Welcome to the Digital You!

Digitalization is the most impactful development in society. Everything in our lives these days is driven by software. Ranging from software enabled toothbrush ecosystems to self-driving cars and from quantified self movements to factory 4.0 initiatives, it’s clear that we’re in the early days of the 4th industrial revolution. In the words of Marc Andreessen, … Read more

Why R&D Sets Business Strategy

After running my consulting business over the last years, I’ve started to see a pattern in the engagements with large companies. The engagement often starts with senior R&D management, one or more lead architects and perhaps a couple of experienced engineers. The focus is some major transformation, platform effort or other topic that starts off … Read more

Why I stepped down as general chair for ICSA 2017

This week I stepped down as general chair for the 2017 International Conference on Software Architecture. It was a very difficult decision and not one frequently made by a general chair. So, what happened? It all started an honest misunderstanding on my part. When I was asked to act as general chair as the proposal … Read more

Leading through Disruption (or not)

One of the ongoing questions in my mind is why large companies have such a difficult time managing disruptions and, as a consequence, why the average tenure of companies on the Fortune 500 has now decreased to 10-12 years. My thinking around this question got triggered recently, when I received an email in response to … Read more

On Hierarchy, Micro-Management and Leadership in R&D

Over the last years, I periodically visited a company that I have really admired for a long time for their focus on autonomous agile teams. These teams have a lot of freedom within their area of responsibility and can choose virtually anything from the platforms to use, the tools to use, when to release, what … Read more