Author – Daniel Rowles and Thomas Brown

Book discussed – 22 January 2019

Review by – Mae Keary

This book serves as a wakeup call for organizations who use digital tools and are finding it difficult to manage their integration into the business culture.  It is readable and the language easy to understand, which makes it a practical book for users at all levels.  

It starts with a useful introduction to digital transformation, followed by an exploration of how to make it happen, and identify things you need to consider based on a structured framework.  

There is an early chapter on why organizations fail at digital, but how or where to start with building a digital culture is only mentioned in later chapters of the book, and those stages seem to come too late.  

Plotting the digital journey is helpful, but the digital culture audit is not probing enough.  The nugget of the book is the digital culture framework, which brings all the requirements together with good use of highlighted areas to expand on topics discussed in the text, plus useful case studies to help the serious reader.  

The authors set out to help us understand the digital transformation process and although the brevity of the text makes it a compact book to read, it may not be so helpful if you were setting out to implement it within your organization.  What it does is to improve awareness and to encourage organizations to embrace change.