In 
This issue’s cover story is mostly (not fully) based on my research on digital transformation journey in selected companies within some of the largest groups in India—Tata, Mahindra & Mahindra and Vedanta/Sterlite.
When I spoke with people leading transformation as well as with some other CXOs, I realized what they talked about digital transformation and what I had heard till then, largely from CIOs were two completely different things.
While most CIOs talk about the need to understand business, most CDOs and transformation heads talk about culture and change management. While CIOs give examples of projects, the transformation head illustrate their points with examples related to training, reorganization and process transformation.
Continuously scanning tech landscape to identify new technologies that have the potential to create value for the business figures as one of the most important tasks in the digital journey, in the discourse among the CDO community. In the enterprise IT circle, such managers are pooh-poohed as those lacking ‘in-depth’ knowledge.
Four nine or five nine is the holy grail of CIOs while the transformation heads talk of failure in the same breath as the initiatives—with a smile!
And both the communities are talking sense: as far as their jobs go. A CIO has to ensure that business as usual does not get impacted even slightly. If it does, a company may lose millions in a matter of minutes. A CDO has the mandate to disrupt. By definition, his successful project will cannibalize the existing business.
So, no one is right or wrong. But if you want to lead digital transformation, you have to get out of the CIO mindset. You cannot run transformation with your CIO mindset the same way a disruptor in charge of a mission-critical data center may become a disaster.
Good thing is, unlike some of the impatient marketing guys of yesteryears, most of the people driving transformation have a healthy respect for the enterprise IT guys. They do understand that without enterprise IT running the business well, they cannot afford to do the experiments. They also realize that many of the execution will require the expertise and skills of CIO and his team.
So, the importance of enterprise IT is not diminished at all. However, if you want to get into driving digital, you need to change.
How? Well, read the story.
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