A Businessman's View

Imposter Syndrome is a cruel partner in your professional journey.  If you're not familiar with the term, it is essentially the feeling that you do not belong in a particular profession or that you do not deserve a specific role or set of responsibilities.  (You may read more in the Wikipedia article .)  I did not hear the term myself until I participated in a mentoring group for young employees at my current job - some of the young employees said they had this, and I won't deny a bit of surprise when I read what it is. If you feel this way, you're obviously not alone.  A good friend of mine suffers from this in no small amount in spite of the fact that she's an upper mid-level manager at her company with an organization of approximately 40 people reporting to her.  She feels this way because she never completed college, but fails to realize that her hard work and dedication to being the best that she can be is why she has been repeatedly promoted through the ranks of h

Last time we delved into the concept of business impact  and defined it using the context of a journey from the "current state" to the "desired future state."  In this blog entry, we will gain a better understanding of why business impact is so important by looking at basic Organizational Chage Management (OCM) principles.  As a caveat, this will not be a comprehensive treatment of OCM by any means and will deviate from what the current methodologies prescribe. Crawling to flying OCM comes in two flavors, for the most part: Kotter.   Developed by John Kotter, this is the direct result of his seminal book (published in 1996) entitled  Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail . Prosci.   Developed by Jeff Hiatt, this methodology is utilized by the company that he founded of the same name. You can find a nice high-level comparison between Kotter and Prosci  here . There are others, of course, including an honorable mention of one of my favorite business-related

Before we can delve into deeper topics, we need an understanding of the concept of "business impact."  This blog entry will attempt to define this concept in clear terms. Giving credit where it is due, this is derived from the amazing course by Force Management called Command of the Message   and is but a drop in the massive bucket of knowledge that you'll get if you take their course.  (And I highly recommend it if you are interested in learning about this topic in substantially more detail.) Essentially, every business is on a never-ending journey that can be represented by the following graphic. To explain the graphic, there is no business that is completely happy with its current state.  In order to constantly provide value to its shareholders (or owners, if privately held) it needs to continually evolve.  This process of evolution involves identifying operating characteristics of the business in its current state that are not ideal.  In some instances, these can be

I'm actually welcoming myself back to my own blog.  (Yes, I guess I'm making that "a thing.")  It's been over 3 years since my last post, and I've experienced much since then, global pandemic notwithstanding. During this time, my wife (an Executive Director at her place of employment) and I have spent countless hours analyzing, dissecting, and generally discussing such diverse topics as... Leadership, Mentoring, How to overcome Imposter Syndrome , How to navigate difficult situations, How to manage difficult employees, ...and others. But it wasn't until I was driving back from the airport early yesterday morning after dropping her off for her latest business trip that I realized these topics may interest someone who chances across this blog while traipsing through the dandelion fields of the Internet. So "buckle up buttercup" - during the next several blog posts I expect to wax philosophical on these and other topics that will hopefully be of int

 In my last post , I discussed how no-code/low-code platforms fulfill rapid development of business applications - addressing the needs of the Citizen Developer (a Gartner term  first used around 2009).  I also commented on how this specific objective limits their ability to provide true integration capabilities, which require the flexibility to adapt to the myriad variations of infrastructure.  This is a concern because companies often have acquired legacy systems via M&A activity while simultaneously investing in new technology solutions, resulting in a mishmash of systems with multiple ways of accessing them. In this post, I'd like to examine how the needs of the latter group are met by describing some key capabilities that are "must-haves" for any company looking to execute on a digital transformation strategy.  In order to do this, let's define who the target user base is for such a technology platform. Disclaimer:   I work for MuleSoft (a division of Salesfo

 Unless you've had your head in the sand for the past year or so, you've seen the phrases low-code  and no-code  bandied about quite frequently everywhere you look.  You've probably wondered if this is something new that's here to stay or just a "flash in the pan."  Although the terms have been in the fore of the IT trade publications recently, Low Code Development Platforms (LCDP) (and the corresponding No Code Development Platforms) have been in existence since 2011.  Their roots can be traced to the 90's with 4th generation programming languages and GUI-assisted programming paradigms, e.g. IBM VisualAge for Basic, which was discontinued in 1998. For those of you who aren't familiar with either, the premise is that these platforms allow someone to quickly build applications using a WYSIWYG interface and a "click and configure" paradigm to Isn't this the source code to Roblox? rapidly build full applications with little or no coding requ