Modern Digital Business Blog

What’s the Difference Between an Agile Retrospective and an Incident Retrospective?

Blameless Chief Operating Officer Ken Gavranovic recently sat down with me to discuss the topic of conducting effective incident retrospectives.  You can watch our engaging, informative discussion below, or read on for an overview of the greatest hits from our talk. Agile development and incident management are the backbones of any tech-driven development cycle. At the heart of these practices lies the art of retrospectives. But what sets apart an Agile retrospective from an inci

Make Sure You Understand How Cloud Costs Differ from Other Business Costs

Do you know what “color” your cloud money is? An odd question, perhaps, but an important one. Because the emergence of the cloud hasn’t only changed how we leverage software applications, it has also changed the type of money it takes businesses to operate those applications. To better understand this, a brief overview of corporate finances is needed. There are three distinct types of money that most companies use for various business expenditures: 1. Capital expenditure A ca

Getting What You Intend from Your Organizational Design: Business Breakthrough 3.0 with Ken Gavranovic [podcast]

On this special edition of Modern Digital Business, I’d like to introduce my co-author on my latest book that was just released, Business Breakthrough 3.0. Are you ready to break free of your old ways of doing business and transform your company from within?  Eager to build teams of engaged employees who bring their best selves to work—every day? Ready to weave sustainability and cultural longevity into the very fabric of your company? Then BUSINESS BREAKTHROUGH 3.0 is

2022 Is the Year of the Citizen Developer

This past year has seen a rise in a new class of software developer, known collectively as the citizen developer. The term citizen developer is used to describe when non-programmers build applications that solve specific business needs. Citizen developers could be product managers, marketing managers, business executives, and others in an enterprise that are not in a traditional software development role. The role of the citizen developer has been growing for many years, with 2021 seeing an expo

Why Is Single Ownership So Important to a STOSA Organization?

STOSA, or Single Team Oriented Service Architecture, is an important guiding principle for large organizations with many development teams that own and manage services comprising one or more applications. Modern organizations, operating modern applications at scale, require an ability to scale their organization as much as they require the ability to scale their application. As their application grows in complexity and sophistication, a larger development organization is required to build and ma

What Is a STOSA Organization?

STOSA, or Single Team Oriented Service Architecture, is an important guiding principle for large organizations with many development teams that own and manage services comprising one or more applications. Modern organizations, operating modern applications at scale, require an ability to scale their organization as much as they require the ability to scale their application. As their application grows in complexity and grows in sophistication, a larger development organization must build and man

Welcome to Modern Applications / Modern Organizations

I’ve been writing books and articles, recording podcasts and webinars, and presenting live keynotes and other talks for many years. My Lee@Scale blog started in 2016 and focused on building highly scalable, high-availability web applications. I thank everyone who has read my articles and wrote to me to ask questions or make comments on the ideas and thoughts I’ve written about. Now, however, it is time for a bit of a change. Rather than focusing on scalability and availabil