Don’t fall for symptoms

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in discussions with several companies and the same problem occurred: my contacts raised a change that they were looking to realize in their organizations and asked me for help to realize it. When I asked how they had ended up in the situation that required the change, most … Read more

Making data-driven real

Recently, I expert-facilitated a workshop at a company having the desire to become data driven. Different from the product companies that I normally work with, this company is a service provider with a large amount of staff offering services to customers. The workshop participants included the CEO and head of business development, as well as … Read more

Towards business agility 2.0

Soon after the introduction of agility in software development, the notion of business agility was introduced as well. The basic idea was to scale the concepts behind agile software development to larger scopes, with the ambition to reach the entire organization, including R&D and IT. In practice, however, for many organizations, it proved difficult to … Read more

It’s up to you!

Last week, we had a strategy workshop at Software Center, the public-private digital transformation acceleration partnership that I lead. During one of the breakout sessions, we had a fun discussion around business agility that illustrated a very recognizable pattern. In a discussion around how to realize business agility, the focus was on who could be … Read more

Make money from data

There’s an interesting development going on in the embedded-systems industry. Initially, data was only used for internal purposes and quality assurance. Customers would send log files to product companies who would analyze them to figure out why the product wasn’t operating as it should and what to do about it. Over time, the periodic data … Read more

You don’t control anything

One realization that I had recently (only to show that I’m not too bright) is how much energy we all spend on controlling our environment and trying to keep everything the same. The trigger was a car trip from Gothenburg to Stockholm during one of the warmest days in Sweden this summer. Unfortunately, the air … Read more

Six reasons why your digital transformation is failing

The common theme over the last weeks, as I started to talk to more and more folks in companies, is the difficulty of realizing digital transformations. Granted, I work with many who are expected or having taken it on themselves to drive the digital transformation of their organization, but I believe the challenge is widespread. … Read more

Don’t be a sheep

During a meeting this week, I had to think of a famous quote by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” The two senior leaders to whom I was talking complained about their R&D organization doing everything right … Read more