In a previous post, I discussed pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial markets. It also helps to understand a lot of other developments and problems (not only) in the world of IT. In this post, I will discuss how it affects the IT working mode.

“Digital transformation” is probably one of the most overstressed terms of the last years - not only in IT, but also everywhere else: in the news, the media, every conference, everywhere. You just cannot not escape it. But what makes it really annoying is that most people who talk about it do not seem to have any proper idea what it actually means.

A few days ago I rediscovered a short presentation that Dr. Russell Ackoff gave in 1994. The recording of this presentation was titled “If Russ Ackoff had given a TED talk…” on YouTube. The presentation is really short – just 12 minutes. But it contains a lot of wisdom, probably too much to understand it all at once.

In a former post, I briefly described the evolution of markets because it influences the IT of today a lot, including the confusion we often experience. In this post, I discuss the evolution of IT itself, as this is also relevant to understand the current state and role of IT.

Whenever you come to a client as an IT consultant, it will not take long before someone will start talking about business processes. A typical narration is like “That’s a nice idea. But we need to make sure that everything is aligned with our business processes”. This is not limited to IT projects. If you create a new product, if you touch the organization or change anything else: it needs to be aligned with the business processes. The whole company seems to revolve around…