Business strategy and technology strategy

Many years ago, together with a few colleagues, I wrote a paper on the BAPO model. The BAPO model says that business and business strategy should drive architecture and technology choices (A). These should, in turn, drive process, ways of working and tooling choices (P). Finally, these should be used to define an organization that … Read more

Ecosystem repositioning

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

What an amazing year!

2020 will go into the annals of history as the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many people have seen their lives disrupted, gotten sick or worse and suffered from mental health issues due to isolation and loneliness. All the mayhem caused by the pandemic, though, easily makes us lose sight of all the good things … Read more

Activating the flywheel of change

Last week, we organized the sprint 19 reporting workshop of Software Center. The opening keynote by Frances Paulisch (Siemens Healthineers) was about the transition from a transactional business model to continuous value delivery to customers. The closing keynote of Aleksander Fabijan (Microsoft) discussed starting and scaling A/B testing. Though the keynotes focused on very different … Read more

The end of scarcity

As it was Thanksgiving in the US last week, I wanted to follow up with a reflection on the notion of scarcity and abundance. Many in industry operate with a scarcity mindset, believing that basically everything we’re concerned with is available only in limited amounts. Whether it’s ‘winning’ a customer, being promoted or getting a … Read more

Don’t fall for symptoms

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in discussions with several companies and the same problem occurred: my contacts raised a change that they were looking to realize in their organizations and asked me for help to realize it. When I asked how they had ended up in the situation that required the change, most … Read more

Making data-driven real

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

It’s up to you!

Last week, we had a strategy workshop at Software Center, the public-private digital transformation acceleration partnership that I lead. During one of the breakout sessions, we had a fun discussion around business agility that illustrated a very recognizable pattern. In a discussion around how to realize business agility, the focus was on who could be … Read more

You don’t control anything

One realization that I had recently (only to show that I’m not too bright) is how much energy we all spend on controlling our environment and trying to keep everything the same. The trigger was a car trip from Gothenburg to Stockholm during one of the warmest days in Sweden this summer. Unfortunately, the air … Read more

Six reasons why your digital transformation is failing

The common theme over the last weeks, as I started to talk to more and more folks in companies, is the difficulty of realizing digital transformations. Granted, I work with many who are expected or having taken it on themselves to drive the digital transformation of their organization, but I believe the challenge is widespread. … Read more