Category Archives: management

Technical debt: like financial debt, yet not quite

Debts arise when you spend more than you can afford. Furthermore, debts grow by itself: they come with an interest rate. Debts do not have to be a problem, as long as they are temporary, and as long as you have the means to pay them back. Because this is the number 1 characteristic of debts: they need to be paid back, one day or another. If you can’t pay them back at the moment when you have to, this…
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More IT expertise in the boardroom, please!

In my work as a freelance IT consultant I work for companies or institutions that are not IT  companies themselves. Mostly they are consultancy firms or research institutes. Knowledge intensive organizations, I call them myself. Digitization process in organizations So did I work for a consultancy firm in renewable energy. Their business is acquiring knowledge regarding solar energy, wind energy, energy savings, energy systems and use this knowledge to help their clients implementing energy saving measures or renewable energy systems….
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Communication with specialists, or how to recognize a good manager

Working in IT means working with specialists. The IT world is one with a large amount of specializations (technical, methodological, business-wise), that is still growing every day. The same can be said of many other lines of business and it is even true for non-business area’s like science: it’s a scientist’s job to know a lot about very little. Apparently, the world needs specialists. I would even take it one step further: specialization is probably inherent to economic activity. Every…
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Top 3 mistakes made by IT clients

In previous posts, I explained why software development is complicated and susceptible to errors. Subsequently, I tried to find out out why especially large governmental IT projects fail. In this article, I point my arrows towards the clients of IT. It’s my opinion that a lot of problems in IT projects start at the client side. Clients are usually very passionate about their own business (not being IT), have all kinds of ideas about how IT should support their business,…
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