What an amazing year!

2020 will go into the annals of history as the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many people have seen their lives disrupted, gotten sick or worse and suffered from mental health issues due to isolation and loneliness. All the mayhem caused by the pandemic, though, easily makes us lose sight of all the good things … Read more

Activating the flywheel of change

Last week, we organized the sprint 19 reporting workshop of Software Center. The opening keynote by Frances Paulisch (Siemens Healthineers) was about the transition from a transactional business model to continuous value delivery to customers. The closing keynote of Aleksander Fabijan (Microsoft) discussed starting and scaling A/B testing. Though the keynotes focused on very different … Read more

The end of scarcity

As it was Thanksgiving in the US last week, I wanted to follow up with a reflection on the notion of scarcity and abundance. Many in industry operate with a scarcity mindset, believing that basically everything we’re concerned with is available only in limited amounts. Whether it’s ‘winning’ a customer, being promoted or getting a … Read more

Towards autonomously improving systems

This week, I attended the International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB 2020) and gave a presentation on autonomously improving systems. The core idea is that software-intensive systems can measure their performance, know what to optimize for and can autonomously experiment with their own behavior. The history of software-intensive systems can be divided into three main … Read more

So much data, so little value

Recently, in a discussion with a company about becoming data-driven, I ran into the same challenge as many times before: the company claims to gather so much data, but the amount of value generated from that data is very small. It makes one wonder what underlies these patterns of, apparently, enormous amounts of data being … Read more

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