Currently on my mind

The past year I’ve met numerous organisations suffering from outdated outsourcing strategies. Either very business critical areas or the entire IT has been outsourced. The typical symptom one meet from this are lacking support of new business strategies, a general lack of control of IT decisions, frustration due to differentiation of incentives and drivers between buyer and supplier. Also the vendor lock-in situation is common, leading to lack of gain of a healthy multi-vendor competition in terms of cost, skills and innovation management. In other words your business is getting hurt.  As a consultant in different roles such as strategic advisor, manager (Manager/Team Manager/Project Manager) or Enterprise Architect, I meet many organisations and people in many different situations; different cultures, different levels of maturity and different industries. However one thing they all have in common, they are all working with business where IT is business critical. ...

Article in Computer Sweden -  "Ännu ett fiasko för Accenture" (free translation goes "Another flop by Accenture") http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.546751/annu-ett-fiasko-for-accenture?queryText=accenture How tragic. Of course anyone can fail, but haven’t we learned to avoid those huge big-bang-programs trying to change too big bite of an organisation or business segments at once? I see the typical mistakes over and over again -          It’s never a monolith with all the same sets of preconditions and requirements. Hence forcing too big of bite into the same model will make big violence on your business. However in most of the times the projects will never even be completed since stakeholders will not be able to agree or likely not even understand each other, due to their different contexts and needs. This will lead to frustration and all but an inspiring working climate. Instead we have to be more percipient to differ...

For the modern high-end company providing some kind of professional service or product – to have an inspiring working climate is one of your most important and valuable investment.  Ok, but how to do it?  There are million of ways and the sky is the limit. But firstly you must understand that this is important, and see investing in your inspiring working climate as a company success factor. Within Netlight we work with this a lot . The people, our competence and our experience, are our most valuable assets. A nd Edge Academy, is just one initiative we run. (for the record, our Edge Academy initiative provides value in many other areas as well) . In addition we have our grandiose Edge Conference during our Edge Summit, our day-to-day competence sharing events, our Edge comptence communities and our Edge competence activity cells. (see a pattern?) What is Edge Academy? Edge Academy is the Netlight intimate technology festival run yearly, by consultants for consultants. ...

In the life as a consultant it’s very natural to talk about delivery, because simply put that’s what you do for your clients. But I know many companies and organisations would gain a lot by focusing more on the topic. Unfortunately delivery is often mistaken as something you do at the end of an initiative; when you turn in the report, delivery the codebase, delivery an architecture or deliver a project. But delivery is so much more. Delivery is something you do every day. It’s how you walk and how you talk. It’s how you take control and responsibility over challenges and opportunities, and how you drive them to come forward. It’s about never delivering any surprises but always be on top of things and clearly bring to attention if things start to get out of tack and not seem to end up as expected.  Unfortunately delivery is not as easy as doing exactly what your boss, stakeholder or client say, but neither about not doing what they’re saying, of course. No it’s about really u...

Hurray for less barrier btw front/backend, consistently asynchronous and the power of dynamic run-time-compilation. In all, a lot of freedom in the JS lack of typing and dynamic run-time-compilation, but with great freedom comes great responsibility. And if the responsibility isn’t taken due to whatever reason (lack of coding practices, lack of competence or experience…) the journey will not be that nice eventually. So, to successfully use Node.js for your enterprise system, you really need to design and maintain your code base very carefully. I would say this is way harder and more important than working in any of the more common and forgiving back-end environments like .net/c# or jvm/java. Questions Is Node.js ready to conquer the world of large scale enterprise systems? Although Node.js doesn’t provide as many out-of-the-box component as for example java, and hasn’t been “hammered” as much, the Node community is very active and productive. And Node.js is already successfully ...

I’ve been in both situations, delivering large projects both with and without, and I must say it's a luxury to actually see what is happening under the hood, in real time, that you soon can't live without. Also I must suggest to have a  real time dashboards showing the full picture, ie. both tech and business KPIs in one unified view. I wouldn’t say no to using AppDynamics, Splunk and Qlikview for the job but there are cheaper alternatives (for example  Elastic search/Logstash/Kibana can be used to get full overview of your logs). The cost? Yes, it does cost but it pays back fairly quick in your distributed environment when you have the volumes. Do I need it, you might ask? It depends. How critical is quality? What's the cost of incidents and downtime? Do you want to provide the tools for development to take full responsibility of their code all the way into production?  Follow me on Twitter: mandus_engman

What would happen if you chose an open source e-commerce platform for your organisation , let say Hybris,  Magento , osCommerce or OpenCart, all based on the technical features provided. Then you outsource further development and customization of all those features to a big development team in India for a couple of months. First after this, when the above steps are finalized, you turn to business and want to start integrate with the business processes you actually have. Do you think success will be a fact? Learnings:  We all know it but still things go wrong – start by understanding your business and your business needs. Today, you can't expect a business critical IT project to be successful without business and IT/Tech running it together.   Follow me on Twitter: mandus_engman