"Digitalization" and "digital transformation" are more than headlines — they are projects someone has to lead. This book takes you from a general awareness of the terms to the working knowledge of a director running such projects.
You will learn why the leader's role is decisive, and how to carry a team through change rather than around it. Because however much data and technology are involved, people remain the heart of digitalization.
Inside the Book
1. The Starting Point: What You Are Actually Dealing With
Automation, digitalization, digital transformation — three words that are used interchangeably and mean very different things. This chapter draws the line between them, shows the stages a company passes through, and spells out where the business value actually comes from. You will also see which digital competencies a company needs before it starts, what new business models become possible, and which risks are worth taking seriously.
2. The Technology Landscape, Explained Without the Jargon
IoT and IIoT, machine learning and neural networks, big data, cloud services, digital platforms, AR and VR, blockchain, machine vision, RPA, 3D printing, data lakes and warehouses — each one with its real strengths, its real limitations, and the author's own verdict from practice. The same chapter maps the IT systems you will be pitched: ERP, MES, APS, PLM/PDM, CRM, SCADA, EAM, BIM, MDM, WMS, SCM, BPM, BI, and more, plus the architecture choices that tie them together. The goal is not to make you a technologist, but to let you hold your own in any conversation with a vendor or an IT director.
3. Stories From the Field
Thirteen real projects, told with the outcomes and the mistakes intact: a new business model for a fertilizer producer, an asset management system rollout, predictive analytics for power generation equipment, digitalization in retail and in banking, HSE implementation, a last-mile delivery startup, digital technology in residential real estate — and the case where Google Sheets simply worked better than a full-blown ERP.
4. Why Digitalization Projects Fail
Seven recurring causes, from the absence of a shared understanding of goals and technologies, to missing soft and hard skills in the IT team, to a weak culture of working with data and processes, to the plain fact that many employees lack basic digital literacy. Read this chapter as a checklist against your own organization.
5. Leading Change — the Deciding Factor
The core argument of the book: digitalization is about people and processes first, technology second. Here you get the working toolkit — the change perception curve and the real reasons people resist, PDCA, ADKAR, Kotter, Lewin, the Kübler-Ross curve, McKinsey 7-S, Beckhard and Harris, Moore's curve, the DICE method, spiral dynamics of organizational culture, coaching and mentoring — with a clear view of which tool fits which situation.
6. Business and the State
RegTech and SupTech explained in practical terms: how regulators are becoming digital, what that means for your reporting and your risks, and how open government data can be turned into a business advantage — with concrete examples.
7. Recommendations: How to Start Small and Still Get Results
A step-by-step algorithm for rolling out digital initiatives rationally: setting a global goal and a roadmap everyone can see, forming the team and its key roles, digitizing processes and structuring data, betting on the 10% of innovators, building feedback loops, and using free tools before buying expensive ones. The closing chapter adds the disciplines that make it all hold together — theory of constraints, lean, project and product management, management psychology.