The IT/OT Book Library: what should I read?

Our mini book library on leadership, team structures and ways of working in IT/OT.

First things first, there are no books around IT/OT convergence (or we haven’t stumbled across them yet…) Surely, there are some books about “Industry 4.0” (and even about the hyped “Industry 5.0” buzzword), but they are (1) either sponsored by some organization trying to lure you into buying their miracle product or (2) too (or only) technology focused. On the other hand, a seamlessly endless list of IT and generic Digital Transformation books can be found. 

In this post we will try to build a growing library of all the books we like and we perceive as useful for any manager operating in the IT/OT convergence world. We will only focus on leadership, team structures, ways of working and similar topics. That’s right, nothing about technology or Generative AI, because the real bottleneck we see isn’t a lack of technology, but a lack of strategy and translating that into a working organization.

We will regularly update this post and welcome all suggestions, either via the comments or via a private message via LinkedIn to David or Willem. 

Ways of Working in Industrial Digitalization

The books below are not written with Industrial Digital Teams in mind. But we believe that they form a perfect basis for your IT/OT team. 

The Phoenix Project, A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

By Gene Kim, ISBN 978-0988262508, Buy on Amazon

A must read novel about a Manufacturing organization with an old-school view on doing IT projects (slow and expensive). Spoiler alert: the book has a happy ending and they figure out how to apply the concepts of DevOps ;). It has definitely inspired us.

The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

By Gene Kim, ISBN 978-1942788768, Buy on Amazon 

We enter the same story as the Phoenix project, but from the viewpoint of a developer. We advise it regularly to team mates/engineers and the feedback is always positive! Gene Kim introduces these five ideals: (1) Locality and Simplicity, (2) Focus, Flow and Joy, (3) Improvement of Daily Work, (4) Psychological Safety and (5) Customer Focus.

Sooner Safer Happier: Patterns and Antipatterns for Organizational Agility: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

By Jonathan Smart, ISBN 978-1942788911, Buy on Amazon

This book is also a perfect way to start transforming your digital teams and leadership from Industry 2.0 practices towards 4.0. Make sure to read The Phoenix Project and/or The Unicorn Project first and then jump into this one. What we like (a lot!) is that this book covers a lot of patterns and antipatterns on how to handle your transformation.

Team Development & Organization 

In your/our efforts to kick start cooperating models between IT and OT, it’s essential to understand how teams can/will/should work together. 

Team Topologies

By Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais, ISBN 978-1942788812, Buy on Amazon 

The day OT systems got connected to IT systems, cooperation was needed. But what is cooperation? How do you describe it? Enter Team Topologies, a way to think and talk about teams and how they interact introduced by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. We used the concepts from this book for our 8 IT/OT Cooperation Patterns. 

Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

By Mik Kersten, ISBN 978-1942788393, Buy on Amazon

The best thing you can do to speed up your digitalisation is to stop thinking about projects and focus on products. Mik Kersten describes this well in this book. Throughout the book software development is compared with a car manufacturing line at BMW, making it very relatable for everyone in the industry. The book describes 3 epiphanies in a language you can understand:

(1) Productivity declines and waste increases as software scales,
(2) Disconnected software value streams are the bottleneck to software productivity and
(3) Software is not a linear manufacturing process but a complex collaboration network. 

Make sure to read this together with Sooner Safer Happier, they are a match made in heaven ;)

Leadership / Personal development

One of the topics we discussed earlier is that managing in the era of Industry 4.0/5.0 requires a changing mindset. We are not the know-it-all managers from the 2.0 era any longer. These books might help you in that personal journey…

Wiring the Winning Organization

By Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear - buy here at IT Revolution

Our review:
”Wiring the Winning Organization" brilliantly encapsulates strategies for organizational success, focusing on creating a harmonious and effective workplace. The authors' insights on leadership and operational excellence are both profound and practical, offering readers a roadmap to transform their organizations into more efficient, innovative, and collaborative environments. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their organization's performance and cultivate a winning culture. The authors do so by introducing three simple concepts: 

👉 Slowify (i.e., "slow down to speed up") to make it easier and more forgiving to solve problems.

👉 Simplify (i.e., partition problems in time and space) to split apart large problems to make them easier to solve, most likely in parallel.

👉 Amplify (among other things, weak signals of failure) to make it obvious that problems need to be solved and that they were successfully resolved

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

By General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell, ISBN 978-1591847489, Buy on Amazon

This book might look a bit odd out here. The author is an American general and applies what he has seen happening in the military to the business world. Quotes such as “whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of interface failures” and the move from “doing things right” to “doing the right thing” are indeed applicable to our fast changing digital world. We very much like the concept of “Leading like a Gardener” and the difference between a command-and-control (hierarchical) structure versus a team driven approach with shared goals and individual responsibilities. In this book you will also find the Complicated versus Complex analogy as you can also find in Sooner Safer Happier. On the down side: you do need to be interested in some military history in order to like this one.

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

By Liz Wiseman, ISBN 978-0062663078, Buy on Amazon

Interesting concepts on how to become a “Multiplier”. The book explores these two leadership styles, persuasively showing how Multipliers can have a resoundingly positive and profitable effect on organizations. The concepts are very applicable to how we see Digital Leaders, but obviously it is just a framework. 

Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos

By Darrell Rigby Sarah Elk and Steve Berez, ISBN 978-1633698703, Buy on Amazon

Agile is something for those idealists/hippies in IT, but it would never survive the cruel world of cashflow, Quarterly results, investments decisions and legal compliance, right? The authors are here to dispel some myths and problems when it comes to scaling agile throughout your enterprise and highlight the difference between ‘doing agile’ and ‘being agile’.

We like this book because it takes a wider look at the problems at hand when you want to scale agile in a company. It isn’t all change, it’s all about balancing continuity, processes and planning with agility from an enterprise perspective.

Theoretical concepts 

Nothing wrong with some theory. Problem is: should you read it or not? The books below will not make or break your future IT/OT organization but might help in understanding some concepts you might come across.

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

By Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, Professor John Willis, Jez Humble, ISBN 978-1942788003, Buy on Amazon

This book covers the more theoretical aspects of what you can also learn in The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project (see above). The book is very interesting if you are inspired by those two books (or one of them) and would like to explore the ins and outs of DevOps further. 

The Goal

By Eliyahu M. Goldratt & Jeff Cox, ISBN 978-0566086656, Buy on Amazon

Applying Theory of Constraints (ToC) is an old concept. This book is more or less the foundational work regarding ToC, albeit the book being quite outdated (smoking in a meeting room was still considered perfectly fine), the concepts still apply today. Several books mentioned above make one or multiple references to The Goal.