Driving Digital

Driving Digital, The Leader's Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology by Isaac Sacolick, AMACOM 2017

What should a digital exec do with his old-school IT department?  Even companies that have moved to the web with cheaper "pay as you go" solutions - vs. licensing - are challenged by what to do with maintenance and updates.  And for a manufacturing company, eco's and machine updates are absolutely production killers.  

Some companies, for as long as their budgets allow, maintain "parallel staffs" - in-house IT people to deal with in-house problems, plus a strong connection to their software provider's IT team.  Many manufacturers are maintaining a painful mix of legacy systems hot-wired to new apps.  And some, Heaven rest their souls, shut off their computers back in the Lean Frenzy, believers who want to produce high volumes of complex products with white boards, electronic kanban and bare bones IT - Bill of Materials and incoming materials plus shipments.  What happens in between receiving and shipping is up for grabs and the purview of expeditors.  Its a scary sight. 

But Sacolick says there is another way, surefire digital.  His most valuable point in this book, aside from numerous corporate illustrative examples, is his emphasis on deciding what kind of data must be collected and the best, or most effective tools to go about doing that.  For manufacturers, this has quickly become the conundrum limiting the kind of IT decision-making that will take us forward - what do we need and where do we get it?  Sadly, when manufacturing unplugged the computers and decided to go all visual and all lean, they guaranteed the death of critical IT infrastructure, the loss of "corporate IT intelligence" that would take us back into an integrated world.  Sacolick's book goes a long way toward bringing it all back together.  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, pemoody@aol.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, tricia@patriciaemoody.com,