Preface

The increase of digital enablement is a critical priority for countries and business organizations. With an estimate of US$2.8 trillion of spending in digital transformation globally by 2025, it is crucial to support and have the tools to make these efforts as smooth as possible.

Currently, most digital transformations are aspirational; only a small percentage goes beyond pilot mode, as evidenced by the latest reports by McKinsey and Harvard Business Review. This book leans on the best practices of design thinking and public policy design to bring frameworks and best practices to design and implement digital policies at scale into an organization to significantly improve its digital transformation effort.

It focuses on the intersection of people, technology, and processes. Throughout the book, we focus on people. We elevate the people aspect dimension with PolicyOps and how it brings the dimensions of automation, native digital platforms, and people to build instruments that foster a culture of inclusivity and experimentation.

We discuss and review the state of art in Policy as Code, policy engines (PEs), giving a focus to Open Policy Agent, and how to use it effectively to build guardrails, authorization (coercive instruments) across digital services. We focus on instruments adapted for hybrid environments and the native cloud providers' policy capabilities.

Finally, we talk about frameworks and how to link policies to business processes using information technology service management (ITSM) tools present in any modern organization.

These concepts allow you to build policies that work across the fundamental tenets of the organization, by using the robust frameworks discussed in the book coupled with PEs such as Open Policy Agent to accelerate digital adoption.