The notion of the application as the best way to package software capabilities is losing relevance. Digital business cuts across application functions, inside and outside the organization. Modern value streams require breaking up application capabilities and dynamically reassembling the digital assets like Sir Mixalot. Remember the Album? Before music streaming, the album was the dominant...
Design thinking is a widely used “outside-in” approach to develop great user experiences. It’s about time that building the API experience, as the gateway to a business’ digital assets, follows the lead. Let’s Talk Humans interact with computer applications through a user interface. This could be a screen and keyboard, swiping on a mobile phone, or speech recognition like Siri or...
Indiana Jones had it easy. Most of the artifacts he encountered were tangible. An exploration of ancient applications is like software archaeology, complete with phantoms, dark spells, and riddles. Ah, the joy of legacy modernization. What is Legacy Anyway? One of the fun facts of digital transformation is that organizations depend on existing applications for their would-be shiny digital assets...
Emerging architecture is a characteristic of agile software development. Instead of the Big Design Up-Front, software architecture emerges along with development activities. This becomes difficult for large projects, so enterprise agile approaches balance forward thinking with the rapid development of features that create business value. With a bit of planning, an architecture focus doesn’t...
Lots of words, little impact. The outcome of consulting engagements is often shelfware and fails to make a real difference. It’s like generating electricity from a potato: it sounds good, but it doesn’t accomplish much. Let’s supercharge it. One Potato, Two Potato Did you know you can stick a galvanized nail and a copper penny in a potato and produce electricity? Neither did I...
Agile projects are a dance between the business and project teams. While many organizations use agile approaches, too often, adoption is limited to the mechanical process. There is a lack of real commitment from the business. But it takes two to agile tango. The Requirements Shuffle Traditional project management approaches are sequential. They are also based on the fallacy that business and the...
Cloud platform services continue to expand. There is a growing opportunity to accelerate application development with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. Some organizations take advantage of these to cut down coding and dealing with application infrastructure. Others… not so much. The old Not-Invented-Here syndrome is alive and well. Well-established technology teams often don’t...
Often, when we assess project risk, we look at measurable factors. Scope management, solution quality, or test results. Such assessments require hard skills. But projects also derail as a result of stakeholder behavior, whether intentional or not. We need to use soft skills, such as empathy, to manage these risks. Project failure rates Remain High According to the Project Management Institute...
Shadow IT refers to business users developing their own solutions, outside of organization’s IT groups. It is often seen as risky and problematic. This article puts the practice in a different light and offers a way forward. Three certainties Death, taxes and the inability of your organization’s IT group to deliver all the solutions that the business needs. Not only are these...
When I bought my 1940s house, it had barely any water pressure, so I hired a plumber to assess the situation. He spent a good while in the crawl space, following offshoots of galvanized piping and corroded connections. When he finally emerged, his message was not what I expected: “Son, you have some creative plumbing going on there”. There are two things you don’t want to hear:...
