The Digital CEO: A Dozen Years Of IT Insight
This blog is now a globally published book titled ‘The Digital CEO: A Dozen Years of IT Insight.’
You can order it from bookstores anywhere using the ISBN code 979-8490343165. It also has an easy to remember URL to help blog readers find it on Amazon, in both paperback and Kindle formats: http://j.mp/digitalceobook
The book features 51 of the blogs published here by IBA Group over the past 4 years. The blog goes back a lot further, a dozen years in fact. I wanted to select some of the more recent commentaries to give a flavor of how IBA Group – and this blog – has consistently been looking to the future of the IT industry for a long time now.
These past dozen years have been a really interesting time for the technology industry. The cloud was available back then but was still fairly experimental. I remember when the Guardian newspaper in the UK moved all their email and business tools to the cloud in 2009 and commentators were shocked – what is now entirely normal (with tools like Office 365) looked radical back then.
Smart homes are now mature and normalized with tools such as Google Home and the Amazon Echo. Digital twins are moving from industrial processes into daily use as healthcare support systems. Many of the topics we have explored in this blog have become mainstream over time.
IBA Group never indicated how I should approach this blog or what I should write about.
I originally met the IBA team in 2009 at a Gartner conference in London. We started talking about how they could enhance their own brand by having more published thoughts and ideas on technology. Advertising doesn’t work very well in a B2B environment but demonstrating your own knowledge and credibility does.
They invited me to contribute to this blog, which would also feature comments from engineers and managers in their own team. Now and again they would nudge me and say, could you talk about cloud computing or something else, but most of the time it has been just me commenting on what is happening in this business. It’s all my own opinion.
I started out commenting on the blog when I lived in London, UK and now I live in São Paulo, Brazil. The commentary has not stopped because it’s easy to contribute to a project like this from anywhere in the world. The blog itself is a good example of a global project.
I hope this book goes some way to demonstrating that IBA Group has been ahead of the curve for many years. They were open to blogging and sharing ideas long before I started helping them and this open-minded approach deserves more appreciation. The past couple of years have been even more important than usual for the IT industry. It was the network and security engineers that enabled everyone to work from home during the Covid pandemic. The IT teams that built tools such as Zoom and Teams kept everyone connected for work and streaming services, such as Netflix and Disney+, kept everyone entertained when everything else was closed.
If this pandemic had occurred even a decade earlier it would have been far more difficult to cope with the sheer challenge of trying to keep companies running when people were not allowed to visit their workplace. Imagine a world where you are trapped at home without online games, Netflix, or Zoom.
It was the IT industry that saved so many companies during this crisis and now we are seeing a wave of accelerated digital transformation. Companies that were not forced to change for immediate survival have realized that consumer expectations have changed – they need to catch up.
For more information on the book, and to order from Amazon, please follow this link. To order from other book retailers use the ISBN code 979-8490343165: