talk with your customers, what are they telling you are some of the biggest challenges they’re experiencing in deploying automation within their organization?
Isaac Sacolick: I think the first thing that comes to my mind is there’s a little bit of paralysis when you look at everything that’s happening in your average enterprise, all the technologies, all the legacy areas, all the opportunities to improve, and quite frankly, all the platforms out there that they might want to evaluate as solutions. And they get stuck. Where to start? What is the right problem set to focus on? What is the area of their operation that they need to focus on? Which type of technologies to pick to be able to support that? I did a video a while ago about how to not select technologies. And I called that one group of people analysis paralysis. They spent too much time trying to figure out what to do. Another group is a kid in the candy store or a gambler. They’re trying to buy too many technologies, and then they’re left with a different problem of figuring that out which technology or technologies to use for a solution to a particular problem.
So, I think there’s a little bit of fear of just getting started. Once they have some platforms, I think there’s a lot of debate in terms of how much of a process to automate, right? There’s this belief that when we automate something, it should be robotic, right? It should be, we can do an end-to-end process, no exceptions. The system can handle everything. And like everything that we try to do, when we automate something, the last 10%, the last 5%, the last 1% become increasingly more complex and difficult to implement. And so, I think there’s a question about how far up into the automation should teams actually implement? And that gets debated ad nauseam among IT groups. And then the last piece around this is just how much automation’s actually providing value? Just like everything else in transformation, it’s not incredibly obvious and immediate when you start automating some parts of IT or some parts of the business where and in fact, you’re going to see some benefits, and when it transpires. And so, you do this for six months, for 12 months, for 18 months, and somebody’s going to ask the question, well, what value are we getting out of this? So, it’s a number of the different questions that CIOs ask me about the automation and how to think about structuring a program around it.
Guy Nadivi: Introducing automation into an organization can trigger resistance from some employees due to fear of job loss or radical job change. We refer to that resistance here on the podcast as robophobia, and it can pose a serious cultural obstacle for enterprises deploying automation on their digital transformation journey. Isaac, what tactics have you seen prove most effective in overcoming robophobia?
Isaac Sacolick: I think it’s a great question. I love the title or the name “robophobia”. I wish I came up with it. Just to give you a sense of how often I get this question, you can get to the blog post I wrote about this a few years ago at starcio.com/automation. And you’re going to see an animation in there with people carrying pitchforks and torches. And that’s sometimes the response you get inside companies when you start using the word “automation”. And it comes from, I think, a couple of factors. The first is the word “automation” signifies to some folks that you are going to be robotic, that you’re going to take people completely out of the equation. It goes all the way up to the CFO, and she or he is thinking to themselves, kaching, right? I’m going to go automate this thing that our 100 people are doing today. I’m going to take 100 people out of the company to save all that money, and move on and be able to automate the next thing after that.
So, I think the first fear factor around is just using the word “automation” and recognizing that people perceive this as robotic, that you’re taking jobs away, that you’re going to be able to fulfill an end-to-end process without any people involved, and I think that’s a falsehood. So, I think the first recommendation I have, Guy, is set proper expectations, right? What are you automating? Why? How much of it is going to be automated? How much of it we’re going to continue to have people involved with, and why there’s going to be people involved with it going forward. That leads to the second piece of this, and as soon as you say “automation”, and my job is in finance, or my job is in IT operations, and I hear “automation”, I’m thinking, oh, no, why am I helping Isaac do this? This is going to take my job away. It’s going to take things that I do every day. I’m going to have to go learn a whole new set of skills. Maybe I’ll have a job after this, maybe I won’t have a job after this.
And these are the things they feel inside. Sometimes they don’t recognize it or express it, but you can see it in their behaviors how forthcoming they are with information, how they’re feeling about their jobs every day. And a lot of organizations struggle with this. And it’s because in fact, what we are trying to do is take things that are menial tasks that we should have automated three, five, 10, 15 years ago, but we couldn’t for any number of reasons, starting with the platforms just weren’t easy enough to go and do the automation at scale. And so, now we can do this, and we have to go back to those people and project, what are their jobs going to look like in a post-automated process? What are they going to be doing differently? What should they learn to step up and have a new set of responsibilities when this project is over? How are they going to enjoy their work differently once they have that job? How are you going to take things that are mundane and give them something exciting to do?
