November 5, 2018
Book Review: Building Digital Culture A practical guide to successful digital transformation
By Daniel Rowles and Thomas Brown Published by Kogan Page, 2017
233 pages
Daniel Rowles (CEO of Target Internet and host of podcast The Digital Marketing Podcast) and Thomas Brown have delivered an excellent guide to transforming your organization to have a digital culture.
In truth, this book is a change management manual with digital culture being the focus on which the organization needs to make changes. It offers practical and useful information on how to accomplish your transformation goals and can serve as step by step guidance and blueprint for getting you started through completion.
Of course, completion is a misnomer here as the change of pace in the world mandates that digital transformation is an ongoing process. The authors do a good job explaining that companies who look to transform to become a digital company are not likely to be successful over time or will perhaps not even exist. Companies must transform to develop a digital culture which will allow for continuous transformation.
The book is written from a marketers perspective but is useful to anyone who is interested in or leading a transformation to a digital culture.
Broken down into four sections (What you need digital culture, Plotting your digital journey, The Digital Culture Framework and Keeping up with change), the bulk of the book is covered in section three, The Digital Culture Framework. And a framework it is, offering essentially a step by step process to follow. This is not to say the other section of the book are lacking. Quite the contrary, they are quite meaty and full of valuable information. Of particular usefulness is the chapter titled Why organizations really fail at digital, as to be foretold is to be forewarned
The only fault I can find with the book is that on a few occasions the text became focused on nitty gritty how to information that was not in line with the higher level directional nature of the book. Case in point the chapter Measurement gets into to some detail on Google Analytics nomenclature. Fortunately, these departures are few.
I highly recommend Building Digital Culture to anyone interested in helping transform the culture of their organization.
Additional thoughts on digital transformation from this book and eMarketer can be found in Digital Transformation: What exactly is this anyhow?