New Year’s Resolutions for CIO and Digital Transformation Leaders

Happy holidays and new year everyone! Have your final cocktails of 2018, read up on my driving digital predictions for 2019, and get ready to lead your organizations through what is likely going to be a jittery year of successes, surprises, and necessary pivots.

I’m guessing you have your 2019 plan locked and loaded, but if you’re a reader of my book Driving Digital, my articles (here and on InfoWorld and CIO) and the monthly Driving Digital Newsletter, you’ll know that roadmaps need ongoing refinement.

So with that, allow me to suggest some new year’s resolutions that you might want to bake into your 2019 plans.

Develop relationships, then drive change

If transformation is a journey, then you best be prepared to meet, learn from, question, inspire, and drive change with new people every day. These activities should occupy a healthy percent of your weekly activities especially because you need relationships and empathy before you can drive culture, behavioral, and process changes. Consider establishing a Driver’s Voice Meeting, taking steps to become an agile organization, looking for new ways to reward top performers, and seeking other practical advice for managing organizational change. The number one reason digital transformations fail is because executives fail to embrace that it’s a bottoms up transformation that will require change across the organization.

Roadmap a proactive data governance program

With the initial GDPR compliance behind us, I hope more organizations will take proactive steps and invest in data governance programs. Yes, you cannot afford to lag in your industry with data, analytics, and AI, and maybe you are already becoming a real time enterprise, but most experts agree that investing in data quality, cataloging, and access policies is a critically important step. 

Read three more of Isaac’s Driving Digital new year’s resolutions for CIOs and digital transformation leaders.

 

Isaac Sacolick is a former CIO and CTO and now President of StarCIO, a services company that helps businesses drive smarter, faster, and more innovative business transformations. He is the author of Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation through Technology which covers many practices such as agile, devops, and data science that are critical to successful digital transformation programs. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, digital transformation influencer, and blogs at Social, Agile and Transformation, InfoWorld and CIO.com.

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