Boost your digitalization: customer support

So far, the posts in this series have stressed that the continuous value delivery to customers, rather than the transactional model, affects all parts of the company. One of the areas often ignored or seen too late as playing an important role is customer support. In many companies, this team is assumed to already have … Read more

Boost your digitalization: sales

For most of my life, I’ve worked in engineering. I worked as a programmer during my university studies. Built my own compilers while conducting my PhD research as I looked into alternative object-oriented programming languages. Worked in industry as a vice president on the engineering side and, of course, I published hundreds of papers on … Read more

Boost your digitalization: business model

Digitalization allows companies to fundamentally improve the way they deliver value to customers from transactional to continuous. Transactional value delivery is where a mostly physical product is sold as-is and then deteriorates over time until it’s replaced with the next product. Continuous value delivery is concerned with using the installed base as an enabler to … Read more

Boost your digitalization: business dimension

For all the talk about digitalization over the last decade or more, I still run into many people outside of software R&D who are convinced that digitalization is a technical problem that doesn’t concern them. Often, it’s viewed as an opportunity for improving the efficiency of existing processes and ways of working. The result is … Read more

Boost Your Digitalization: 8 capability areas to build

During the last weeks, I reflected on the research activities in the Software Center for which I am the director and I realized that everything we do with the partner companies and the universities is concerned with increasing the pace at which we are delivering new value to customers. Whereas most companies, a decade ago, … Read more

Platform lesson #10: One ecosystem platform stakeholder at a time

Although platforms can be used purely for internal purposes, many reach a point where they’re opened up to third parties, becoming an ecosystem platform. Ecosystem platforms serve, by definition, two- or multi-sided markets. This means that you have multiple stakeholder groups to support to make the platform successful. When thinking about ecosystem platforms, I often … Read more

Platform lesson #9: Be careful to open up to third parties

Every platform company I’ve worked with would love to open up their platform to third parties and get ‘free’ functionality extensions. Especially the idea of a multi-sided platform where different parties exchange value with each other and you collect a nice slice of each transaction comes across as a highly desirable state of being where … Read more

Platform lesson #8: Instrument your platform for data-driven decisions

William Edwards Demming, the American who helped Japan rebuild itself after World War II, famously said: “In God we trust; all others must bring data.” This is still a lesson most companies haven’t fully incorporated. Once a platform gets a certain amount of traction, the opportunity to make data-driven decisions presents itself. This is incredibly … Read more

Platform lesson #7: Constantly optimize commodity for TCO

In earlier posts, I’ve introduced the Three Layer Product Model (3LPM). Similar to all other software, platforms have three layers of functionality: innovative and experimental, differentiating and commodity. Functionality typically starts as innovative and, when it resonates with customers, becomes differentiating. The differentiating functionality drives sales and market share, causing competitors to develop similar functionality … Read more

Platform lesson #6: Control platform variability

Software platforms by their very nature support multiple products. Typically, these products are used in different contexts and configurations. As a consequence, the platform has to offer variation points that allow each product and customer to use the platform in the way that best suits their purposes. Each variation point then has two or more … Read more