What Digitalization Means For You

A friend of mine got fired last week. I will not share any details to protect the innocent, but he had been with the same company for close to 20 years when the company, that has been struggling for years, decided that he wasn’t a good fit anymore. The pattern is a typical one that … Read more

Better Every Day

Especially in the embedded systems industry, the approach has traditionally been to build products that get worse over time. We design, manufacture and sell a product to the customer, it slowly deteriorates and then we sell the customer a new product several years later (see figure 1). Even though the next product will be better … Read more

You Think You Know, But You Don’t

Data-driven decision making frequently requires experimentation as a mechanism to acquire the necessary data. When working with companies in transitioning from opinion-based to data-driven decision making, however, I frequently run into push back. The typical comment is that we already know the answers to the specific questions at hand and since we already know this … Read more

Is Your Company Digital?

The companies that I work with, both in my research and my consulting engagements, are all going through a digital transformation. These companies are looking to become digital companies rather than whatever they were before. In this journey, however, there is an interesting question that comes up on a regular basis: what does it mean … Read more

Don’t Focus On Outcomes

During a number of discussions the last weeks, the notion of outcomes and disappointment with outcomes was brought up. The tendency in these conversations is an endless exploration of the reasons the unsatisfactory outcome happened (or, occasionally, why the unexpectedly positive outcome happened). Quickly people start to disagree and provide arguments for alternative points of … Read more

Towards Operational AI

In the latest two articles, I outlined the two phases of adopting machine & deep learning (ML/DL). In the figure below, we show the steps that companies typically evolve through while adopting AI, ML and DL solutions. As shown in the figure, the third step, the subject of this article, is where ML/DL components are … Read more