Category: longform
Essays, articles, and other original content.
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Book Review: Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations
The premise of this book, for most anyone, is painfully boring: planning out and project managing the installation of COTS software. This is mostly lumbering, on-premises ERP applications: those huge, multi-year installs of software that run the back office and systems of record for organizations. While this market is huge, touches almost every company, and…
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Getting Started — picking your first cloud native projects, or, Every Digital Transformation Starts with One Project
This post is pretty old and possibly out of date. There’s updates on this topic and more in my book, Monolithic Transformation. Every journey begins with a single step, they say. What they don’t tell you is that you need to pick your step wisely. And there’s also step two, and three, and then all…
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Enterprise open source montage
I cut the below montage-y overview of the history of enterprise open source from a Register piece I’m working on. Here it is! For me, the dawn of enterprise open source was somewhere around 2001 when IBM committed billions of dollars to shoring up Linux. Around this same time, the Eclipse Foundation (also launched by…
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Moving beyond the endless debate on bi-modal IT
I get all ants-in-pants about this whole bi-modal discussion because I feel like it’s a lot of energy spent talking about the wrong things. This came up recently when I was asked about “MVP”, in a way that basically was saying “our stuff is dangerous [oil drilling], so ‘minimal’ sounds like it’d be less safe.”…
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HPE Software sold for $8.8bn, to Micro Focus
While HPE is getting $2.5bn in cash, the whole deal value is more like $8.8bn, the non-cash being stock. More details: The Numbers “Under the deal, HP Enterprise shareholders are expected to end up with Micro Focus shares currently valued at about $6.3 billion. Micro Focus will pay HP Enterprise $2.5 billion in cash.” (WSJ)…
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Deciding where the Docker ecosystem will make money
The Docker forking hoopla is providing an interesting example, in realtime, of how open communities figure out monetization. #RealTalk: Open communities are not immune to C.R.E.A.M. One of the most important decisions an open source community makes is where and how it will make money. I always liked Eclipse’s take because they’re mega clear on this…
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These aren’t the ROI’s you’re looking for
I have a larger piece on common objections to “cloud native” that I’ve encountered over the last year. Put more positive, “how to get your digital transformation started with a agile, DevOps, and cloud native” or some such platitudinal title like that. Here’s a draft of the dread-ROI section. The most annoying buzzkill for changing…
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Working with legacy applications, systems, and portfolios
Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson asked me recently for advice on working with legacy applications. Check out her piece on it. Here’s the full reply I sent to her in email: Her topics: – The steps someone could take to get themselves up to speed on their employer’s legacy software. – How this knowledge can make them…
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Questioning DRY
tl;dr Recently, I’ve been in conversations where people throw some doubt on DRY. In the cloud native, microservices mode of operating where independent teams are chugging along, mostly decoupled from other teams, duplicating code and functionality tends to come more naturally, even necessarily. And the benefits of DRY (reuse and reducing bugs/inconstancy from multiple implementation…
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Eventually, to do a developer strategy your execs have to take a leap of faith
A kingmaker in the making. I’ve talked with an old colleague about pitching a developer-based strategy recently. They’re trying to convince their management chain to pay attention to developers to move their infrastructure sales. There’s a huge amount of “proof” an arguments you can make to do this, but my experience in these kinds of projects…
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So you want to become a software company? 7 tips to not screw it up.
Hey, I’ve not only seen this movie before, I did some script treatments: Chief Executive Officer John Chambers is aggressively pursuing software takeovers as he seeks to turn a company once known for Internet plumbing products such as routers into the world’s No. 1 information-technology company. … Cisco is primarily targeting developers of security, data-analysis…
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Self-motivated teams lead to better software
This post is pretty old and possibly out of date. There’s an updated version of it in my book, Monolithic Transformation. In contrast to the way traditional organizations operate, cloud native enterprises are typically comprised of self-motivated and directed teams. This reduces the amount of time it takes to make decisions, deploy code, and see if the results…
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Addressing the DevOps compliance problem
Satisfying the mythical auditors is often one of the first barriers to spreading DevOps initiatives more widely inside an organization. While these process-driven barriers can be annoying and onerous, once you follow the DevOps tradition of empathetic inclusion — being all “one team” — they can not only stop slowing you down but actually help the overall quality of…
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All the taboos about working at home
Working at home, with a family, is a challenge, as this nice overview piece at The Register goes over. You think you’re trading all those interruptions from co-workers talking about the sportsball or just complaining about the daily grind, but you’re actually trading in for a different set of co-workers, your family. And their requests…
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Barriers to DevOps in government
There’s just as much pull for DevOps in government as there is in the private sector. While most of our focus around adoption is on how businesses can and are using DevOps and continuous delivery, supported by cloud, to create better software, many government agencies are in the same position and would benefit greatly from…
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A presentation is just a document that has been printed in landscape mode
I’m always wanting to do a talk or write a series of items on the white-collar toolchain, or surviving in big companies. Here’s one principal about presentations in corporate settings. Slides must stand on their own Much presentation wisdom of late has revolved around the actual event of a speaker talking, giving the presentation. In…
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Management’s role in DevOps: orchestrating the why
Donkey teamwork What’s the point of it all? Why are we doing this? These questions pop up frequently in IT teams where the reason for doing your daily activities — like churning through tickets, whizzing up builds, or “doing the DevOps” — seems only that someone, somewhere told you to do it. If you’re in this situation — you have no…
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You Have Caused Confusion And Delay | Reaction Images | Know Your Meme
You Have Caused Confusion And Delay | Reaction Images | Know Your Meme
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DevOps ROI
Recently, for my column over at FierceDevOps, I opined about doing ROI for DevOps. This topic comes up a lot as I note in my Pivotal post on the topic. Here’s a summary/excerpt of the three ways of thinking through it: 1.) Bottoms-up ROI: We know everything and have put it in this spreadsheet …if…
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Coté Memo #074: \”Let’s start an anonymous club.\”
It’s mostly links this week, with a big add video ad for my pal below: Get your lurn on [player.vimeo.com/video/121…](https://player.vimeo.com/video/121473651?color=01786e&byline=0&portrait=0) Do you want to bone up on your product management skills? Check out this two day workshop from Craftman PM. I used to work with Prabhakar and he’s anything but boring when it comes to…
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