Digital Transformation

The leader of a company, or of a transformation, can begin with Digital Transformation and Product Culture (2025), which defines the terms and approaches the subject through the management of digital products,[1] and with 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation (2024), short episodes on what an architect does in a large organisation that is changing its IT.[2] For artificial intelligence the plainest introduction is Generative AI in a Nutshell (2025), which is also offered as a course with exercises and video.[7] Someone who uses business systems and spreadsheets daily without being at ease with data has Getting Started with Data (2020).[33]

The practitioner planning a migration can go to Cloud Strategy (2024), which offers decision models in place of instructions,[3] and the one building an internal platform to Platform Strategy (2026), the most widely read book here, whose chapters each stand alone.[4] All Hands on Tech (2025) is written for the heads of technology organisations, with each chapter answering one practical question.[12]

The specialist has Lean Enterprise Architecture (2026) for enterprise architecture[10] and Elements of Data Strategy (2023) for the strategy of data.[31] Quintessence (2022) is the most abstract book on the shelf, for those who believe that the obstacle is the organisation's own assumptions.[5]

The phrase came into general use in the 2010s, but the thing is older. Mainframes automated clerical work from the 1960s; enterprise resource-planning systems and the re-engineering of business processes reshaped companies in the 1990s; the web obliged every business to meet its customers online; and cloud computing and the smartphone, from the late 2000s, changed both the tools and the competition. Since 2022 generative AI has been added to the list.

The books supply some markers. Digital Transformation and Product Culture takes its examples of traditional companies from a bank founded in 1924 and a retail chain founded in 1957, both now investing heavily in applications and an online presence.[1] Platform Strategy cites a report that seven of the ten most valuable companies of 2018 owed their success to a platform business model, where ten years earlier none had.[4] Deliver Value in the Data Economy (2022) observes that the trade in data is still taking its first steps and recalls that the comparable economy of programming interfaces took about a decade to succeed.[6] And Generative AI in a Nutshell dates the present wave to November 2022, when a chatbot built on a large language model gained a million users in five days and a hundred million within two months.[7]

37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation is a former chief architect's account of the role. Architects, it concedes, are thought by many to be overpaid residents of an ivory tower, and yet they are among the most sought-after people in IT as traditional enterprises try to change, while many of the most successful digital companies have excellent architecture and no architects at all. The book defines the role by what it is not, a firefighter, a senior developer, a project manager or a scientist, and proposes a test of an architect's value: whether the systems are still running and still able to absorb change five years on. Counting decisions would be the wrong measure, since avoiding a decision can be as much the architect's work as making one; architecture needs thought, which does not fit into half-hour slots between emergencies; and where a scientist tends to make things more complex, the architect's task is to make complex things easy to understand. Senior architects work at three levels, defining the IT strategy, which includes retiring old systems, governing the landscape of systems and delivering projects so as to stay grounded in reality. Its central image is the lift in a tall building. In a large organisation the people who hold the relevant knowledge are often not the people empowered to decide, and the architect is the one who rides between the board room and the engine room, explaining technology upstairs without losing the essence and translating the business strategy into technical decisions downstairs. Since the job is to move people, the book adds, an architect must be able to tell a story.[2]

The frameworks are several. Lean Enterprise Architecture presents enterprise architecture as a practice driven by value, in chapters that can be read separately,[10] and The Cybernetic Enterprise (2025), by one of the same authors, is an operating model for organisations that have adopted agile methods and still adapt slowly as a whole.[11] All Hands on Tech gathers current ideas about the structure of teams, domains, platforms and data into a guide for those who lead technology organisations.[12] Crossing the Chasm with Wardley Maps (2025) is about introducing one technique of strategic mapping to a team.[13] BizTech Evolution (2025) looks across the boundary of the firm, at the relation between organisations and the technology providers that serve them, and argues for moving from transactions to alliances.[14]

Cloud Strategy warns its readers that they will finish with more questions than they began with, and counts that a benefit, since better questions lead to decisions that fit an organisation's own situation where a framework followed by numbers does not. Much of the material written about the cloud, it says, is centred on products or promises benefits without saying how they are obtained, which puts the technology cart before the enterprise horse. The swarm of fish on its cover, shaped like one large fish, is there to say that the sum of the parts has a shape and a dynamic of its own, as a complex architecture does. Its own starting point is that the role of IT in the enterprise is changing, that organisations which grew up with the cloud think and work differently from those migrating to it, and that adopting the cloud because everyone else does is no basis for a strategy: an organisation needs to know why it is moving and what success would look like, and to accept that there is no stable end point. Several chapters close with lists of things to do and to avoid.[3]

Platform Strategy, by the same author, begins from the observation that the word platform is overloaded, and sets out to say what distinguishes a platform from the frameworks and shared services that came before, when something deserves the name and how it brings benefit; cloud services, it notes, are platforms themselves, as are the internal platforms that speed up a company's developers, the data platforms on which it makes decisions and, beneath them all, the internet. Its cover carries a jellyfish, an animal of some complexity that is well coordinated without a central nervous system. Its parts are addressed to different readers, executives being invited to skip the technical ones. The author records that the book was written without generative AI.[4] Building Software Platforms (2022) is a guide to building internal platforms on one cloud provider's managed services, written for software companies that are moving to selling their products as services paid for by use. An internal platform helps, on its account, by offering developers curated building blocks that they can serve themselves, leaving them free to work on what customers value. Its introduction includes a lesson in timing: one provider's service for running code without managing servers, launched in 2008, failed because developers were not ready for it, and a rival's later one came to lead the market by meeting them where they were.[15]

