Earlier this week, the Tallinn-based globally operating startup offering AI-powered identity verification solutions raised an additional $100M and — now valued at $1.5 billion — rightfully joined the ranks of Estonian tech unicorns. Several years ago when I was visiting our partner’s offices in Greece, I was shown the inner…

This Monday it was announced that AXELOS — the custodians of best practice frameworks and methods such as ITIL and PRINCE2 — will be sold to PeopleCert. AXELOS was set up in 2013 as a joint venture between the UK Cabinet Office and the professional services company Capita plc, with…

This short post is based on the discussions I keep having with technology leaders about their tech stack, vendors’ overzealous sales teams, and investment decisions. It is also inspired by the discussions I’ve had with Simon Wardley. We get bombarded with new approaches, technologies, platforms, and software products. Often, when…

This quick post is inspired by the recent discussions about using swarming for incident management, most recently in Learning from DevOps: Why complex systems necessitate new ITSM thinking by Jon Hall. It all starts with Cynefin. It’s actually rather difficult to not start with Cynefin, because this sense-making framework just…

We (sometimes/often/all the bloody time) like to improve things in big batches. As in: everything that was done before is bad and should be replaced with this new thing. I find it ironic how widespread this is even in the agile community. One of the recent trends is the move…

While some IT professionals encounter this ITIL thing on their first day in a new job, some others have reached the role of Senior Software Engineer at the ripe age of 26 before being exposed to it. What is it and why would anyone working in a startup care about…

The only reason most people and organizations have heard about the CAB (Change Advisory Board) is because it was described in the change management section of the ITIL® tomes, and then eagerly implemented as a quality control mechanism in large enterprises. For many non-IT Operations professionals, CAB is the only…

One of the topics we discussed at the Cynefin retreat in Whistler was the concept of scaffolding and its role complexity. …

A few days ago, Mark Schwartz (of AWS) published an article about the critical missing piece of DevOps, discussing the scale of work in and by IT Operations, and how the way organizations approach DevOps often includes some, but not all of those responsibilities. …