What on earth is a #digital agenda – were we using quills and paper before? #GoingDigital #Disruption

For a while now there has been a lot of talk about the Digital Agenda, Going Digital, Digital Journey, etc, etc

I got quite annoyed – weren’t we already digital?  I believed it was yet another rebranding of the “Paperless Office” or the like rather than something that I really needed to know about or understand.

It wasn’t until last year that I really got to grips with what it really meant, and managed to cut through the PR machine and the bull that I was getting from people.  I realised that it was something that quite a lot of people don’t understand – and its one of the greatest threats to heritage IT for many years.

I had been having conversations with people in IT and I was hearing “Its all about digital, if you aren’t doing digital, then, well, what are you doing?!”.  Probing a little further into their knowledge it transpired that they had little or now understanding of what “going digital” meant.

It seemed everyone was doing it, everyone knew what they were doing when they were doing it and I was the only one who hadn’t and / or wasn’t… sounds like being back at college.  And just like college it was all crap and know one person really knew what to do, what it was or how to do it – and very, very few were actually doing it.

So what has lead me to think that Digital is a thing?

The last twelve or so months I have done nothing else than build out a cloud foundation for a large enterprise company.  We used SCRUM as well as some KanBan and a sprinkle of Waterfall for good measure.  We were delivering a capability that would enable DevOps (in this instance DevOps means a team that is capable of supporting and delivering change to a production environment).  We started to move to self healing infrastructure and as I teh cloud transitioned into the new cloud organisation the new shiny cloud was truly starting to take a hold.

During that very busy year I realised that Digital was actually an arithmetic sum of many new agendas to create something different, a new thing that has been called “Digital”.

I concluded that the Digital Agenda was actually one of the biggest threats for heritage IT that there has been for quite some time – possible ever.

My experience over the last three or so years in Agile, visual MI, Cloud, DevOps is shaping (in my mind) that the role of IT is forever going to change from now on.  Lets us not forget the Big Data and Digital Security agendas that are taking hold on everything as well.

There are people who are aware change is happening but are ignoring it, there are those that are oblivious to the digital agenda, there are those who see it coming and are embracing it.  No matter who you are, or what you do in IT, this inflection point, rubicon, etc, going to impact you if you work in IT.  You life will change and its going to happen to you and happen faster than you think.

For an IT professional, Digital is something that is coming and isn’t going away, and my fear is that over the coming years, people who have build their livelihoods in IT may not realise just what a game changer this latest disruption is going to be.

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