This document introduces the DPBoK Foundation's Digital Transformation Body of Knowledge (DPBoK) standard, which outlines 12 competencies needed for digital transformation across four organizational contexts: individual/founder, team, team of teams, and enduring enterprise. Each competency is broken down into 3 sections that provide an overview of the topic, key concepts, and examples. The competencies cover areas like digital fundamentals, infrastructure, application delivery, product management, operations management, coordination/process, investment/portfolio, organization/culture, governance/security, information management, and architecture. The DPBoK is presented as a framework to help organizations succeed in today's digital era by linking the various components of digital transformation.

1. DPBoK Foundation
A certification linking the dots of Digital Transformation
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2. Introduction to DPBoK Standard
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Business
process
transformation
Customer
Engagement &
experience
Product &
Service
digitization
IT & delivery
transformation
Organizational
culture
Strategy
Ecosystem &
Business
Model
7 Levers of change to succeed in today’s digital era

3. 12 Digital Transformation Competencies
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Digital Fundamentals
Digital Infrastructure
Application Delivery
Product Management
Work Management
Operations Management
Coordination &Process
Investment & Portfolio
Organization &Culture
Governance, Risk, Security &
Compliance
Information Management
Architecture
Competency
Company Size
Founder
< $1m
1 – 3 employees
Team
> $1m
8 – 12 employees
Team of Teams
> $10m
40 – 70 employees
Enduring Enterprise
> $50m
350 – 500 employees

4. Context I: Individual / Founder
• Bare minimum requirements of delivering digital value.
• Quick & tactical approach.
• No process.
• No politics.
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5. 1- Digital Fundamentals
• Focus on the digital value that is delivered to customer/consumers.
• Discuss well known approaches for understanding product context:
• Traditional business case model.
• Business Model Canvas.
• Lean startup.
• Understanding the digital product lifecycle.
• Emphasize on the role of DevOps in speeding up the flow of value in
the product Lifecyle.
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6. 2- Digital Infrastructure
• Focus on understanding the overall capabilities of digital
infrastructure and initial concerns for its effective, efficient, and
secure operation.
• Understanding of 3 major aspects (Compute, Storage, & Network).
• Virtualization and containerization and their benefits.
• Cloud computing different models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS).
• Configuration management (Infrastructure as a code, version control,
…)
• Securing infrastructure & applications (Zoning, Authentication,
Encryption, …).
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7. 3- Application Delivery
• Focus on application development activities.
• Understanding of the stages of application development.
• The failure of Waterfall development approach and recommending
Agile as a better approach.
• CI/CD pipeline / steps.
• Test-Driven development & addressing technical debt.
• Benefits of cloud native development.
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8. Context II: Team
• Product met some success, you need to do more work so you hire few
more people forming a team having single mission & cohesive
identity.
• Not much overhead.
• Informal communication is the base, but work increased that needs
more organized approach.
• Founder started to get busy, so needs a dedicated person as a product
owner to handle product development.
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9. 4- Product Management
• Sharing same vision across the whole team including new joiners.
• The need for consistent approach to discover, define, design,
communicate, and execute a product vision.
• Process vs Project vs Product.
• Productization as Strategy (Amazon as example).
• Promoting strategy driven by empirical and hypothesis approach
rather than HiPPO.
• Scrum.
• Product planning.
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10. 5- Work Management
• Fundamental issue: “How work is tracked?” (What, Who, When,
Order, …)
• Definition of done.
• Work management & Lean concepts:
• Queues & Multi-tasking.
• Cost of delay (Android, Kindle examples).
• Reducing work in process.
• Limiting the batch size.
• Feedback (Reinforcing/Balancing).
• DevOps consensus (Relation between change size, its success, & IT
Service availability).
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11. 6- Operations Management
• Focus on running the business.
• Concept of SLA.
• Environment pipeline (Dev, QA, integration, production).
• Different types of monitoring (Simple, User experience, Extended,
Specialized, Aggregated).
• Capacity & performance management.
• Operational response and popular processes.
• Site Reliability Engineering.
• CAP (Consistency, Availability, Partition-tolerance).
• AKF scaling cube (Functionality, horizontal duplication, data partitioning).
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12. Context III: Team of Teams
• One team can’t cope with increasing complexity and operational demand.
• You might have multiple products that you need to manage the interdependency.
• Specialization is increasing, tendency of specialists to work in their field rather
than the needs of the customer.
• Teams needs some level of coordination & sometimes tension arise between
teams.
• Desire from Stakeholders for control and predictability.
• Resources are limited and always in contention.
• New experienced joiners expect the company have projects and processes to get
the work done.
• Advisors and consultants suggest various frameworks for managing the
organization.
• Main challenge is the coordination problem.
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13. 7- Coordination and Process
• As long as there are dependency, this require coordination. Work
without dependency can scale nicely.
• Broader goals must be achieved while multiple teams should act
jointly.
• Consider 3 delivery model 3Ps (Product, Project, Process) along with
Program management.
• Understanding dependency taxonomy (Knowledge, Task, Resource).
• Understanding coordination taxonomy (Structure, Synchronization,
Boundary spanning).
• Decision rights (RACI).
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14. 8- Investment and Portfolio
• The organization requires strategy for choosing among options &
planning in terms of costs and benefits.
• Multiple teams are contending for investment.
• Vendor relationships continue to expand.
• Historical IT financial practices vs next generation IT finance.
• Digital sourcing (People, HW, SW, Services) and contracts.
• New products & larger scale planning.
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15. 9- Organization and Culture
• Tension between functional depth versus product delivery.
• Classic IT organization vs new IT organization forms.
• How organization is structured, & teams are grouped?
• What is the approach of bringing new people to the organization?
• Industry framework (CMMI, ITIL, PMBoK, COBIT, TOGAF).
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16. Context IV: Enduring Enterprise
• Large scale organization with complex IT based operations, annual
budget hundreds of millions.
• Main issue is how to operate in this scale and remain Agile.
• Scaling up in size also means scaling out in terms of timeframes.
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17. 10- Governance, Risk, Security, and
Compliance
• What are laws and regulations that are relevant to IT?
• Audits are required.
• Security threats increase proportionally to company size.
• Clear definition of Governance vs Management.
• Assurance and audit.
• Security Taxonomy (Threat agent, Threat, Vulnerability, Risk, Asset,
Exposure and Safeguard).
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18. 11- Information Management
• Data in general, how to manage it? Wherever & Whatever it is.
• Hierarchy of data, information, knowledge.
• Enterprise Information Management, and Data Management
Association (DAMA).
• Data modeling (Conceptual, Logical, Physical).
• Reference Data Management.
• Analytics (DWH, Business Intelligence).
• Agile Information Management.
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19. 12- Architecture
• With scale, management needs decisions to be made across digital
operation & increased complexity.
• Tight alignment between enterprise architecture and IT portfolio
management is a must.
• Defining the relation between enterprise architecture and the operating
model (Strategy, Portfolio, and operation / infrastructure).
• The value of enterprise architecture to the organization.
• Architecture and relation with Governance.
• Architecture as a management program.
• Architecture repository (Catalogs, diagrams, matrices).
• The Agile critique of architecture.
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20. References
• DPBoK standard.
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21. Thanks
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