Posts

• Leaning on AI to Increase Public Spending Transparency 2 months ago Posted in: AI & the Enterprise - 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… Read More
• What We Keep Getting Wrong 4 months ago Posted in: Strategy & Transformation - 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… Read More
• Two Kinds of AI Company 10 months ago Posted in: AI & the Enterprise - 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… Read More
• Architecture Is Having A Moment 11/29/2024 Posted in: Technology & Architecture - 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… Read More
• Your Copilot is Mostly Watching 7/29/2024 Posted in: AI & the Enterprise - 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… Read More
• Voting Solutions for All People 4/17/2024 Posted in: Consulting Craft - 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… Read More
• Stuck in Third Gear 11/7/2023 Posted in: Technology & Architecture - 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… Read More
• The Demo Looked Great 6/18/2023 Posted in: AI & the Enterprise - 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… Read More
• Everybody’s an AI Company Now 12/30/2022 Posted in: AI & the Enterprise - 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… Read More
• Nobody Tracked the Bar Tab 4/18/2022 Posted in: Strategy & Transformation - Remember when cloud was going to save money? The pitch was seductive. Stop buying infrastructure. Stop guessing capacity. Just pay by the drink! A little compute here, some storage there, a round of managed services for the table. No commitments. No waste. Just pure, consumption-based efficiency. It turns out that… Read More
• Shadow IT Grew Up and Got a Job Title 11/21/2021 Posted in: Leadership & Culture - The notion of Shadow IT as an expression of the mismatch between supply and demand of remains fascinating to me as it pits the abundance of what's possible with technology against the scarcity of making it available, with a backdrop of people picking up IT by its scrappy bootstraps .… Read More
• Your Best People Are Already Interviewing 5/13/2021 Posted in: Leadership & Culture - One of the privileges of consulting is breadth. Especially as strategists, you tend to not go deep in one organization, you go wide across many. David Epstein wrote about this in Range: generalists who draw from diverse experiences often see patterns that specialists miss. I am far from the smartest… Read More
• The Bill Always Comes 12/14/2020 Posted in: Strategy & Transformation - Remember those miracles from the spring? The ones where teams stood up digital channels in days, migrated to remote work overnight, and duct-taped together solutions that kept the business running? Turns out that those miracles come with invoices. And they're arriving now. I'm not talking about cloud bills, although those… Read More
• The Three-Year Roadmap That Took Three Months 6/7/2020 Posted in: Strategy & Transformation - In February, a client shared their three-year digital strategy. It was well crafted with a phased approach, careful governance and had executive alignment. By April, only three months later, they had implemented the most tansformative elements. Not because the strategy was brilliant. Because a pandemic made it non-optional. Necessity Beats… Read More
• Digital Transformation Finally Out-Transformed Itself 12/10/2019 Posted in: Strategy & Transformation - In a meeting last month, a senior executive mentioned without a hint of irony: "We need to transform our transformation." The room didn't flinch. That's how far gone we are. It's been roughly a decade since "digital transformation" entered the corporate lexicon, and the phrase has been stretched to mean… Read More
• Your API is a Product, Treat It Like One 5/24/2019 Posted in: Strategy & Transformation - It's not uncommon to manage hundreds of APIs in a drive towards increasing interoperability. Surprisingly, it's also not uncommon to see organizations track them by spreadsheet, In one case, I reviewed a client's API strategy that was encapsulated in two tabs: Published and Other. That was it. That was the… Read More
• All the Clouds: Why Multi-Cloud is the New Buffet Nobody Needed 12/22/2018 Posted in: Technology & Architecture - There's a moment in every cloud strategy workshop where someone says it. You can feel it coming... the CIO leans back, crosses their arms, and declares: "We're going multi-cloud." The room nods. It sounds smart. It sounds strategic. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd read in an analyst… Read More
• Father’s day as a parent/consultant 6/18/2018 Posted in: Consulting Craft - Kids with a parent who works as a consultant grow up with strange perspectives. Monopoly games come with Net Present Value analysis on potential hotel acquisitions; science fair projects with kick-ass hypotheses and massive amounts of data to back them up. But also, mom or dad consultant is away a… Read More
• From Design Thinking to Design Doing with Prototyping 6/3/2018 Posted in: Technology & Architecture - Prototyping is the transition from talking about it, to doing just enough of it to see where it takes our ideas. Not until we build a semblance of our solution can we test to see if our ideas stick. Prototyping drives the feedback loop and becomes the launch point for ideas… Read More
• PMO: Bring on the Revolution 5/12/2018 Posted in: Leadership & Culture - The old school project/program/portfolio management office PMO is a relic from the command-and-control models of the past. It worked well for managing predictable solutions. But it's where agility and innovation dies. Bring on the revolution. Recognize This? When I see old school PMOs and these are more common than you… Read More
• Breaking Up Applications 4/29/2018 Posted in: Technology & Architecture - 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,… Read More
• Design Thinking for APIs 4/17/2018 Posted in: Technology & Architecture - 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,… Read More
• Software archaeology: legacy modernization 4/9/2018 Posted in: Technology & Architecture - 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… Read More
• Managing Emerging Architecture 3/30/2018 Posted in: Technology & Architecture - 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… Read More
• Potato-Power Consulting 3/24/2018 Posted in: Consulting Craft - 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… Read More
• It takes two to agile tango 3/15/2018 Posted in: Leadership & Culture - 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… Read More
• Overcoming the Not-Invented-Here Syndrome 3/7/2018 Posted in: Leadership & Culture - 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… Read More
• Using Empathy In Project Risk Management 3/6/2018 Posted in: Consulting Craft - 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.… Read More
• Enlightened Shadow IT 3/4/2018 Posted in: Leadership & Culture - 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… Read More
• Creative Plumbing 3/2/2018 Posted in: Technology & Architecture - 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,… Read More
• Don’t Be An Enabler 2/27/2018 Posted in: Strategy & Transformation - "Technology is the enabler for business outcomes". This common mantra is often heard when tech teams talk with business stakeholders in corporate settings. It sounds sort-of right. After all, it makes little sense to embark on a project for technology's sake. Don't rock the boat. At the same time, it… Read More