And quite frankly, you have to be realistic about this. Not everybody is going to embrace the change. It’s one of the things you have to work through as a transformation leader. What you’re trying to do is find those people that are going to embrace the change, those people that you want in your organization for the long term to recognize, hey, there’s a different way for me to contribute to the mission of this organization. I’m going to be letting go of the things that are of low value, and I’m going to be able to contribute to things that are of much higher value when this is over.
But you as the leader need to be able to share that vision with them very early on. And in some cases, we know very explicitly what that looks like. In other cases, I’ve worked with companies that said, “Look, I don’t know what this is going to look like. I need you to partner with me so that when I start learning how things are done, I can start thinking through with you and brainstorm with you what those next opportunities are.” But I may not know all the answers up front. And being able to be honest with employees around that and bring them into those experiences and those discussions so they can contribute with their knowledge and their subject matter expertise about where they can take things next. So, that’s what I think, Guy. I think it’s those two things. And again, you can find that blog post at starcio.com/automation.
Guy Nadivi: Isaac, there are many flavors of automation out there, such as IT process automation, of course, RPA, DevOps, runbook automation, workload automation, and many more. Some people believe the industry is heading towards a convergence point. Gartner calls it “hyper automation”, and Phil Fersht from Horses for Sources refers to it as “integrated automation”. We had a recent guest on this podcast say that ultimately, integrations combined with AI will mitigate the need for automation altogether. Where do you think things are heading for the automation industry?
Isaac Sacolick: Well, I’ll say first, I’m not crazy about the word “hyper automation” or “integrated automation”, although I’ve used hyper automation in some of my writing before. If you take a step back, I think where you can be really revolutionary when you talk about this inside your organization is to take a real people-centric approach, right? How can we help people, our subject matter experts, drive transformation in our business, right? And when I look at that people-centric approach, there are a few different tools that I can provide them today that are very different than what I could have provided them five or 10 years ago. And this is some of the technologies that are being put under the umbrella of hyper automation, right?
First is, yes, we’re going to take tasks that are manual in nature, that are moving data from point A to point B that involve clicking on a whole bunch of things, and yes, we’re going to automate tasks that now we know the machine can do more reliably, more faster, more responsive, and we’re going to take those and remove them from the equation. And we’re going to do this because we want to enable the next set of things. Those next set of things are going to come from implementations in self-service technologies, in low- and no-code technologies that allow you to provide these tools to subject matter expertise. And they’re going to help you innovate what the parts of the workflow that need people involved in it, that need decision making, that need oversight, that need enhancements that right now are more efficiently done and more intelligently done with a person doing those things. So, first, yes, we’re going to automate tasks, but then we’re going to enable and empower people with the ability to innovate and create technologies using low- and no-code.
And the third part is machine learning, right? We’re creating a ton of data out there. We can visualize parts of it. But what we’re really trying to do is help people make better decisions. And we’re doing decision making over large vasts of data. We know that machine learning can help spotlight outliers, can help spotlight fraud, can help find segmentations that didn’t exist before. And so now, not only am I automating things that I don’t need to do anymore, not only am I empowering people with the ability to innovate their workflows, I’m also providing data and analytics and machine learning capabilities to them so that they can make smarter decisions on larger vasts of data. So, when I put those three things together, low code, automation, and machine learning, now I’m starting to build a platform by which to really enable employee experiences going forward. So, I think that’s really where this is all going.
Guy Nadivi: Other than ROI, is there a single metric that best captures the impact of digital transformation on business and IT operations?
