Month: July 2017

Roads & Kingdoms is an independent journal of food, politics, travel and culture. In its second year of existence, it was voted the Gold Winner for Best Travel Journalism Site by the Society of American Travel Writers. The magazine first launched in Myanmar as a Tumblr that became a home for reports on everything from Burmese civil war to dissident MCs to the perils of rancid crab. R&K is now a fulltime digital magazine based in New York and Barcelona, publishing longform dispatches, interviews and global ephemera daily.

Source: Roads & Kingdoms’ editors, colleagues and crew

There’s been an ongoing discussion of “Digital Transformation” for at least the last 5 years. Before that, I remember being in Silicon Valley with the senior leadership team of a Fortune 500 company in 2007 explaining the wave of change that was about to hit most organizations, but not having the catchy phrase back then. We just knew it was going to be big, it was caused by “digital” and just about everything was going to undergo some sort of transformation.

In the intervening years the phrase “Digital Transformation” has become a catch-all for too many things. In general, it seems like most agencies and organizations are using it to mean, essentially, “all the digital shit we gotta get moving on faster so we don’t get left behind”.

Look past the jargon and go to the roots of where the phrase came from; there’s a lot of really good thinking about Digital Transformation that will be useful for your own efforts to drive change in your organization.

• The Nine Elements of Digital Transformation – This is a summary/overview from the authors of a much more in-depth piece (see below). However, this one has a really important focus on the customer experience.
• Digital Transformation: A Roadmap for Billion Dollar Organizations – This whitepaper from CapGemini/MIT was the first one that made me wake up in a cold sweat, thinking “holy crap, this is going to require a much bigger enterprise effort than i thought. ” Before i read this, i was really just focused on the functional area i was leading. After this, i realized how integrated the “digital” effort needed to be throughout the organization.
• Nine Questions to Help You Get Your Digital  Transformation Right – This article is new to me, but it’s focus on key cultural changes – budgeting, cross-team/cross-partner collaboration, customer centricity – is right on.
• What Digital Transformation Really Means – More of a thoughtful analysis of the term and some analysis about what it *really* means by ITWorld. Really like the focus on “fungibility” and the emphasis on adaptability. Not much use for building your own roadmap, though.
• What Does Digital Transformation Really Mean (Marketing Week) – This is written for marketers and provides a good overview of the concept and, more importantly, actionable advice about how to get senior leader buy-in.
• 5 Disruptors to Marketing: Part 1 – Digital Transformation – This article is from the perspective of Marketing, but it’s a good overview of how “digital transformation” is creating organizational confusion as functional areas grapple with core, existential questions like “Who is accountable for the customer experience?” or “Who should be the owner of product management” when so much of the product is digital?
• Altimeter’s 2014 Update on Digital Transformation – They’re all over this topic (here’s the 2016 doc), but i found this 2014 report especially helpful when talking with clients about what was happening inside their own organization. (interesting side note: In the old days of “social media”, i had kind of dismissed Brian Solis as a kind of gadfly – maybe it was the monocle – but i’ve come to respect his take on what’s happening inside of large organizations via Altimeter).
• The Future of CPG: Moving from Analog to Digital – Close to my CPG experience, this Accenture article is useful for helping marketers to understand that digital goes way, way beyond marketing.

I’m hoping to add a couple more articles here over as time goes by.

By the end of 2017 we expect the first transactions to be made on the Propy Registry. Each title transfer will require Propy Utility Tokens (PRO) for processing and validation. Furthermore, we’re negotiating with several governments to accept the title deed issued by our distributed registry as legal proof of ownership. Thus, growing the ecosystem by involving more governments and real estate companies will increase the usage of PRO tokens. A limited number of tokens — 100 million — will be created.

Source: The First Token Sale in Real Estate – Hacker Noon

It’s cool to see companies like this one. Its a pure infrastructure play, providing tools to help you run your organization with blockchain based tools.

Backfeed develops governance schemes and economic models for decentralized organizations, enabling a true collaborative economy using blockchain technologies.

Source: Backfeed | Spreading Consensus