I love this time of year in the United States when we have a brief pause
from our complex lives and get the chance to break bread with family and
friends. Thanksgiving means a lot more for me this year, but I will have to
leave the story on why for another time.
Long-time fans of my blog will remember some of my other Thanksgiving posts
– two of the 1,000 articles I just celebrated. (See the
1000’th post here).
My first and favorite came in 2013, where I shared a
CIO top ten guide to preparing a Thanksgiving feast, and last year, I gave a
huge thanks to my fantastic Digital Trailblazer supporters. My post from two years ago on
five ways to thank teams driving digital transformation
is still very relevant.
Three reflections on giving thanks in 2023
This year, I’m electing to share how other
Digital Trailblazers
are reflecting over the last year and where they express their gratitude.
Knowledge, learning, innovation, and talent are common themes.
1. Thank the team
“What I’m most grateful for is our highly skilled, dedicated, and devoted
data office team. The data mesh environment we’ve created here within
Collibra, the data office, is the center of enablement with the mission to
educate and empower people as data citizens with data literacy skills,
processes, and self-service technology. Data citizens can understand, trust,
and consume data for fact-based decision-making, and can build, curate, and
connect data as products that drive measurable value at scale.” – Jay
Militscher, Vice President, Data & Analytics,
Collibra.
2. Reflect on innovation opportunities
“This holiday season, I’m thankful to work in an industry that fosters
evolution and innovation. While our industry continues to suffer a talent
shortage, organizations are finding ways to make their staff more efficient
through tools like no-code platforms for detection rule and automated
response design, and recently, the explosion of generative AI tooling that
decreases toil and helps increase analyst efficiency. cybersecurity threats
evolve, thankfully, so does our tooling, and there’s always something new to
learn to keep the job interesting.” – Mike Laramie, Associate CTO, Security
at
SADA
3. Celebrate the democratization of knowledge
“Every time we make a step towards better and wider access to knowledge, we
should be very thankful and celebrate it. People in high tech love the word
democratization and eliminating silos, and as an industry, we have made huge
strides in achieving these goals. It was the year when the category of data
cloud (with Snowflake as the category leader) was established once and for
all. The dream of one place to store and query all your data became more
real. We moved from data storage/compute to data clouds. This is truly the
end of data silos.” – Nikolaos Vasiloglou, VP of Research ML at
RelationalAI.
Thanks to my event and lifelong learning partners
In last week’s 1,000th post, I shared
three time-tested lessons for digital transformation leaders. I ended the post thanking the many people who contribute and are fans of
the
Coffee with Digital Trailblazers
event I host on LinkedIn on Fridays at 11 am ET.
Today, I want to thank the many people and organizations who invited me to
speak at their in-person and virtual events.
Thanks to AJCU-CITM, Aterian Partners, Atos, BigPanda, Binghamton
University, Boomi, CDP.com, CIOChat, CIO Professional Network, Cockroach DB,
Coveo, Creatio,
CXOTalk, C-Vision, Deloitte On Cloud Podcast, Depaul Innovation Lab, DisrupTV,
Edgevana,
Evan Kirstel B2B TechFluencer, Foundry, GDS, Higher Gear CIO Forum, InterVision, Isos Technology,
Ivanti, LaunchDarkly, Landmark Ventures, Lenovo,
Mayfield CXOs,
National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD), nGage ETx, Nova
Southeastern University, OpenText, OpsRamp, Mission.org, PrivOps, Quickbase,
Resolve, RedZone 10X CIO Innovation Community, Rubrik, Siemens low-code
podcast, Society of Information Management (SIM), SINC USA, Something Extra
Podcast, Subscription Insider, #TimTalk, Yates SparkCXO, Talend, The Cube,
TreasureData, ToroCloud, UC Irvine Center for Digital Transformation,
Windward Consulting, and others!
In the list above, I linked to three recent appearances where I discussed
generative AI, digital transformation, and CIO leadership. If you haven’t
seen the CXOTalk episode with Michael Krigsman, Tim Crawford, and me on the
CIO Playbook for Enterprise AI, you definitely shouldn’t miss it. Watch
below.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Join us for a future session of
Coffee with Digital Trailblazers, where we discuss topics for aspiring transformation leaders. If you enjoy
my thought leadership, please sign up for the
Driving Digital Newsletter and read all about my transformation stories in
Digital Trailblazer.
Digital Trailblazers! Join us Fridays at 11am ET for a live audio discussion on digital
transformation topics: innovation, product management, agile, DevOps,
data governance, and more!
