Digital Transformation: Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction

Thomas M. Siebel,  Digital Transformation: Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction, RosettaBooks, 2019.

From visionary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tom Siebel comes a penetrating examination of the new technologies that are disrupting business and government--and how organizations can harness them to transform into digital enterprises.

The confluence of four technologies--elastic cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things --writes Siebel, is fundamentally changing how business and government will operate in the 21st century.

Siebel masterfully guides readers through a fascinating discussion of the game-changing technologies driving digital transformation and provides a roadmap to seize them as a strategic opportunity. He shows how leading enterprises such as Enel, 3M, Royal Dutch Shell, the U.S. Department of Defense, and others are applying AI and IoT with stunning results.

Digital Transformation is the guidebook every business and government leader needs to survive and thrive in the new digital age. 

 CNBC, Billionaire Tech CEO Tom Siebel on digital transformation, 2019年7月9日

David McCann, A 10-Step Plan for Digitally Transforming a Company, CFO, June 27, 2019.

1. Marshall the CXO team as the digital transformation engine. A leadership team committed to the digital agenda is “an absolute requirement and a first priority,” Siebel writes. But don’t take that to mean that the CEO or CMO will suddenly be writing code, he adds. Rather, the leaders must know what opportunities digital transformation can open up and how to differentiate the company’s digital efforts from others.

2. Appoint a chief digital officer with authority and budget. This person’s primary role is chief evangelist and enabler of the transformation. He or she needs to have, or be able to establish, strong relationships throughout the organization “to help business line leaders transform their processes.”

3. Work incrementally to get wins and capture business value. This consists of three simple pieces of advice: (1) Don’t get caught up in endless and complicated approaches to unifying data. (2) Build use cases that generate measurable economic benefit first, and solve the IT challenges later. (3) Consider a phased approach to projects, “where you can deliver demonstrable ROI one step at a time, in less than a year.”

4. Forge a strategic vision in parallel, and get going. “Map out your industry’s full value chain, and then identify steps of this value chain that have been, or that you expect to become, digitized. This will help you understand where your gaps are.”

5. Draft a digital transformation roadmap and communicate it to others. Clearly define a future vision for your digital business. “What does your ideal future state look like in terms of your organizational structure, people and leadership, product and services, culture, and adoption of technology? Use this ideal future state to compare against your current state.”

6. Pick your partners carefully. “In a digitally transforming world, partners play a bigger role than in the past.” Management consultants can help flesh out a company’s AI strategy. Software partners can provide the right technology stack to power a digital transformation. Professional services partners can help build advanced AI applications.

7. Focus on economic benefit. “If you can’t identify projects for digital transformation that will return significant economic value within one year, keep looking. The market is moving too rapidly.”

8. Create a transformative culture of innovation. Even if the CEO has a clear vision of what needs to happen to transform the company, senior management, middle management, and rank-and-file employees must also fully understand it. The right culture rewards collaboration, hard work, and continuous learning.

9. Re-educate the leadership team. “Face the facts. Your organization does not have the skills today to succeed at this effort…. A majority of what you will be told about AI and digital transformation is sheer poppycock delivered by self-proclaimed experts…. You need to be able to distinguish signal from noise.”

10. Continually re-educate the workforce. “It is impractical to think about replacing your workforce with a new, qualified team. But you can train them.”

Management philosophy of Thomas M. Siebel

Siebel is a proponent of building a “self-learning corporate culture” that motivates employees to continue their education on the job. C3.ai offers cash awards of $1,000 to $1,500 to employees for each course they complete from a curated Coursera curriculum.[32] In 2019, Siebel initiated a program at C3.ai that pays 100 percent of the costs for employees to complete an online master's degree of computer science (MCS) program from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Employees who complete the MCS degree receive a salary increase of 15 percent, a cash bonus of $25‚000, and additional stock options.[33]

Susan Adams, Billionaire Tom Siebel Is Offering His Employees The Most Generous Education Benefit Ever, Forbes, Jun 5, 2019.

More than a third of the company’s employees already have advanced degrees. Siebel says he expects a range of employees to be eager to try for the computer science degree, everyone from software engineers to customer service staffers.