The Business Bottleneck, book, now available, for free!
New book from me, free too!
I have a new “report” out from O’Reilly and sponsored by VMWare/Pivotal. It’s focused on how “The Business” can help out with digital transformation: The Business Bottleneck.
Here’s a list of topics from official description, written much better by someone else than I could have written:
- The finance bottleneck: How forecasts, plans, and commits often fail in the chaos of business and software development
- The strategy bottleneck: Why tried-and-true approaches to corporate strategy are a poor fit for digital-driven business
- The leadership bottleneck: Why leadership, concerned with success and sustainability, is powerless to change how people operate
- Case studies: How Duke Energy and other businesses have adapted to short software cycles
I’ve excerpted a few things here and there, and some of the stuff I’ve cut. Now you can get the full book for free. It’s good stuff!
Why not download it right now!
Original programming
Software Defined Talk
This week, we talk about:
With a new CEO and president at IBM, we talk about what’s been going on good and bad at IBM in recent years. Big bets were made and that whole cloud things overshadowed things. We also talk about the mysteries of private equity, here what Thoma Bravo has done to make billions of dollars of Dynatrace and Compuware. Finally, we briefly talk about the whole microservices and serverless are silly trend - monoliths rule! (Oh, and some small Java talk.)
Getting more enterprise DevOps
I’m working on a new talk, the premise is that we still have a lot of work to do to get DevOps and agile and stuff into enterprises:
When it comes to improving how software is done in large organizations there’s still a lot of work to be done. In fact, most haven’t started applying DevOps principles or even technologies. We’ve had agile for 20 years, and DevOps for 10 years. You would expect enterprises to have started using these best practices and, as they say, “transformed” by now. Enterprises are facing bottlenecks that are too often ignored, or assumed solves, by the DevOps community. This talk discusses those bottlenecks and how we can help move past them. Otherwise, DevOps will continue to play around the edges of the trough of disillusionment: much talked of, but not put into practice enough.
We all want DevOps to thrive and benefit our colleagues in IT. Our forgotten pals in THE ENTERPRISE are hungry to thrive and enjoy the benefits of DevOps. Let’s make sure they do.
To flesh out my ideas, I’m writing a companion article. We’ll see how it goes!
“There’s a whole lot of stupid up there.” | Michael Coté | Flickr
Explore cote’s photos on Flickr. cote has uploaded 993 photos to Flickr.
“you don’t have the mindset—the mindset has you”
The questions you ask will tell you a lot about the way you’re seeing the world at that moment in time. A mindset of abundance or a mindset of scarcity? A mindset of threat or a mindset of opportunity? A mindset of curiosity and openness or a mindset of judgment and action? A mindset about what is or a mindset about what could be? Notice that all of these mindsets are the right ones to have in certain circumstances. They’re only problematic if you are the mindset rather than choosing it—in that case it would be most accurate to say that you don’t have the mindset—the mindset has you. Your mindset determines your behavior, determines what is or is not possible in a given situation, including what questions you think to ask.
— Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders by Jennifer Garvey Berger, Keith Johnston
Mural in Gent | Michael Coté | Flickr
Explore cote’s photos on Flickr. cote has uploaded 993 photos to Flickr.
Relevant to your interests
- Reading 5 hours a day, and other tips on reading more - ‘Stephen King had advised people to read something like five hours a day. My friend said, “You know, that’s baloney. Who can do that?” But then, years later, he found himself in Maine on vacation. He was waiting in line outside a movie theater with his girlfriend, and who should be waiting in front of him? Stephen King! His nose was in a book the whole time in line. When they got into the theater, Stephen King was still reading as the lights dimmed. When the lights came up, he pulled his book open right away. He even read as he was leaving. Now, I have not confirmed this story with Stephen King. But I think the message this story imparts is an important one. Basically, you can read a lot more. There are minutes hidden in all the corners of the day, and they add up to a lot of minutes.’
- Being friends with someone makes it hard to write op-ed’s about them. - ‘I write about tech executives, and (no joke) refuse to meet with them. Mostly because I’m an introvert and don’t enjoy meeting new people. But also because intimacy is a function of contact. Often when I meet someone, I like them as a person, feel empathy for them, and find it harder to be objective about their actions.’
- Google Cloud revenue - ‘Google brought in $8.9 billion in cloud revenue in 2019, a 53 percent spike from the prior year. In 2018, cloud revenue was $5.8 billion, and it grew 44 percent over the $4 billion the cloud division generated in 2017.’
- Smaller procurement cycles help eliminate waterfall badness in government IT
- Advice for ops people doing product management for platforms/infrastructure - ‘Advice for ops people doing product management for platforms/infrastructure ‘
- A product management view of tech debt - ‘The key takeaway is that technical debt should be communicated as a business-oriented problem with a measurable investment.’
- Developer relations at IBM - No SSH JJ.
- The history of Microsoft Azure - ‘In a famous internal Microsoft memo dated October 28, 2005, Ozzie articulated his vision for building a disruptive platform that would replicate the design of Microsoft Windows OS, .NET application services and Microsoft Office Suite on the Internet. Little was known that this idea would eventually translate into Azure IaaS, Azure PaaS and Office 365. ‘
- Should I do microservices? - ‘One common architectural driver discussed when comparing a modular monolith with a microservices architecture is level of complexity. Grzybek finds the modular monolith less complex than that of a distributed system. High complexity reduces maintainability, readability and observability. It also requires a more experienced team, an advanced infrastructure, and a specific organizational culture. If simplicity is a key architectural driver, he therefore strongly recommends a team to first consider a monolith ‘
- Tomcat is used a lot, IntelliJ, and Spring.
- IBM’s financials for the past 8 years
- James Governor reviews the observability concept and market