The Digital CEO:
A Dozen Years Of IT Insight
Mark Hillary and IBA Group Books 2021
All Rights Reserved
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IBA Group Books
2583/13 Petrlkova St.
Prague 5, 158 00
Czech Republic
www.ibagroupit.com
https://blog.ibagroupit.com/
IBA Group Books
2583/13 Petrlkova St.
Prague 5, 158 00
Czech Republic
www.ibagroupit.com
https://blog.ibagroupit.com/
Author portrait supplied by the author.
Cover art by:
ISBN: 979 849 034 3165
The Digital CEO:
A Dozen Years Of IT Insight
Mark Hillary and IBA Group Books 2021
The right of Mark Hillary to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claim for damages.
This book is for Renata, Joe, and Ruby...
Contents
M ark Hillary is a British technology writer and analyst, based in So Paulo, Brazil. He studied Software Engineering and has an MBA from the University of Liverpool.
Mark hosts the CX Files podcast with Peter Ryana weekly show focused on the future of customer experience. He frequently contributes to the global media, focused on technology and CX, with articles published by the BBC, Financial Times, Reuters, and Huffington Post.
Mark has written several books focused on technology. His first was titled Outsourcing to India: The Offshore Advantage published in 2004 by Springer in Germany. He co-wrote Global Services: Moving To A Level Playing Field with Dr Richard Sykes in 2007 for the British Computer Society and he translated all of Shakespeares poetry into tweets in My Tweets Are Nothing Like The Sun: William Shakespeare on Twitter.
In 2021 he has published WFH: Securing The Future For Your Organization focused on the security of working from home and GigCX: Customer Service In The Twenty-First Century, focused on the emerging cloud based contact center industry.
Mark has lectured at or chaired major conferences in five continents and has extensive university experience as a guest MBA lecturer at London South Bank University for several years.
Mark has often been asked to help ghost-write speeches and articles for technology and CX leaders globally. In this capacity he has written for ambassadors, politicians, and CEOs across the worldhelping them to deliver a clear message on the role of their company and industry.
Mark once spent a day helping Commander Neil Armstrong improve his standard going to the moon speech so he could deliver his speech with added jokes about the telecoms industryin front of 3,500 telecoms sales professionals it went fantastically well.
Mark has advised several national governments on technology policies and has advised the United Nations on the use of technology for development in Bangladesh and Nigeria.
http://bit.ly/markhillary
http://carnabysp.com
Social: @markhillary
T his book is inspired by many years of Marks cooperation with IBA. I liked the idea to combine all blog publications on the latest technologies into a book and immediately decided to support it.
Mark began writing for our blog in 2010. In the first blog post, he said: Im Mark Hillary, a writer and blogger based in London, UK, and Im going to explore some themes related to the global IT services industry on this blog.
Remarkably, he wrote about an economic crisis at that time: The past couple of years have been a trying time for anyone involved in IT services. The global economic slowdown has affected most sectors, leaving few companies in a strong position, spending on IT for the future.
The todays pandemic triggered another economic crisis. However, the difference from 20082010 is that it did not slow down but accelerated technological advancements. The world became more reliant on IT. Technology changed the way we work, learn, shop, travel, and even the way we do our households.
Eventually, Mark relocated from London to So Paulo, Brazil. In parallel, he expanded the blog portfolio to reflect technology developments. We kept suggesting the technological topics related to our software expertise, and Mark analyzed and elaborated on those .
The range and grasp of his blog posts is amazing. I know that Mark graduated from a technology university. It was in the 1990s. I joined the IT industry even earlier. In the 1970s, I used to service computers that occupied several floors. Can you imagine that one rack of 1 Megabyte RAM memory weighed one ton?
I am fortunate to be a part of the exciting process of IT development. It has been a pleasure cooperating with Mark and I would like to invite you to go on a fascinating journey through the pages of this book, delving into new technologies and reflecting on our future.
Sergei Levteev
CEO, IBA Group
Prague, Czech Republic
October 2021
Go here to read all our articles in the IBA Group blog:
https://blog.ibagroupit.com/
I n 2009, I visited a Gartner technology conference at a hotel close to Heathrow airport in London. I was chairing a panel discussion on technology and outsourcing in Eastern Europe in my role as a director of the UK National Outsourcing Association.
I met the IBA team because they had a stand at the event. I had written a few books on technology outsourcing so I asked them how business was going. After talking for a while I suggested that they might want to use some content as a way of promoting their business. This was several years before content marketing became essential for most technology companies.
The IBA team agreed, but in a different way to usual. When most companies ask me to write for them, they tell me the subject, who they are trying to interest, and any brands I should mention. Often, I will ghostwrite, rather than write something to be published in my own name, so I also need to know the style of the named author.
The IBA team just said, why dont you write some ideas about IT and we will publish them. Over the years they have suggested a few areas I might want to think about, but they have never said to me here is our latest service, please write about it.
For a dozen years now I have been thinking about IT services and sending articles to IBA and they have been publishing them. Its been an interesting time in my life as I lived in my native London when I started on this journey and now I have a family in Brazil.
One of the reasons I have continued sending these ideas to IBA Group is because I like their approach to the IT industry. This business is full of hype. Fake it till you make it. Analysts like Gartner even regularly publish a hype cycle reviewing which technologies might be real and which are just hot air.
