Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Without the Right Capital Structure, There is no Software Company Within

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Is every company destined to be a software company? From a production perspective, there's reason to believe so: relatively minor thing...
Sunday, May 31, 2015

Would Uber be so intriguing if we thought of it as the next American Airlines?

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Suppose for a minute that self-driving cars become commercially available. Obviously, a lot has to happen before we get to that point, but ...
Thursday, April 30, 2015

Matrix IT Organizations, Part II: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

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A few months ago, we took a look at the pathologies of matrixed organizations : no focus, amateur management, and people waging turf wars to...
Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Activist Investing in Strategic Software Chapter 1 Excerpt - Why Governance Matters

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I've published drafts of the introduction and first 4 chapters of my book, Activist Investing in Strategic Software . I still have some...
Saturday, February 28, 2015

Activist Investing in Strategic Software

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A few years ago, I felt I had enough experience - and had put enough thought into the subject - to write a book on governance in software de...
Saturday, January 31, 2015

Matrix IT Organizations, Part I: Turtles all the way Down

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Multiple layers of authority overlap both horizontally (different people and committees engage with the same issue) and vertically (many dec...
Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The CIO and M&A, Part II

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Integrating businesses is no small task.  Established workflows, systems and tools are vigorously defended yet poorly understood.  Fearing f...
Sunday, November 30, 2014

The CIO and M&A, Part I

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"It is hard not to be cynical about this. M&A is a great process for creating fees for bankers, and for destroying the value held b...
Friday, October 31, 2014

Can a Business Rent a Core Capability?

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Tech utilities - things that automate administration, enable communication or improve employee productivity - started as a labor expense, be...
Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Tech: From Owning to Renting - to Owning Again?

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In the 1970s, the predominant business strategy was vertical integration: own the value chain from raw materials to retail outlets. The rese...
Sunday, August 31, 2014

Why Commercial Contracts Matter In Agile Software Development

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"We value customer collaboration over contract negotiation." -- The Agile Manifesto Contracts for software development have hist...
Thursday, July 31, 2014

The Fine Line Between "Stretch Role" and "Unqualified", Part II: The Growth Mask

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When a business or a profession grows faster than the labor market it draws from , it suffers a capability deficiency: there simply aren...
Monday, June 30, 2014

The Fine Line Between "Stretch Role" and "Unqualified", part I

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Everybody wins when somebody is put in a stretch role. Whoever does the hiring - a manager naming a first time tech lead or a board hiring ...
Friday, May 30, 2014

Deflation and Technical Debt

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Technical debt is a useful metaphor for explaining why some code is faster to complete but more expensive to maintain. It is also helpful i...
Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Are We Aligning the Portfolio with Labor, or Labor with the Portfolio?

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Corporate IT has long been a paradox: as a source of competitiveness it is expected to be responsive and flexible; as a cost center it is ke...
Monday, March 31, 2014

Knowledge Versus Wage Work in Software Development

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"Increasing numbers of people who had formerly been self-employed in workshops and cottage industry, often on a subcontracting basis, a...