Jan Bosch
Recently, when interviewing (for our research) someone at a company in the food space, I learned something that I hadn’t realized: these days, cheese is a by-product. For thousands of years, farmers milked cows and then, as a way to preserve the milk, they made cheese out of it. And that cheese, or at least … Read moreYour Product Is No Longer The Product
Another week on the road and another set of discussions around business and software ecosystems. Although it is clear that the ability of a company to build an ecosystem around its business is replacing company size as a, or perhaps the, key differentiator, I notice that there is a lot of confusion about what being … Read moreYour Ecosystem Has 50 Shades Of Gray
This week, the Software Center organized the Sprint 14 reporting workshop for the partner companies and universities. A great event with over 100 people participating and learning about the progress that we’ve made during the last 6 month sprint. As we have expanded the mission of Software Center to accelerate the digitalization of the software … Read moreDon’t Be Left Behind By Your Business Ecosystem
A few weeks ago, I posted a blog post with the same title as this post. This week, we hosted the International Conference on Software Engineering in Gothenburg. It was a great event with 1800 participants. As part of the conference, the Wednesday was allocated to an Industry Forum and as part of that, I … Read moreWhy Digitalization Will Kill Your (Software) Company Too: Video
Another week; another ridiculous amount of hours on an airplane, so this post is coming from Bangalore. During last week, I noticed an interesting pattern that I had seen several times over the last year: many companies and their leaders are not clear on what business they’re actually in, especially as it comes to being … Read moreAre You a Product, Platform or Ecosystem Company?
Companies spend very large amounts of resources on functionality that is commodity and does not offer any differentiation to the company and its customers. Our research shows that the R&D investment in commodity could be as high as 80-90%. Although the companies that I work with do not dispute the 80-90% numbers and do not … Read moreNew Book: Impactful Software
During a conference in Vienna, I listened to a keynote from a researcher from a large industrial company. The talk was full of the promise of IoT, connectivity, cloud, edge computing and apps and the business benefits that could be realized. The presenter did a good job, but I have heard these presentations on the … Read moreWhere Is This IoT World That I was Promised?
Most of the software-intensive systems companies that I work with are in the process of converting from pure product businesses to product + service or pure services businesses. This is a huge change for any company and means changes at several levels and all functions of the company. Over the last months, I have been … Read moreThe End Of Product Companies
The vast majority of R&D leaders and especially consultants focus on the efficiency of R&D: how to convert requirements into software against the lowest possible cost and resource needs. Although anyone from agile and scrum experts to continuous integration professionals focus on this challenge, very few people focus on the effectiveness of R&D. Effectiveness refers … Read moreHow To Double Your R&D Effectiveness – Part I
This week I spent in Buenos Aires (Argentina) at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017), which is the premier event in the field. As usual, I enjoyed the pre-events such as workshops, smaller co-located conferences and panels more than the main conference itself. Although many will disagree with me, I feel that the … Read moreThe End of Control