Articles & Guides
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Essays, playbooks, and reflections on AI, digital transformation, leadership, industries, and life in the digital bubble.
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The Seven Deadly Sins of the Legacy CIO (3/8): 2.Envy—Outsourced Thinking
Envy in technology leadership rarely appears as jealousy. It looks like outsourced thinking when leaders stop trusting their own judgment and their teams and start using outside frameworks, benchmarks, and consulting models to make decisions about strategy.
The Seven Deadly Sins of the Legacy CIO (2/8): 1. Pride—The Prestige Project
Pride is one of the legacy CIO sins and typically doesn’t appear as arrogance. It looks like an attachment to a visible change program that is difficult to question. When leaders lack clarity, they make slower decisions, misuse resources, and silently divert off course with digital transformation.
The Seven Deadly Sins of the Legacy CIO (1/8): Introduction
How outdated technology leadership sabotages digital transformation—and how a 700-year-old framework explains why. I first read Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy many years ago, long before digital transformation became one of the most popular corporate concepts. Dante...
Innovation in the Sky’s Blind Spot
The spaces between technologies are where real innovation happens. Levitate Aerospace has found one of those gaps in the sky, where drones and helicopters meet. The company is changing the way that large-scale monitoring, digitization, and management of critical infrastructure corridors can be done by combining lighter-than-air flight with advanced sensing and data platforms.
Digital Minimalism for Enterprises (3/3): Building a Stop-Doing Operating Model
The majority of businesses keep thorough backlogs for construction. New AI pilots, new features, and new integrations. Roadmaps are structured. Committees for investments are organized. Pipelines for deliveries are optimized. However, most companies do not keep a backlog for stopping.
Digital Minimalism for Enterprises (2/3): Meeting Inflation Is an Architectural Problem
Meeting overload is typically handled as a disciplinary matter in organizations. It is an architectural signal as seen by a CIO. Meetings increase to make up for fragmented systems, conflicting metrics, and unclear decision rights. The architecture is the real issue, not the calendar.
Digital Minimalism for Enterprises (1/3): Why Enterprises Must Stop Adding Tools
Every big transformation starts with good intentions. But when progress turns into accumulation, digital transformation quietly becomes digital clutter. A new platform for working together promises to make it easy to work together. A new analytics dashboard says it...
Designing the Digital Nerve System: A Blueprint for Multi-Plant Manufacturing
A lot of manufacturers have one or two “lighthouse” plants, but they have a hard time getting that knowledge to all of their plants. This article gives a practical plan for making a digital nerve system that links several factories. The system should have a common language, common capabilities, and a secure data backbone so that improvements made in one factory can be used in all of them.
The Invisible Factory: Using IT to See Every Euro of Waste Before It Happens
There are two factories in every plant: the one that everyone can see and the one that no one can see, which is made up of micro-stops, normal scrap, hidden energy waste, and engineers looking for data. This article explains how thinking of IT as the nervous system of a manufacturing company can make that factory visible and help you save money.
From Cost Center to Nervous System: How IT Can Rewire a Manufacturing Company
In a lot of manufacturing companies, IT is still seen as a cost center that keeps things running. In fact, it has become the organization’s nervous system, sensing what happens in the plants, linking data across sites, and helping people make better choices. This article talks about how a well-designed IT “nervous system” can cut down on downtime and change the way factories work.
If Your Factory Could Talk, This Is What It Would Say About Your IT Strategy
A modern plant looks completely “digital” from the outside. From the inside, most factories still see AI as isolated pilots, broken data, and IT plans that end at the firewall. This article imagines what your factory would say in 2026 if it could be honest about your IT strategy. It also talks about what leaders need to do to create a real digital nervous system for manufacturing.
Confessions of a Head of IT: What I Wish Every CEO Knew About AI Projects
It seems like AI is a success story from the outside, since almost every company says they are “using AI.” As the Head of IT, the truth is more complicated from the inside. In this article, I talk about five real problems with AI projects in 2026, from the zoo of tools we’ve made to the lack of a human operating system. I also talk about what CEOs and boards really need to do to fix things.