Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Why would anyone worry about user experience for anything that’s not customer-facing? This question was the premise of Maurice Roach’s post in the Zühlke blog, “Empathise with your users or you won’t solve their problems”: Bring up the subject of user empathy with some engineers or product owners and you’ll probably hear comments that fall […]
What does an old World War II tank have to do with innovation? I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating – one of benefits of having a blog is the ability to interact with and learn from people all over the world. For example, Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading blog posts on […]
While on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, an interesting graphic caught my eye. Titled “The Iceberg of Ignorance”, it referred to a 1989 study in which: …consultant Sidney Yoshida concluded: “Only 4% of an organization’s front line problems are known by top management, 9% are known by middle management, 74% by supervisors and 100% […]
Thanks to Volkswagen, we now have an idea of the cost of failing to maintain an ethical culture, roughly $18 billion US (emphasis added in the quoted text below by me): Volkswagen’s financial disclosure on Friday, in a preliminary earnings report, came a day after the company agreed on the outlines of a plan to […]
I’ve made another guest appearance on Architecture Corner. In episode 39, “New and Obsolete”, Greger Wikstrand, Casimir Artmann and I discuss product lifetimes and the Internet of Things. How could Nest have better handled the end of life of the Revolv device?
On May 15th, my house will stop working. My landscape lighting will stop turning on and off, my security lights will stop reacting to motion, and my home made vacation burglar deterrent will stop working. This is a conscious intentional decision by Google/Nest. To be clear, they are not simply ceasing to support the product, […]
The FBI, with the help of a third party, has managed to gain access to Syed Farook’s iPhone. In a court filing Monday, the FBI stated that they did not require Apple’s help any longer. Apple, on the other hand, now has a need to know what vulnerability was exploited to access the phone. Whether […]
“Customer-centricity” is one of the biggest tags in the tag cloud to the right. My first post this year was “Is 2016 the Year for Customer-Focused IT?”. It’s a concept that I find vitally important to IT for the simple reason that to the extent that IT is not fit for purpose, it’s a waste […]
Consider this Tweet for a moment. I’ll be coming back to it at the end. In my last post, I brought up Twitter’s rumored changes to the timeline feature as a poor example of customer awareness in connection with an attempt to innovate. The initial rumor set off a storm of protest that brought out […]
Two articles from the same site (CIO.com), both dealing with planned innovations, but with dramatically different results: “Report: Twitter’s algorithmic timeline may arrive next week” reports that rumors (or “rumors”) of Twitter switching from a chronological timeline to one curated algorithmically has led to an uprising under the hashtag #RIPTwitter. Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, has […]
Over the past few months, I have touched on a variety of what might seem to be disparate topics: the need for architects (or at least architectural design), estimates, organizations as systems/enterprise architecture, customer-centricity, and IT management and governance. I suspect the trend will continue for a while, so it’s time for a post to […]
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 377, features Tom’s essay on empathy, Kim Pries talking about the application of David Allen’s concepts for Getting Things Done, and the first Form Follows Function installment for 2016 on organizations and innovation. Tom and I discuss my post “Changing Organizations Without […]