Designed for Digital: How to Architect Your Business for Sustained Success (Management on the Cutting Edge) Hardcover – September 24, 2019

Designed for Digital enters a crowded arena of books about digital and digital transformation. This book is unique in the sense that it offers a solid, progressive and clearly outlined approach to building a digital company. If is free of the hype of digital, the over reliance on Amazon and Google as examples and the hyperbole normally associated with this subject.This comprehensive and solid advice, backed by real experiences of companies who are like yours. Overall Highly Recommended.The chapter titles give you a good sense of the book and its no-nonsense approach:Digital Business DesignBuilding Shared Customer InsightsBuilding an Operational BackboneBuilding a Digital PlatformBuilding an Accountability FrameworkBuilding an External Developer PlatformDeveloping a Roadmap for Your Digital TransformationDesigning your Company for DigitalThese are real things that real people need to do. The chapters offer clear definitions and advice on each topic. They are written for a senior management audience, more what it is and why its important than detailed how to advice.The work is sound, based on research and real life case studies from established companies who are making the transition into becoming a digital business. That is the type of company most of us work for and the book uses detailed case examples that will help you explain what it takes to design for digital.

Best book to date on winning digital. Buy it! Discuss at the C-Level.In our personal lives we take delight in the constant stream of new possibilities from the cloud-platform companies. But, big, older companies with ERP systems are generally struggling with their "digital transformation" or "omnichannel" strategies. Why? And what are the stages of the journey to digital effectiveness from our customers' point of view?This book will answer many of your "digital transformation" questions. It is the best researched and written book that I've encountered on winning the digital race. The case studies starring mature behemoths (Schneider Electric, Toyota, Phillips, USAA, etc.) will enlighten both non-tech and IT readers. The graphics are simple, but profoundly insightful.The authors have identified five, building blocks that every traditional company must invent and integrate (often with the help of outside, digital-cloud talent). It will put - non-tech managers, IT managers and outside tech partners - all on the same path with a shared vocabulary.Don't just pave over old ways of doing stuff. Invent new, digital, service values for customers on a real-time, evolving basis. Minimize the hits from digital disruptors and score big against traditional, lagging competitors.

Having read Ross’s other books (e.g. see my review of “IT Savvy”), I thought I had to get this title to stay up to date with latest business/IT developments when I saw it was coming out. As I read the text, I felt familiar with the discussion of aligning processes technology and people and the emphasis that current and future efforts will continue to go beyond just IT concerns. Ross and her co-authors’ illusions to companies such as Campbell Soup and DHL with whom I had worked during IBM Business Consulting projects also lent to my confidence in their findings and projections concerning digital design.More specifically, the book’s contents include a Series Introduction and Preface then 8 chapters: (1) Digital Business Design [a rationale and overview of the authors’ info gathering and study of the subject], (2) Building Shared Customer Insights, (3) Building an Operational Backbone, (4) Building a Digital Platform, (5) Building an Accountability Framework, (6) Building an External Developer Platform [chapters 2-6 are digital design building blocks], (7) Developing a Roadmap for Your Digital Transformation [arranging the building blocks] , and (8) Designing Your Company for Digital. There is also an Appendix 1: Committing to an Operating Model to Build an Operational Backbone and Appendix 2: Assessing Your Building Blocks for Digital Transformation as well as helpful Notes and Index.As mentioned above, given past history, I had familiarity with different aspects of the topic, but did pick-up on newer aspects, fuller understanding, and the direction moving forward. For instance, the authors encapsulate that “Digital technologies are game changing because they deliver three capabilities: ubiquitous data, unlimited connectivity, and massive processing power. . . [for] develop[ing] new offerings to help solve customer problems.” They distinguish between ‘digitization of a company” versus “new digital offerings,” and speak about how businesses need to attend to both areas. There is mention that the book is applicable to non-profit and public sector concerns, but the wider socio-economic implications are beyond the book’s scope.The authors do give much attention to the need for an “experiment, test, learn” culture and organization design emphasis on “new roles and accountabilities vs restructuring.” They stress that “the digital journey [is] long, [where] people take time to embrace, [and] adapt to new ways of working . . .” Their statement that the effort involves “. . . more fundamental organizational change than simply adopting Agile methodologies . . .” bring to mind books such as Dignan’s “Brave New Work” (see my review).While the generation of “Customer Insights” for effective use of digital capabilities is significant, the possession of a robust “Operational Backbone” to deliver is also critical. From my earlier activities, I had an acquaintance with these dimensions as well as the idea of “Component Business Modeling” (see my review of Sanford and Taylor’s “Let Go to Grow: Escaping the Commodity Trap”) as a way to link them. What was new for me was the authors’ explanation of component APIs (application programming interfaces) as well as the designation of component owners and teams. These assignment help enable digital offerings and assure appropriate component interaction among each other and with other enterprise or cloud services. The other revelation was their description of fifth building block, “the external developer platform” as well as the internal and business ecosystem complications that it entails where as Manovich suggests “Software Takes Command” (see my review).The diagrams and examples throughout the book illuminate, and the different ways of assembling the digital building block puzzle pieces to convey or lay out a development road map is cute and satisfying. Yet cases such as those related to Phillips Healthcare and Spotify during this time of COVID-19 bring to fore more nagging questions about the wider social effects and use of digital technologies (e.g. see my reviews of Topol’s “The Creative Destruction of Medicine,” Byrne’s “How Music Works,” and Kelly’s “The Inevitable”). As the authors say SMACIT (Social, mobile, analytics, cloud, the Internet of Things) with the acronym taken literally as the way we often experience or feel related changes may have broader meaning than they realize for good and ill (e.g. some such as Blackburn et al at McKinsey have recently indicated that pandemic conditions have accelerated digital development and use).Even though the book does not explore the wider issues, it does provide a means for comprehending what is occurring with the expanding prominence (coming dominance?) of digital capabilities. It also should be an important resource in coming up with ways to proceed that will be of societal benefit as well in the long run.

