Jan Bosch
The traditional way of organizing companies was in functional departments where people with the same skillset and education could focus on specific challenges, solve these and then hand over the result to the department that would integrate all the parts from all the functions into one working system. The perceived advantage was that each expert … Read more
Last week, we had a workshop with the Software Center companies on new business models and their coexistence with traditional models. The overall trend is that all companies are looking to transition from traditional, transactional business models to more continuous ones. The challenge is that the more continuous you aim for your business to be, … Read more
In many industries, there’s an implied, often underspecified, architecture of how the different stakeholders in the ecosystem interface with each other. By defining their mutual interfaces, it allows for better alignment. For the typical interactions within the ecosystem, this is very helpful as the different parties have predefined expectations about one another, and transactions and … Read more
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 more
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 more
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 more
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 more
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 more
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 more
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 more
