My reason for working on the book was simple: I wanted to write something really interesting; I wanted this interesting thing to inspire me as well as others; I wanted this writing to leverage my experiences in high-tech for over two decades and be useful to my readers in some unique way. For some years, I was dreaming up possible writing projects to fulfil this wish, and often lobbying some of my close friends to join me in those endeavours. I am happy to say that Dirk was one of those close friends who got quite enthused by such discussions, and when I ultimately did not launch a project from my side (for example, something like writing a book tentatively titled ‘Turning over the Pyramids’ aimed at IT transformation using today’s available technologies and practices) he (Dirk) came up with the proposal of writing this book on digital transformation.

I started out as a hard-core techie transitioning into business development and sales management roles through project and product management. I had management roles in world-leading software companies in Silicon Valley at global scale; I had also managed a couple of start-ups in the computing field. In other words, I have had the opportunity to observe and experience many changes in the high-tech sector as it evolved. In my current responsibility where I head up the cloud computing business for Capgemini, one of the largest global SIs, for all of continental Europe, I have been witnessing first-hand rapidly emerging customer needs and fast advances in technologies, along with fundamental changes in organisational behaviours capable of meeting those needs. I often do feel that strategy planners and technology practitioners face real difficulty in matching the needs with technology and practices – making an effort to ease this difficulty has been a key driver for all my book-writing projects.

Therefore, when Dirk approached me to be a co-author for this book I liked the idea at once. I had already co-authored four books in the areas of SOA, BPM and case management. However, I had the feeling that this book project would be different since one of its key goals was to make a difficult discussion simple – to offer the reader an easy read that would provide motivation and best practices to plan and execute digital transformation. I had many discussions with Dirk, formulating the goals, overall structure, and the style of the book, feeling satisfied one day, and then a few days later, with new ideas and inspirations, redoing almost all of that all over again. (Good thing that Dirk has big whiteboards with magnetic paper clips in his office.) Martin joined us halfway down the road and enriched what Dirk and I had come up with. Besides the main authors, this book has benefited immensely from valuable contributions from a long list of guest authors, each of them sharing their knowledge and experience pro bono. And, we also received a lot of high quality support for the comic strips and graphics as well as for the project management of the book.

The impact of digital technologies is already pervasive in our daily lives, altering our likes and dislikes, and changing the way we behave, buy and consume. We want to receive our products and services faster than ever before; even for fast food, we like mobile order-and-pay-ahead features as now adopted by chains like McDonalds, Starbucks, Domino’s Pizza, and Taco Bell. We reward offbeat innovations like the Amazon CEO’s idea of ‘shipping’ to the moon or Google/Alphabet’s efforts to rollout autonomous cars. Consumers, product manufacturers and service providers all think differently in the digital age. In creating this book, we also did many things differently in the way the book is organised and the way the whole book project was managed, but most importantly we set a focus on our reader being able to consume the content fast and easily (keeping with the most critical essence of digital culture, speed and ease of action).

We chose a pretty unique style to structure the book: four parts, the ‘Why’, the ‘What’ and the ‘How’ (in two parts), each containing many sections which in turn are just four pages, one of which is a cartoon – this was done to make the reading easy. However, this style also posed a real challenge. Ordinarily there seems to be so much to say on any topic in digital transformation that three pages of text often appeared too small a real-estate to fit them all in. The challenge was to distil the essence and describe it in a simple manner – at least for my chapters this meant rewriting parts of them (or the chapters that I edited substantially) more than once. In my quest to balance the important with simplicity and brevity, I was helped by Einstein’s famous quote: ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler’. It is my hope that you, the reader, will gain tangible benefit from this balancing act.