Drop whatever it is you're reading and go read The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. This short book will quickly change your perspective on a lot of things, not the least of which being the role and importance of IT within the greater context of business operations, as well as the imperative to more tightly align business priorities with operational risk management.
Go here for more information about the book.
Go here for a free 170-page excerpt of the book.
The book walks through "The Three Ways" as it describes a fictional company transitioning from a badly broken and dysfunctional old school IT and dev environment into a newer-than-new-school DevOps model. A sage guides the new IT director through this transition, with one of the big lessons in the end being the point that IT is so central to all business operations today (and forever more) that the COOs of the future will have to be extremely competent in technology operations, and may just come almost exclusively from an IT background (offset with business school training, or comparable).
It's hard to understate how well this book explains the concepts contained therein. It covers many of the topics that I've mentioned over the years on this blog, but the authors do a much better job explaining those ideas. Security, IT, and Dev should no longer exist as standalone silos, but should instead be all part of one cohesive, optimized unit designed to rapidly evolve and function with great agility.
I could go on, but will spare you... go read the book! :)
