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Semantic modernization & new jargon
Published 2026-03-30
Semantic modernization & new jargon Semantic modernization & re-jargonization without epistemic change -how the organization believes knowledge is created, validated, and justified- probably wastes trillions in traditionally managed high software-content enterprising. While activities must happen in time sequence, understanding does not progress linearly (in “knowledge work”). The most important knowledge about users/customers/clients, feasibility and business value alignment -often emerges only after partial solutions exist.
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What works and what doesn't work
Published 2026-03-23
A first field note on how traditionally managed organisations view epistemological access to outcome causes and effects.
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Flyvbjerg & cost overruns
Published 2026-03-04
Long tail statistics IT projects, or rather, high-software-content development and projects are plagued by missed (effort) estimates. And that's OK as the potential uptake due to scalability and transformative efficiency gains can be enormous. Now, just how much are typical overruns? There is highly credible peer reviewed academic research on the "overrun" of software (development) projects (see Flyvbjerg et al.). Unsurprisingly, this research shows the overrun of software projects is significant; it is the most significant of all project types, it beats the Summer Olympics, nuclear power plant construction, tunnels, etc., by a margin. In fact the distribution telling you (roughly) the probability of finding a software project with overrun x follows a power law distribution (a long tail distribution). Now, this power law (its scaling exponent) is such that if you would calculate the average overrun of projects you would find that the average is infinite.
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