Jan Bosch
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
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
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
During the last year, I’ve been in several discussions that, to a large extent, boiled down to “why is this product so stupid?”. The stupidity was defined by the lack of the system to anticipate user actions, the inability to learn to function better in a specific context or the total reliance on the user … Read more
With all the focus on data and AI, it was simply a matter of time before the countermovement started. Reflecting on several discussions around this topic that I’ve had over the last year, the key theme seems to be that data and AI are predicting the future based on the past and as long as … Read more
Some decades after the term “Agile” was introduced in software development, one would expect that – assuming it was a good idea (which it is) – the concept should have been fully embedded in industry and we’re busy with other things. Still, and this never fails to surprise me, everyone is talking about “beyond Agile.” … Read more
Based on our research, we’ve developed a four-dimensional model for the digital transformation in the software-intensive embedded systems industry. In the last two posts, we explored the business model and product upgrade dimensions. This post is concerned with the data exploitation dimension. As shown in the figure, the first step in most companies is focused … Read more
In last week’s post, I mentioned our framework describing the transformation that companies go through when going digital. I also discussed one of its four dimensions – the business model dimension. In this post, the focus is on the product upgrade dimension. As shown in the figure, we’ve identified five steps or phases in the … Read more
