Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 399

This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 399, features Tom’s essay “Storytelling: Developing The Big Picture for Agile Efforts”, Kim Pries on deliberate practice, and a Form Follows Function installment on customer-centricity for IT. Tom and I discuss my post “A Meaningful Manifesto for IT”. It seems obvious that […]

Learning to Deal with the Inevitable

  My last post, “Barriers to Innovation”, began with a question. Is innovation inevitable? By the end of the post, that question had changed. Is innovation inevitable for your organization? Tom Cagley left a comment suggesting another change: Think about changing the question again. “Is innovation inevitable?” might be better stated as “Is change inevitable?” […]

Barriers to Innovation

  Is innovation inevitable? Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading blog posts on innovation since last November. In his latest post, “Credit card fraud and stalled innovation”, Greger discusses the relatively slow pace of innovation in credit card security. Those best placed to increase security neglect it because they don’t own the risk (a […]

A Meaningful Manifesto for IT

“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 […]

To run in the Digital race we must build an emerging technologies function

Setting you up to understand the technology landscape is key to determine what technologies would affect us the most. Because we cannot adopt them all. And you have to implement them in concert while replacing and evolving the existing landscape at the…

To run in the Digital race we must build an emerging technologies function

Setting us up to understand the technology landscape is key to determine what technologies would affect us mostly. Because we cannot adopt them all. And we have to implement them in concert while replacing and evolving, at the same time, the existing l…

The Business of IT – Customers, Clients, and Fit for Purpose

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 […]

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 365

This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 365, features Tom’s essay on Agile Project Charters, Kim Pries on improvisation in software development, and a Form Follows Function installment on customer-driven development. Customer-driven development refers to my post “Maybe It’s Time for Customer Driven Development”, where I discussed the need […]

First Do No Harm – the Practice of Software Development

Analogies are never perfect, but reading Erik Dietrich’s “Do Programmers Practice Computer Science?” brought one to mind. Software development has much in common with the practice of medicine. Software development, like medicine, involves the application of knowledge. Also like medicine, this application is made complex by considerations of context. Yet another commonality is that in […]

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 […]

Event based processing and capability architecture

The illusions of process architectures Most of the time people expect that a process is a linear execution of activities that has been predetermined, some people call this the happy path (top illustration) and expect that this is the way things should work. On other occasions people realize that processing is a bit more complex […]