What’s New: Digital Reality Checks Series

Big news today: Rosenfeld Media is launching a new line of books called Digital Reality Checks! They’re designed to help all kinds of digital professionals—not just from the UX tribe, but IT, marketing folks, and others—make sense of the expensive, often overhyped software tools that large organizations depend upon.

The first one in the series—Theresa Regli’s Digital and Marketing Asset Management—is now available for purchase. Oh my god: digital asset management has become a huge problem in almost every organizational setting, and I’m thrilled to help address it. Buy it in paperback or ebook from our store or Amazon.

Future Digital Reality Checks books will cover similar challenges, like web content management and marketing automation. Expect to see 6-8 of titles over the next couple years.

You might be scratching your head a bit. “Digital professionals” don’t necessarily sound like people focused on UX. Or you might find these topics a bit unfamiliar and technical.

But we’ve already noticed that you are changing. The kinds of people who read our books and attend our conferences are no longer purely UX folks by any stretch, and interests are bleeding together.

For example, one of the most popular themes at both Enterprise UX 2015 and 2016 conferences was design systems. People are clamoring for better tools to support creating better experiences that scale well in large organizations. In many cases, the outcome is dependent upon the efforts of all sorts of “digital professionals;” in other cases, those professionals are the beneficiaries of strong design systems. As Peter Morville would say, they’re all intertwingled.

This shouldn’t be surprising, and it’s nothing new: disparate tribes came under the UX umbrella years ago. We’re only going to see more convergence, bigger umbrellas, and the sunset of disciplinary tribalism. I’m not fan of tribes and priesthoods, so I find it thrilling!

And it’s exciting for me that Rosenfeld Media can play a small role in accelerating and strengthening those connections through our publishing and conference planning efforts, just as we have for UX. We’re so happy to help mix marketing and IT people into the pot. We’re stronger together.

I’m also thrilled to have a partner in all this: Tony Byrne and his team at Real Story Group, who are writing the Digital Reality Checks books. They’re a fiercely independent group of analysts that has taken a very no-bullshit approach to the enterprise software space—an area that’s typically marked by marketing hype and vendor/analyst conflicts of interest. Real Story Group’s analysts really are focused on understanding digital reality, and they take the same jargon-free, plain language-approach to their craft that we’ve used in Rosenfeld Media’s UX books.

Bottom line: a new line of books for for digital professionals that get at the real story of enterprise software tools. Digital and Marketing Asset Management today, and more to come. And even if it’s not up your alley at the moment, I’m pretty sure someone you work with will benefit from reading it. Please let them know about it.

PS We’re going to launch another new book series in the coming weeks called Two Waves Books. I’ll tell you more about that very soon…