Matthias Schrader

Without prejudice, this book is as close as it gets to a "digital transformation roadmap cookbook" and... reference book

Meaning: the author is not just a researcher, but serial e-startupper, and this book contains also a summary of what is on the digital transformation "concepts market" (as often any consultant or author tries to "push" her/his own concepts as "the" concept, such as summary is useful for anybody trying to find a supplier to support them in the long journey).

Eventually, his company became in 2017 part of Accenture, and this book was closed one month after that ownership change.

So, you can take it as both a manifesto and a guideline- but there is no pushing for services.

It is in German but even the author states that the book is actually written in "Denglish", a blend of German and English, as while talking about the digital economy, translating is betraying.

If you read books about "digital transformation", expect a significant amount of cross-references, overlaps, and cross-citations.

Frankly, the first two sections ("PROLOG" and "CASUAL ECONOMY") are probably not so interesting for those willing to use the book as a guideline- but those two sections could actually be more than useful to interact with business decision makers who might not be aware that digital transformation isn't just a matter of technology.

Or: with any paradigm shift, you have first to understand where you are and why the new paradigm is so different from your own- by looking at examples of adopters who actually were "natively digital", before moving onto those that embraced it.

The third section, "CODE", brings you to the key elements of the proposed approach, i.e. accepting that by creating products and services for the new socio-economical environment (not just for Millennials, also for those interacting with them), you lose a bit of control, compress the time between product releases and enhancements (not just in software: look at how cars are increasingly churning out new models, almost adopting a "fashion" lifecycle), and... embed your customers within the product and service (re)design activities.

Many books talk about "ecosystems", but then fail to explain what that means- and how it is built, as if that were a "fog of war" decision-making paradigm.

Instead, the author gives some useful concepts by adopting concepts from the software industry into organizational transformation, e.g. concepts such as "API" (ways to interact between different entities"), a little bit as in the early 1990s, when I was selling methodologies and explaining the "context" concept, but by recycling experience from politics and not from software.

Digital transformation requires designing products and services that have to be also to "grow with the market", and deliver also what Rifkin calls "marginal cost zero": even when delivering a physical produc, if the product is "intelligent" enough, beside the initial investment, you will get a product whose value added is actually generated by the additional services that the data allows, and maybe derived additional services.

Then, the "PLAYBOOK" section instead is a nice summary and structuring of various concepts that you probably heard of, but structured as a step-by-step (better: cycle-by-cycle) approach.

Probably, some of the material is exoteric, also if I liked it (e.g. the "Product field" approach), and can be easily replaced by others that you are already familiar with.

But it is worth reading this session also for an added bonus: a list of "concepts" that are common in the "digital transformation" industry, with a short commented bibliography for each concept.

Incidentally: most of the book references are anyway in English (and I will share some of my reviews soon)

[review posted on LibraryThing.com on 2018-05-14]… (meer)