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Me and my horse Brim Time. For those interested in horse breeding: Brim Time’s sire is Irco Marco, a successful Swedish show jumper. Irco Marco’s grand-sire, Marco Polo, in turn was one of the foundation sires of modern Dutch horse breeding. Brim Time, like his sire and grand-sire, I reluctantly admit, is a somewhat inelegant horse. Olle Kjellander, the National Studmaster at Flyinge at that time, in fact said the first time Irco Marco was presented that he would never license him (for breeding according to the Swedish Warmblood stud book) since “he wasn’t even a sport horse”. Fortunately, he later came to change his mind. Irco Marco came to sire many horses that have competed in the Olympics and on Grand Prix level. What some of the Marcos lack in size and elegance, they compensate with agility, fearlessness and an extraordinary will to jump.

I work as a management consultant focusing on operational effectiveness of organizations that develop systems with software in them.

More and more of the value of new products comes from software and the electronics running the software. An article in IEEE Spectrum estimates that a premium car today contains some 100 million lines of software. Also, the accumulated value (aka “money”) is today stored as binary numbers on hard drives and, for good or for bad, moved around the planet in the blink of an eye by software. It is in fact today hard to imagine a world without software.

System developers in general and software developers in particular seem to thrive on the bleeding edge of our technology and our intellectual capacity. The Risk Factor Blog continuously feeds us with the consequences of this. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want it any other way because that would mean that we stop improving the state of the art.

It is also therefore natural, but none the less unfortunate, that system development methods and organizations in general don’t quite keep up with the increasing complexity and size of software; we often don’t know that we need a new tool, method, or organization until the need is (too) obvious.

This site contains my personal reflections about system development methods, processes and tools, operational effectiveness, change management, continuous improvement, modeling of organizations and processes and other interesting stuff that I run across in my daily work.

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The domain name of this site is the latin name for the Swedish county in which I live, Ostrogothia (Östergötland in Swedish. For details, see Ostrogothia on Wikipedia.) Ostrogothia is by many scholars believed to be the origin of the Goths who sometime before or during the 1:st century A.D. migrated from Scandinavia to today’s Poland and further and in the 3:rd and 4:th centuries ravaged the Roman Empire. (To confuse things, the Ostrogoths are not associated with Ostrogothia but are a group of Goths that emerged several centuries after the exodus of the Goths from Scandinavia.)

Ostrogothia lies in the heart of a land that the historian Jordanes in his The Origin and Deeds of the Goths refers to as Scandza and which he describes thus: “If wolves cross over to these islands when the sea is frozen by reason of the great cold, they are said to lose their sight. Thus the land is not only inhospitable to men but cruel even to wild beasts.”

Jordanes exaggerated, probably because he had never set his foot anywhere near Scandza. It does get cold during the winter but Ostrogothia is in fact a rather pleasant and peaceful place to live for humans and for beasts, like the two specimen on the photo to the right.