I just released my long-awaited book, Breaking Through the Agility Barrier: Creating Information Systems that Accelerate Business Agility.
An unseen barrier exists between the “agile” development processes widely used by IT groups, and the needs of the business to change their systems rapidly in response to changing market conditions and company goals. This barrier is expensive, resource-hungry, and bleeds value from the business.
Only by understanding this barrier, and the simple principles required to break through it, can IT leaders deliver their highest value to the business. While simple to describe, though, it’s not so simple to execute, and here is where I can help.
My mission is to help IT leaders (and aspiring leaders)—at whatever level they may be, from CIOs to developers—to improve their ability to deliver true business agility.
It’s my sincere hope that others will find my observations, insights, ideas, and pragmatics to be as useful in their practice as I have in mine.
My writing is based on long experience in the trenches of information systems design, development, and delivery.
I’ve worked on the design of information-based systems for most of my career. Early on, I was a Research Scientist in industrial R&D, and later I worked as a Principal Architect and Consultant on very large-scale, complex, distributed information systems.
Prior to the advent of the World Wide Web, I was actively engaged in exploring information commerce and the commercialization of the Internet. I published a number of juried papers and book chapters on information commerce, as well as other topics, and represented my company in the early stages of the CommerceNet program.
Rarely do these systems function in isolation, so I became interested in finding new ways to help them coordinate activities across traditional company or geographic boundaries.
I was a founding member of the International Foundation for Cooperative Information Systems (IFCIS), and deeply involved in the early Cooperative Information Systems Conferences (CoopIS).
For the past decade I’ve mainly worked as a consultant.
Over my career I’ve been privileged to work with a number of Fortune 50 companies, as well as many smaller firms, across a number of industries. In each case, I’ve been blessed to work on interesting (ie, hard) problems that demanded creativity, innovation, teamwork, and plain old hard work.
I reside just outside of Denver, Colorado.