Changing Mindsets: The Missing Ingredient to Digital Transformation

If It’s Not Working, Change Your Mindset

For many years, I’ve studied how organizations think about and use their own, in-house software to run their business and achieve their goals. Successful, high-performing organizations rely on software for their day-to-day operations. For these organizations, software is the primary engine of business innovation: delivery in retail, telemedicine, autonomous vehicles, and new methods of banking. These organizations think about software like toothpaste. Well, like a toothpaste company would think about toothpaste: their primary product, the thing that is the business and deserves considered attention and innovation. Better software keeps those organizations sparkling clean and fresh.

Joking-by-analogy aside, by “software,” I mean the custom-written apps and services used for internal functions and customer-facing apps as well. More broadly, when I talk about how an organization “does software,” what I’m talking about is the complete, end-to-end process, set of tools, processes, and infrastructure used to govern, build, run, and manage all that software.

This all-in set of practices, governance, stages, and tools goes by many names: a value stream,¹ a build pipeline, a supply chain, or, as I prefer to call it, a path to production.

As I’ve discussed in my previous two reports—Monolithic Transformation and The Business Bottleneck—using software as the primary enabler of how ...