The book, 2026. 132 pages.
The Seven Frictions
Why IT Slows Innovation in the AI Era, and How to Fix It
Your company is not short of ideas. It is short of calendar.
The book measures the days between an accepted idea and a live user, a number I call Lead Time to Learning. It traces those days to seven causes and closes with a playbook of moves, policies and scorecards an IT leader can run next week.
Seven causes, four clocks
The four drivers tell you where the calendar days landed: approvals, environment, data and change controls. The seven frictions tell you why they landed there.
Access
A ticket, not a toggle.
A sandbox key waits in a queue behind requests that have nothing to do with it. None of this is hard. All of it is queued.
What is inside
Four parts, thirteen chapters and six appendices you can lift straight into your operating model.
- Part I
The Pattern
Most companies do not run out of ideas. They run out of calendar. How the latency tax shows up, and how IT became the barrier without anyone choosing it.
- Part II
Root Causes
The seven frictions, the incentives that keep them in place, and the comfortable assumption about what governance proves.
- Part III
The Playbook
Accelerator IT as an operating model: measure the tax, open a fast path, run IT as a platform, put data on tap, release in rings with kill switches, and harness AI experiments.
- Part IV
Leading the Change
What the CIO role becomes, how to fund it, which KPIs to keep, and how to hold momentum after the first wins.
Appendices
- Fast path policy
- Latency scorecard and anchors
- Mapping workshop script
- AI pilot contract and harness
- Scorecard automation
- Glossary
Walk one use case yourself, end to end.
Pick one small use case, something a product team wants and could safely test. Then stay with it from beginning to end, personally, however senior you are. File the tickets yourself. Write down every step and every wait, with dates.
The pain points will not need a consultant to find them. They will be the places where you, with your title, still waited.
Bring the book to your team.
Ask me about running the mapping workshop from Chapter 5 with your IT leadership team: ninety minutes, one real pilot, and a backlog with owners and dates at the end.
