Last week I went to Microsoft in Seattle and Redmond, together with 40 other architects, CEO’s and CIO’s, developers and data specialists from the Netherlands. Three days packed with meetings and sessions from Microsofts leaders and technical product specialists. The main topic was Data and AI. The subjects ranged from Artificial Intelligence and cognitive services,…
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…
This week I’m preparing myself for my second trip to Microsoft in Redmond – Seattle. Three days packed with presentations from and discussions with the best people at Microsoft: Scott Guthrie, Eduardo Kassner, Ulrich Homann, James Whittaker, and many more. And I’ll visit the product teams of AI, Cosmos, IoT, Machine Learning, Azure Functions. It’s…
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…
It’s happening right now. Everyone in IT has to think about their next steps. Especially in the IT infrastructure business. Here’s what is happening: In the last 10 to 15 years companies outsourced their infrastructure services. Today many of these services suddenly became commodity. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Disaster Recovery, Backup, Security, IoT, Machine Learning. This…
My son, four years old, loves dinosaurs and fossils. We dug out some fake fossils recently. He knows their names, their sizes and what they ate. He also understands they are dead. Dinosaurs did not make it because they were not able to adapt fast enough after a major disruption. Like Darwin said: “It Is…
Organizations that want to increase their metrics either invest in: creating more value for their customers or employees, or doing just enough to keep going, but for less effort and money. During the last decade, Microsoft and Amazon amazes customers by investing in work that create more value. When you do that, people talk, the…
How do IT managers, architects and other people in the IT department deal with the change public cloud brings us? In my last post I described one of the things I see in my work that lead to the end of the current form of many IT departments. The challenge for IT people is to…
The audience of the people working in IT infrastructure is changing rapidly. We used to talk tech to each other, now we have to deal with people from the business and the C-level. Scary moments for all parties. What is driving this change and how does this affect the role of IT managers, the architects…
