If You Had a Choice, Would You Buy Your Brand of IT?

People of a certain age might remember the Road Runner cartoons from their childhood. In each episode, Wile E. Coyote suffered numerous accidents attempting to snare the bird using products from Acme, Inc. Aside from the opportunities for a product liability lawsuit, I always wondered why he didn’t just quit buying from them. Sometimes I […]

Changing Organizations Without Changing People

Prof Bo Molander once pointed out to me and the other students in the class that when you try to change people, you go up against billions of years of evolution, “good luck with that” and when you try to change groups, you go up against millions of years of evolutions, “good luck with that […]

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 369

This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 369, features Tom’s essay on stand-up meetings, Kim Pries on mastery, and a Form Follows Function installment on #NoEstimates. Tom and I discuss my post “#NoEstimates – Questions, Answers, and Credibility” and take on whether it’s realistic to eliminate estimates given their […]

Organizations and Innovation – Swim or Die!

One of the few downsides to being a Great White shark is that they must continually move, even while sleeping, in order to keep water moving over their gills. If they stay still too long, they die. Likewise, organizations must remain in motion, changing and adapting to their ecosystem, or risk dying out as well. […]

Inflection Points and the Ingredients of Innovation

One of my hobbies is the study of history. Not the dry, dusty, “…on this date these people did that” type of history, rather I’m fascinated by the story of how real people interacted with each other and the world around them. I’m interested in the brilliance and the stupidity, the master strokes and the […]

Fixing IT – Too Big to Succeed?

Continuing our discussion that I mentioned in my last post, Greger Wikstrand tweeted the following: I encourage you to watch the video, it’s short (7:39) and makes some important points, which I’ll touch on below. Serendipity, when it occurs, is a beautiful thing. Serendipity can occur when heads-down order taking is replaced with collaboration. Awareness […]

Full Stack Enterprises (Who Needs Architects?)

In my last post, “Locking Down the Prisoners: Control, Conflict and Compliance for Organizations”, I returned to a topic that I’ve been touching on periodically over the last year, organizations as systems, which overlaps significantly with the topic of enterprise architecture (not to be confused with enterprise IT architecture of which EA is a superset). […]

Locking Down the Prisoners: Control, Conflict and Compliance for Organizations

The most important thing to learn about management and governance is knowing when and how to manage or govern and more importantly, when not to. The story is told about a very new and modern penal facility, the very epitome of security and control. Each night, precisely at 11:00 PM, the televisions were shut off […]