Hi, Ernst here. I work on strategy, innovation, and the messy reality of making it stick through technology. This blog is about what I see in the wild.
There’s a particular textbox in popular HR software Workday I want you to picture. It’s the one for performance review comments. Three lines deep, eighty characters wide, with a tiny scrollbar that fights you when you try to write anything longer than a haiku. Sunday night, laptop Year of work, three-line textbox “Meets expectations” A whole year of someone’s work...
A couple of years ago, voters in a large state approved a multi-billion-dollar bond to overhaul how behavioral health services are funded, delivered, and measured. The ambition is broad, covering physical infrastructure, treatment capacity, populations the existing system has failed for decades, and the way counties plan, providers operate, and the state oversees all of it. The public that gets...
I started writing this blog in 2018, mostly because I had things to say about technology and business that didn’t fit into client deliverables. Seven years and a pandemic and an AI revolution later, it seems like a good moment to take stock. Not a predictions piece or a trends roundup. More of an honest look at what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what we keep getting wrong about...
There’s a lot of talk recently about organizations wanting to become an “AI-first” and it tends to involve a lot of hand-waving about transforming operations, embedding intelligence everywhere, and reimagining the business through an AI lens. It echoes the digital transformation pitch from last decade, crossed out and replaced with “AI” written in Sharpie. The...
I’ve been writing about architecture since 2018, back when it felt like a losing argument. The industry was moving toward speed, autonomy, and “just ship it.” Granted: microservices, serverless, and teams owning everything was exciting and architecture reviews were seen as bottlenecks, architects as relics of a waterfall era. If you talked about intentional design in certain...
Eighteen months into the generative AI era, there seems to be a shift in the conversations. The panic has subsided. The “will AI take my job” headlines haven’t gone away, but most have moved past the existential dread and into something more interesting: the gap between what AI can do in a demo and what it actually does in their workday. Every major vendor now has a copilot...
It can be difficult to describe what strategy consultants do in terms that are relatable to people in the real world, say, at a dinner party. Often, projects are specific to organization’s domains and their particular challenges within those. challenges within those domains. Of course it helps to avoid any kind of jargon (or worse: consulting-lingo) and focus on how we make a difference...
In the beginning, there was nothing. And a programmer said “Let there be software.” And there was still nothing, until Operations decided to deploy it. That, more or less, was first gear. And the problem with first gear was that it was a clutchy affair. Two disciplines living in different worlds. Development cared about shipping features. Operations cared about keeping things stable...
In early 2023 it seemed that every executive wanted an AI strategy. Most of them were starting with the solution and working backward to the problem. I suggested taking a breath and doing the groundwork first. Most didn’t. Some are now discovering what everyone who’s ever deployed enterprise software already knows: the demo is not the product. The demo is the holiday brochure. The...
I have a rule of thumb. When my mom asks me about a technology, it has crossed from niche to mainstream. She asked me about ChatGPT over the holidays. To be fair, so did everyone else. In the span of a few weeks, a technology that most people outside of machine learning circles had never heard of became the most talked-about product in the world. ChatGPT will reach 100 million users faster than...
