The Spotify model The Spotify model [SPOM] describes an organisational structure which aims at maximising agility through removing friction. The building block of the Spotify model is the squad, a team which is responsible for the entire lifecycle of a product from inception to implementation, operation and retirement. Friction is removed by maximising squad autonomy: … Continue reading Team topologies fix the Spotify model
Category: architecture
Cloud vs. on-premises is about shaping risk
TL;DR: moving to the public cloud consolidates many small risks into few large ones. A recent GCP cloud outage (https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/20004) highlights an issue with running more and more parts of the internet on the same infrastructure: as more computing resources consolidate in large cloud providers' data centres, the risk of a significant, global outage of … Continue reading Cloud vs. on-premises is about shaping risk
The problem with standardisation
Standards are a double-edged sword Subbu Allamaraju, CTO Expedia, https://m.subbu.org/lessons-from-2019-5beb64e63bc7 TL;DR: Standardisation reduces the dimensionality of a problem space thus eliminating possibilities for optimisation. Standards reduce the number dimensions of a problem space Consolidation initiatives aim at reducing the number of domains in a problem space in order to make problem handling easier: reduce the … Continue reading The problem with standardisation
Goodhart’s law
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. Goodhart's law (source Wikipedia) Or, in other words, once you tell people "improve that KPI or else", that KPI will be abused to the point of becoming useless: the KPI will improve, but the overall quality/speed/cost (pick a … Continue reading Goodhart’s law
Digitalisation vs. Automation: it is about capabilities
A pre-digital organisation focuses on efficient processes implementation; a digital organisation focuses on capabilities.