Isaac Sacolick: I don’t think there’s a single metric. But when I talk to folks about digital transformation, I give them three categories that they really should have in there. The first is around growth, right? It’s really hard when you talk about digital transformation to only focus on efficiencies or only focus on quality. We know this from generations of investments in process culture and technology changes that ROI off of efficiency and quality only gets you part of the equation. We have to talk about growing the business. We have to talk about new sources of revenue, changing and evolving what markets that we’re going after. And so, I think it’s very important that when you talk about digital transformation, you’re also talking about the front side of the house and how you’re enabling growth and new product development.
The second thing, when I talk about culture, and you say, “Well, how do you know Isaac, whether the culture is really evolving?” And the first thing that I look for is engagement. Now, engagement can mean different things to different parts of the organization. If I’m talking to an Agile team, I want to see that if they’re focused on commitment, if they’re really practicing scrum, and they’re committing at the beginning of the sprint, and they’re supposed to be completing and getting to done at the end of the sprint, how strong is their engagement to actually make that happen, given all the uncertainties that a scrum team and a sprint go through dealing with what they commit to, to the point where they get things done? If I think about an ITSM group, right, when we start putting metrics up around meantime to resolution, and we put other metrics up around customer satisfaction, how are they engaged in improving those metrics over time? So, I think that’s really important when you start talking about culture.
And then lastly, we talked a lot about today, Guy, about changing how the organization thinks about automation, thinks about low-code and becoming a more self-service, and about using machine learning and data to drive decisions. I’m really looking for metrics that express that future way of working, right? That could be as simple as how many people in the organizations are delivering applications in my self-service programs? It could be, “what is the impact of the data that we’re providing to the organizations when we’re developing self-service BI and providing dashboards to the organization?” So, I’m really looking for, are we really changing the way we’re working? And Guy, again, I get this question quite a lot. I have another post around this that people ask me about all the time, and you can get to that at starcio.com/measure-digital-transformation. And it captures a lot more detail around those three areas of KPIs and operational improvements.
Guy Nadivi: Isaac, the pace of innovation for digitally transforming technologies can really leave your head spinning. What do you envision will be some of the biggest disruptions we’ll see in the next one to three years with respect to digital transformation?
Isaac Sacolick: Yeah, my head’s been spinning around digital transformation for almost two decades. I know exactly what you’re talking about. My first answer to this is we’re already seeing it, right? If we talked about digital transformation 20 years ago, it was largely in media, and then it grew into retail. And today, when you look at even the industrials, you look at how construction, manufacturing, agriculture, energy, how all these businesses are running today, and you can’t tell me that they’re not going to be putting robotics in, they’re not going to be putting analytics in, they’re not going to be thinking about new ways of automating, that their supply chains aren’t impacted and they have to not rethink the way they’re operating as a business. So, I think in the industrials, in the industries that have traditionally been lagging in the pace of change, I think you’re going to see that accelerate significantly over the next one to three years.
One segment around this is in small and medium size businesses. I think when you look at who they have to compete with, where the growth is going to come from, the types of things that medium and larger organizations have been investing in, these smaller businesses… I’m not talking about startups. I’m talking about small and medium sized businesses from 10 employees up to a billion dollars, they have to become more competitive with experiences, with data, with efficiencies and automation. And they need to do this a lot faster, right? Because by the time you start feeling disruption creeping up your back, it’s almost already too late, right? You have to start doing these things before, in anticipation of the disruption. And so then, when the market is starting to tell you, you need to be doing things differently, you’re already moved to the cloud. You’ve already figured out automation. Your team is agile. You’re doing data-driven exercises. You have low-code technologies. So, I think SMBs that haven’t started really need to accelerate.
And I think the last area I would say is, going back to digital transformation 2.0, emerging tech hasn’t slowed down over the last two years. And we used to talk about AI, IOT and blockchain as three different pillars. But what I’m talking about today is the intersection of IOT and AI and the platforms that are supporting that. I’m talking about a retail experience that might include VR and AR technologies and AI at the same time. And being able to do this with mainstream technologies, things that you can buy, and configure, and integrate, and not things that you have to go build yourself and get all the PhDs and advanced developers to be able to access these technologies. So, I think that’s what we’re going to see over the next three years, is these technologies becoming more mainstream, and that’s going to force industrials, it’s going to force small and medium sized businesses to really become more digitized, more digital, and make sure they can be competitive over the next three to five years with that.
Guy Nadivi: Isaac, for the CIOs, CTOs, and other IT executives listening in, what is the one big must-have piece of advice you’d like them to take away from our discussion with regards to digital transformation?
Isaac Sacolick: Here’s what I would say. Look, the technology is going to continue to evolve, right? The things that we’re implementing today will become legacy in three to four years. There’s going to be a new set of technologies that we’re going to be talking about. There’s going to be some technologies that are hard today that are going to become a lot easier things in the next three to four years. So, it’s not technology, because that’s always changing. And when you look at it from a business lens, our competition is going to change. We used to talk about digital transformation as legacy companies versus startups. And now, it’s, everybody is really competing with everybody, and everybody’s also cooperating with everybody. So, the nature of competition is also going to evolve.
Also, just new forms of disruption, right? We could not anticipate two years ago that we’re going to hit a big boulder in the form of a pandemic that was going to slow us down. We have climate change to be focused on. We know our supply chains are not going to bounce back immediately, right? So, we have all these things that will continue to change, will continue to evolve. So, when I think about what CIOs have to think about, what’s going to be something that’s going to be the operating system of the future? What is the operating environment? What is the culture? What are the practices that you need to do? And my advice is to start building centers of excellence around them. And which ones those are in your organization are going to be different than others. For some that are very development-centric, you might be doing agile and innovation centers of excellence. For other organizations that are more data oriented, you’re going to think about citizen data science and proactive data governance, and looking at those kinds of centers of excellence.
But what that basically does is set a foundation saying this is going to be core to the way we’re evolving. The technology is changing. The business priorities are changing, but we’re going to continue to evolve how we’re working as a business using these collaborative practices. I think that’s what’s most important for all CIOs and CTOs to do. It’s actually core to what StarCIO does. We do have our center of excellence programs. But I think for every organization, you need to continue to evolve the skillset, the practices and culture, and adapt them to what technology is out there, and adapt them to what the business is asking you are doing.
Guy Nadivi: All right. Looks like that’s all the time we have for on this episode of Intelligent Automation Radio. Isaac, digital transformation, I think, seemed like just another buzzword to so many people until the pandemic turned digital transformation into an imperative at many organizations. Given the heightened focus on achieving business resiliency through digital transformation, I imagine your consulting practice is going to continue being very busy in the years ahead. Thank you very much for taking some time out to join us today.
Isaac Sacolick: Thank you, Guy. Great to be here!
Guy Nadivi: Isaac Sacolick, President and Founder of StarCIO. Thank you for listening, everyone. And remember, don’t hesitate, automate.
Isaac Sacolick
President & Founder of StarCIO
Isaac Sacolick (@NYIke) is the Founder and President of StarCIO, a company that helps SMBs and enterprises compete with data and technology, develop transformational centers of excellence, and execute smarter, faster, safer, and more innovative transformation programs. Isaac is a successful CIO who has led digital transformation, product development, innovation, agile management, data science, and IT operations in multiple organizations. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller, Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology, and has written over seven hundred articles as a contributing editor at InfoWorld, CIO.com, and Social, Agile, and Transformation. He is an industry speaker on digital transformation, becoming a data-driven organization, artificial intelligence, agile management, and other leadership topics. IDG, Enterprise Management 360, and Thinkers360 list Isaac as a top digital influencer, and HuffPost, Forbes, and HP Enterprise as a top social CIO.
Isaac can be reached at:
Twitter handle: @NYIke
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaacsacolick/
Driving Digital Newsletter: https://www.starcio.com/intelligent-automation
YouTube Channel: https://www.starcio.com/5nyike
