Featured
When the Architect Picks Up the Hammer
Something shifts when a senior technologist stops directing software to be built and starts building it himself, with AI as the pair. After four decades in software and twenty years away from the keyboard, the distance between intent and implementation finally collapsed. This is what that felt like, and what it revealed about experience, craft, and the future of building
The Decline of the Org Chart
For most of the last century, the challenge of organizing large groups of people around shared work produced a consistent answer: the hierarchy. Not because anyone designed it to be optimal, but because it solved five distinct coordination problems at once, and nothing simpler could do the same. Those problems are now separable. The structure built to solve them all at once is beginning to come apart, unevenly and in ways most commentary misses.
Themes
The Return of the Builder
Intent, clarity, and the craft of building software when implementation gets cheap.
6 articles →
The Self-Driving Enterprise
How AI is reshaping enterprise software, from ambient ERP to autonomous workflows.
21 articles →
My Life with AI
A personal narrative of building alongside machines, from a TRS-80 to today.
2 articles →
Random Thoughts from the Trenches
Software craft, leadership, estimation, and whatever else is on my mind.
38 articles →Articles
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Forget the hype: think about ERP integration before AI
The technology sector has always been prone to hype and promises of silver bullets. Marketers get ahead of engineers and evangelize over the promise of the Next Big Thing. Conferences dedicated to the…
What You’re Getting Wrong About DevOps (and How To Make it Right)
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Is It Time to Replace Your Legacy ERP System?
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The low-no-code series - Unit4: 3 reasons low-code is over-hyped
I have worked in the IT industry for many years and sometimes it’s hard not to become a little weary of the hype around the latest trends. Low-code/no-code is one of those trends where hype can…
The architecture of future-proof ERP
Every ERP vendor will tell you their software is 'future-proof'. But what characteristics really make enterprise software a smart investment in an unpredictable future? I believe there are four main…
Why edge computing matters to enterprise software
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Making ERP [e]xpert, [r]emote-friendly and [p]ersonal
The criticism commonly levelled against enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is that they are monolithic and generalist software slabs: suites of applications, dense with features and functions, designed to cover just about any need an enterprise might have, with a uniform user interface layered over for a common look and feel.
Automation's Critical Role in Driving Efficiency
Last year in this space, we predicted that "the humanity of the enterprise will be at center stage." The pandemic certainly brought people front and center in ways nobody could have foreseen. COVID-19…
Five Ways to Keep Innovation Alive in Your 2021 IT Strategy
This year, the pandemic taught us the truth of old proverb “necessity is the mother of invention.” When companies had to close offices on short notice to control the spread of the virus, IT teams…
Welcome to the world of pervasive ERP
For decades now, users of enterprise resource planning software have been trained to believe that all the action must take place within the core of the system.
Has business technology focused on the wrong thing?
Why do businesses buy new technology? Historically, it’s been an operational investment to reduce costs, simplify administration, speed up processes and measure results. These are admirable objectives…