Jan Bosch
Although it is uncertain who said this, a famous quote is “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” This notion is at the heart of digitalization: much of what we think we know is no longer true when the industry goes … Read more
There’s more data in the world than ever before. According to some sources, the world stores over 50 zettabytes of data. A zettabyte is 2 to the power of 70, or one billion terabytes. So, one would assume that the entire world has moved to data-driven ways of working. As we all know, this is … Read more
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
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
In the online world of software as a service (SaaS), A/B testing in some form is used continuously for virtually any type of development. For an A/B test, two alternative realizations of a feature or some functionality are developed and presented to a test group (alternative B) and a control group (alternative A). Some outcome … Read more
Digitalization is concerned with the three key enabling digital technologies software, data and artificial intelligence. These build on each other as it typically is software that generates the data from systems in the field and it’s this data (preferably labeled) that forms the basis for machine learning and deep learning. The software-intensive systems industry, as … Read more
There are few topics in software development that can get people going as much as testing and quality assurance. The notion of shipping low-quality code to customers feels like a humiliation to most engineers. It causes a perception of abusing the customer for testing purposes, which doesn’t sit right and to many feels like a … Read more
So, here’s a little puzzle for you: you have a piece of rope that just fits around the earth at the equator. You now add 1 meter long sticks all around the equator and put the rope on top of these sticks. How much longer do you need to make the rope? Of course, you … Read more
During the Christmas break, I read several books including “Sense & respond” by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. The authors frame the difference between traditional and digital companies in terms of the absence or presence, respectively, of a continuous dialog with the market and the customers. Of course, traditional companies interact with the market and … Read more
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
