So, you’re customer centric?

This week, for the umpteenth time, I met a team in the process of putting a new product in the market, telling me that they were so customer centric. What they meant was that during development, they’d talked to a number of potential customers and some of the employees had used prototypes. For those that … Read more

AI is NOT big data analytics

During the big data era, one of the key tenets of successfully realizing your big data strategy was to create a central data warehouse or data lake where all data was stored. The data analysts could then run their analyses to their hearts’ content and find relevant correlations, outliers, predictive patterns and the like. In … Read more

Why your data is useless

Virtually all organizations I work with have terabytes or even petabytes of data stored in different databases and file systems. However, there’s a very interesting pattern I’ve started to recognize during recent months. On the one hand, the data that gets generated is almost always intended for human interpretation. Consequently, there are lots of alphanumeric … Read more

When you don’t know, run experiments

The effects of digitalization and other technological shifts cause companies to realize they need to change. This often leads to significant discussions in the organization as there typically are several alternatives being considered by different people. These might include topics such as business models, product implications, partnerships with suppliers and technology providers. Agreeing on the … Read more

Why you’re a product + service business

Before digitalization became a thing, the industry was divided into two types of businesses: those that sell products and those that provide services. Those that sell products have a transactional relationship with their customers, mostly consisting of selling one of their products. The service businesses tend to have a more continuous relationship with their customers … Read more

Get your data out of the gray zone

Last week, I wrote about the different types of use for data that we have available. That led to discussions with various people and I realized that there’s a problem around data that’s very typical in companies that have their roots in embedded systems or mechanical engineering: it’s actually unclear who owns the data from … Read more

What use is your data?

If you’ve been reading my posts, you know that I feel data is one of the key ingredients of a successful digital transformation. It’s not just about adding software to your products or putting DevOps in place. It is as much about collecting, analyzing and storing data and using this data to improve a variety … Read more

How clean is your data?

One of the sayings that almost everyone in business has taken to heart is “data is the new oil” by Clive Humby. There are constant discussions about data ownership between end customers and product providers, as well as between OEMs and their suppliers. The first start-ups are now trying to advise companies on how to … Read more