Jan Bosch
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
This week I gave a talk at a meetup on business agility. The, admittedly controversial, title of my talk was “Why Digitalization Will Kill Your Company Too”, a topic that I discussed in a previous blog post. The interesting thing during the meetup was that lots of participants asked me why companies are not changing … Read more
The last days, I had some time to reflect and one of the things that consistently surfaces is the amount of irritation and frustration that many people experience in their jobs. Now, to be clear, the people that I work with and that I meet are no complainypants at all, but generally serious, hard-working people … Read more
Over the last month or so, I have been reading a book titled “Skin in the game” by Taleb. He doesn’t like academics very much and scientists get roasted quite severely in several chapters. Being a professor myself, that stings a little but the problem is that I agree with him. His main point, severely … Read more
During the last weeks, I reflected on the difference between the startups and the large, established companies that I work with. One of the main differences seems to be the amount of freedom that individuals have. When a company is first formed and the initial team is assembled, there is of course the normal “storming, … Read more
Although most of the online (SaaS) companies that I work with are heavily data-driven, the embedded systems companies have had more difficulty to achieve that. With connectivity becoming more and more the norm for embedded systems, though, these companies are now also starting to become data driven. This is great as replacing opinion-driven decision making … Read more
Over the last weeks, I have been in several group conversations where we had to agree on the relative priority of multiple factors. For instance, are we optimizing for the total number of users or are we optimizing for maximizing revenue per user? Should we prioritize fuel efficiency or is minimizing exhaust waste more important? … Read more
Although mass-market companies have figured this out long ago, companies offering their software-intensive systems to a smaller group of powerful customers are often under significant pressure to customize their systems for individual customers. There are at least three reasons why customizing your system for each individual customer used to be a good idea. First, when … Read more
Since the summer, I have worked with several companies that are starting to see continuous deployment on their horizon. This is great progress and brings many advantages such as fast feedback on quality issues in the field as well as the ability to quickly fix any issues that customers experience. Internally, more frequent deployment often … 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