Clearly explained a rationale framework to transform businesses into digital with lots of insights from case study. I highly recommend reading

Pretty simple, actually--Jeanne Ross gets it and doesn't feel obligated to overcomplicate what many others feel obligated to swaddle in mystic garble. If you run a company, just get this book and then get started transforming.

How to define and build the Digital Transformation Building Blocks required for a Digital transformation, a full framework with case studies. Perfect book for all the Digital and Enterprise architects looking for analyze, define and build the Digital Platform building blocks.Sequel to the famous book "EA as Strategy" (looking for define a Operational Backbone) this one goes a step further and analyze how to define the second step: The digital Platform.

MIT's Center for Information Systems Research has hit a home-run with this new opus that gathers years of research-based insights. Business executives and managers will learn what digital transformation really means. This books cuts through the hype and marketing smoke that has been flooding business media for too long now, and provides the basis for making informed choices. Designed for Digital sets expectations where they should be, reminding the C-suite that there were never such a thing as a free lunch. Nothing replaces balanced decisions and time to attain profitable and sustainable change.

Livro indispensável para quem está liderando ou precisa entender o que é transformação digital e como coloca-la em movimento na sua organização.

+Lettura molto piacevoleGli argomenti vengono presentati in modo organico e poi approfonditi passo passoOttimi gli esempi che accompagnano il concetto spiegatoTrattamento degli argomenti fluido ed esaustivo-Avrei inserito qualche altro schema a supporto

Found this to be a fantastic book on digital transformation. Most books on this topic stop at describing high level “strategies” or “business models.” This book goes deep into the “how” of digital transformations of established companies.Most insightful for me were distinguishing “digitized” versus “digital” and the framework of the five building blocks. The building blocks really act as a checklist and help to cut the amorphous concept of digital transformation into tangible and manageable chunks. Also found the real live case examples very helpful.If you’re dealing with digital transformation in your job, especially if you’re not in IT, I highly recommend reading this book.

This book was eagerly awaited by the Enterprise Architecture community. It is the result of five years of research into adoption of digital technology by big companies. In the main, its subjects are not the prime movers that seized technology opportunities to grow suddenly from nothing; they are companies that were already household names, saw what was happening, and reacted. It looks at what they did, at what worked, and what did not work. It draws conclusions, and describes patterns for success.The book is an impressive piece of work. It presents a reference model for use in digital transformation, and discusses how to create a roadmap to change an enterprise to fit that model. It is illustrated with copious real-world examples, drawn from the authors' research. The reference model is simple and clear. Creating a roadmap is not so straightforward, but the book presents ideas on how to do it, again with real-world examples.Availability of information is the basis of many of the new digital businesses. Understanding the data flow is the key to configuring components to create digital business offerings. The components must be arranged to obtain and deliver the information that provides the business value. The book does not address the technology architecture needed to ensure the system components support effective data flow. Perhaps that is too much to expect. The reference model and roadmap discussion are major achievements on their own.Designed for Digital is an excellent book. It will help enterprise architects understand the business architecture of digital enterprises. It will help them less to understand how to create the technology systems to support the business architecture.