All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Arthur Shopenhauer – German philosopher Hewlett Packard had one of the great corporate cultures of the 70s and 80s. When people talk about Silicon Valley at it’s best, they are talking about Hewlett…
Introduction In 20 years of working in IT I have also worked for non-profit organizations – most of the time pro-bono. Mostly they needed help with some simple technical issues, and other times on a strategic level: understanding what to do next and why. To help them for the longer-term I wrote something in 2016…
Cloud is fundamentally changing the game for many organizations and persons. A new set of rules asks for a new approach, and I’ve seen examples of organizations who block the discussion about taking new approaches to this changed game. In this 4th post I’ll be rounding up the conclusions of my earlier posts about this…
December 2015 I went to Microsoft Seattle for a three day IT Enterprise Architects conference. Reflecting on the information we got and looking at it from our company’s perspective, we realized even more then before that we were driving an overweight truck trying to pass a railroad, while the train was coming right at us…
An organization who wants to stay relevant over time needs to be able to deal with changes and reshape itself. To do this, every organization needs one or more shapers. A shaper is someone who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts and opposition of others.…
Usually every organization or department you work with tells you they are successful. “Yes, we are doing great! Our profit has grown, our customers are very happy with us and we take great care of our people.” Over time once you get to know them better, you are sometimes blown away by experiencing the complete…
There is a lot of discussion on how to start using Office 365 in your organization before people are actually doing anything. Especially orgs older then 15 years tend to stall. They have file servers containing dozen of terabytes of data, created non-transparent work processes and have a relatively older workforce. And then there is…
Living with a person is complex, and it is complex being a person. It’s not like you push a button or pull a lever and a thing happens, it’s a much more complicated system than that. Complexity is therefore governed by principles rather than rules. Same goes for innovation. Take a look at the following model: Simple…
Organizations are becoming more and more IT companies. Technology has become the way to develop new services or enrich existing services. The business is getting closer to IT, and ideas come true because the needed technology is accessible to everyone. The use of containers is one of the most important IT trends at the moment…
“What about vendor lock-in?” people ask me when I’m having talks about public cloud. “If I put all of my applications and data in Azure and Office 365, Microsoft has got me by the balls. Why should I do this?” It is a good question, and there is a good answer too. To be sure,…
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about how IT departments became irrelevant. In the time that passed I’ve met more and more IT managers who are having a serious challenge to stay relevant for their org. Once they were Kings, now they are getting obsolete if they do not adapt. This article…
A very simple example of a collision of two worlds: reason and power. A few months ago I started sharing my files with people from external organizations using Microsoft’s Onedrive. Very handy. No more annoying searches for the email that contains the latest version of a powerpoint presentation. And sharing via Onedrive gives me more…