Older systems are the harder part. Modern Applications Strategy (2025) is about choosing which applications to modernise and how, tying the choice to business goals and comparing strategies that begin from different technical foundations.[16] Modernizing Legacy Software with AI (2026) is a technical leader's playbook for doing such work with AI-assisted development,[17] and a course, Microservices Masterclass (2026), covers the design of systems as small independent services and its common traps.[18] Reimagine, Don't Retrofit (2026) states a rule for every such shift: organisations first bolt a new capability onto their existing processes, and the ones that thrive are those that stop bolting and start redesigning.[19]

Digital Transformation and Product Culture ties the transformation of a traditional company to the management of digital products. A digital company is one that could not exist without its technology, as a search company could not exist without its search software. In such a company, it says, product management sits at the centre and defines much of the strategy; in a traditional one the technology people are seen as enablers, usually gathered in what is called the digital team, and must earn their place by showing what technology can do for the business. It lists the benefits on offer as closer relations with customers, data from which to learn, innovation through rapid experiment, and faster and better processes through automation, and its examples come largely from the Brazilian market, where its author led the transformation of a property company.[1]

The rest of the product shelf fills in the craft. Product Management (2020) follows a digital product through its life from innovation to retirement. Its sample takes up a question that large organisations often get wrong, the difference between a product manager and the Product Owner of a Scrum team, and answers that they are two sides of one coin, the what and the how of a development team's work, since nobody can order a backlog without knowing the goals of the business and of the users. A company that has divided the roles between two people should not conclude that it has staff to spare, the author adds; more probably another role, such as product marketing, is missing.[20] Digital products leadership (2020) is about the head of product and the teams that role directs,[21] and Startup Guide (2020) is about creating a software product that pays its way.[22] API Product Management (2021) applies the same thinking to products offered through programming interfaces.[23]

Quintessence argues that an organisation's effectiveness depends not on its structure or its processes but on the assumptions and beliefs its people hold in common, which most would call its culture. The book is a map of an ideal software development organisation drawn in beliefs instead of methods. Its account of why change is hard is that such beliefs interlock: to challenge one is to make the others tighten their grip, so that only coordinated intervention at several points at once can displace the set. The values it proposes for the ideal organisation are three: to attend to people's needs, to nurture an environment in which good relationships can form, and to make nonviolence an institution. The author, writing from some forty years in the field and from running a software house, is candid that a book is unlikely to do more than arouse curiosity, since a change of perspective rarely comes from the experience of others.[5]

Other books work at the level of structure. The Modern (IT) Organisation (2018) describes an enterprise that is agile from corporate strategy to the release of software.[24] Organisational Plasticity (2021) defines its subject as the ability to change an organisation's structures and processes quickly and without much trauma,[25] Dynamic Reteaming (2019) treats the changing membership of teams as something to be done on purpose,[26] and User Needs Mapping (2025) offers a visual method for aligning teams around the needs of those they serve.[27] Living Complexity (2022) is a catalogue of practices for teams whose problems do not yield to linear methods,[28] and Problem? What Problem? (2020) is about the obstacles that slow teams down, within the team and beyond it.[8]

Two satires stand as a warning. Scaled Agile DevOps Maturity Framework (2026) is the mock manual of an invented framework which, unlike other transformation frameworks, does not ask the organisation to change,[29] and The Incredible Story of Deft (2nd ed.) (2025) is a novel about improvement methods sold as cures for everything.[30]

Deliver Value in the Data Economy is written for the business side. Data, it says, is ceasing to be a by-product and becoming an article of trade, a product or a service, and value is created less inside single organisations than in networks that cross industries. It treats the opening of public data as a force that enlarges the market and turns data into a commodity, interchangeable and traded like grain, gold or oil, and the programming interface as the means by which data and services are offered to outsiders.[6] Elements of Data Strategy defines the work of the data strategist in three phases, due diligence, design and delivery,[31] and How to do things with data (2025) asks what data does in an organisation and how a business becomes one that is driven by it.[32] Getting Started with Data is the primer for everyone else.[33]

On artificial intelligence Generative AI in a Nutshell begins with definitions. AI is not new, since the recommendation of a video and the approval of a card payment are both its work; generative AI produces new content where the older kind found or classified what existed; and a large language model is generative AI that communicates in ordinary language, which is why anyone could use it without being a programmer. The architecture behind such models was introduced in a research paper of 2017, and because the products built on them keep overtaking one another, the book refers to them all by one collective term instead of naming a favourite.[7] Reliable Generative AI (2026) is concerned with making such work repeatable and safe, through the design of prompts, retrieval, evaluation and governance.[34]

Beneath the strategy lies the running of the business. Business Process Modeling, Management, and Mining (2021) is a set of illustrated lecture notes on modelling processes, mining them from data, improving and automating them.[35] IT Asset Management (2025) argues that the management of IT assets, which many technical executives think a dull and low-grade task, is a concern for senior management.[36] Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Field Guide (2026) is a field guide for customers implementing one vendor's cloud system for accounts and operations, a kind of software that has traditionally been sold and installed through partners.[37] Building SharePoint Online Intranets (2025) does the same for an intranet,[38] and On Defining Quality Engineering (2022) proposes quality engineering as the discipline that lets software be delivered fast without losing quality.[39]

Two books look at particular sectors. A Guide To The Future Of Hospitals (2026) considers how hospitals may be designed and run as digital health moves routine care outside their walls,[40] and Rethinking Capital Project Delivery (2026) argues that the delivery of refineries, power plants and other capital projects should become iterative; one of its forewords recalls engineers objecting that a project is not a conveyor belt, and the reply that the teams passing through it are.[9]