Digital Trailblazer

Chapter 10Transforming Beyond Crisis and Becoming a Digital Trailblazer

This should feel like a routine flight, but it isn't. As the plane pulls from the gate, I look out the window and am grateful for the on‐time departure. It's cold and raining outside, and my mind is wandering between what I just worked on with a client and what I need to focus on when I arrive home in Westchester County, New York.

We were supposed to decide the agenda and select attendees for a workshop to align the incident management, site reliability engineers, and development teams. The organization has many technology operation incidents, not enough time to perform adequate root cause analysis, and the developers resolve too few problems with code fixes. The leadership team is numb to the frequency of bridge calls, the techno‐jargon exchanged during them, and the time required to restore services.

The workshop we're planning begins with reviewing the end‐to‐end process for managing major incidents. We expect to assign roles and responsibilities, define protocols, and make these calls run more efficiently. More importantly, we want to reconsider the severity levels set to incidents, map out a closed‐loop process for root cause analysis, and define with the engineering team how they resolve defects.

But we didn't do any of the prep work for this workshop and had to call an audible. Instead, we updated business continuity plans, developed contingency communications, and finalized an order for new laptops. ...