Skip to content

business

Digital Transformation through the lens of complexity

Digital Transformation is one of the most overused phrases of the past decade. And just like the blind men trying to describe the elephant, we only describe the parts of it that are most apparent to us. I’m aware of the same mistake that I’d be making if I tried to define it holistically. So, to me, the most meaningful way to describe it, is in context of the rest of this series. I’ve enjoyed complexity theory in the past few years after being introduced to the Cynefin framework by Dave Snowden. So I want to look at Digital Transformation… Read More »Digital Transformation through the lens of complexity

The Sichuan Restaurant

I am in Bangalore for an agile training for a client. I’m staying near our office in Koramangala so I went to this chinese restaurant called “Sichuan” near Raheja Residency for dinner. First of all let me say that its a really good restaurant. If I had to nitpick, it was a bit warm in there but that’s about it. Food, ambience, service, rates, everything is very nice. I had a soup and a main course that was delicious. Even the fresh lime soda was nice. So I am absolutely positive that they can serve excellent desserts as well. But… there’s a… Read More »The Sichuan Restaurant

What are we doing?? – Part Three

This is what got me thinking about “What (the %*&$) are we really doing?”. Are gazillions of dollars being invested in IT, by organizations just trying to maintain their status quo? As the study shows, this is partly true. Businesses require to grow for survival. Growth requires accommodating more and more people and systems into your business. It is very natural (and useful) to be paranoid of these new people / systems. As businesses grow they have to become more or less bureaucratic. Bureaucracy requires additional processing power. This power can either be man OR machine If the business chooses… Read More »What are we doing?? – Part Three

What are we doing?? – Part One

I am doing what we call an Inception for a new project. The situation is not at all unusual. The Constraints An Organization with a bunch of generic e-commerce platforms Live customer sites on each of these platforms One of these platforms particularly painful Integration with proprietary back-office operations software The RequirementsBuild a custom platform that will replace all the existing ones, support all the customer sites and have a bunch of unique features. And BTW we need to go live in 2 months.How?The only way to do this is build a bare bones application that can take a couple… Read More »What are we doing?? – Part One

Agile Business Analysts

Yesterday, Craig Brown asked Do we need Agile Business Analysts?. Two and a half years back when I joined ThoughtWorks, I would have said “No, we don’t”. Today I strongly disagree with the view that Business Analysts can be done away with on Agile projects. The objective of an Agile project is to provide maximum value to the client as soon as possible. Now I agree that the ideal situation would be when you have business users & developers who agree and abide by this sentiment. You can happily get rid of the BA in such a situation. Real life,… Read More »Agile Business Analysts