Jan Bosch
This week, I attended the International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB 2020) and gave a presentation on autonomously improving systems. The core idea is that software-intensive systems can measure their performance, know what to optimize for and can autonomously experiment with their own behavior. The history of software-intensive systems can be divided into three main … Read more
Recently, in a discussion with a company about becoming data-driven, I ran into the same challenge as many times before: the company claims to gather so much data, but the amount of value generated from that data is very small. It makes one wonder what underlies these patterns of, apparently, enormous amounts of data being … Read more
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
Soon after the introduction of agility in software development, the notion of business agility was introduced as well. The basic idea was to scale the concepts behind agile software development to larger scopes, with the ambition to reach the entire organization, including R&D and IT. In practice, however, for many organizations, it proved difficult to … Read more
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
There’s an interesting development going on in the embedded-systems industry. Initially, data was only used for internal purposes and quality assurance. Customers would send log files to product companies who would analyze them to figure out why the product wasn’t operating as it should and what to do about it. Over time, the periodic data … Read more
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
During the last year, I’ve been in several discussions that, to a large extent, boiled down to “why is this product so stupid?”. The stupidity was defined by the lack of the system to anticipate user actions, the inability to learn to function better in a specific context or the total reliance on the user … Read more
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
During a meeting this week, I had to think of a famous quote by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” The two senior leaders to whom I was talking complained about their R&D organization doing everything right … Read more
