Rough Consensus

How I work

A holistic approach for people, processes and technology.

The digital transformation is accelerating the pace of change in an ever growing range of businesses. This poses enormous opportunities to grow your business. Going digital native can lower your costs by an order of magnitude or open up markets that were out of reach using more traditional go-to-market approaches. However, when you can't keep up with change, it can also become a challenge or an outright threat to your survival. At present, transformation towards a digital native business is not optional anymore, but a necessity.

A successful transformation does not solely depend on the selection and implementation of the right technology. Much more important is the adaptation of your business processes and the shift in mindset of your staff.

My approach addresses each of these three aspects: people, processes and technology. I focus on improving your way of working by making the feedback loop for innovation as short as possible. Your organisation's transformation accelerates only when your people learn fast from their actions. This is were a data driven approach marries automation. By including measurable feedback from the start and automating as much as sensible, for both development and operations, your pace of change increases. That's what I call agility.

Rough consensus and running code

You might wonder what the name of my company is referencing to. I started working as Software Engineer in 1997 for Unisource Business Networks, a joint venture by Swiss Telecom, Telia Sweden and KPN. We built and operated international data networks and I joined the newly founded Internet division. The way of working in our department deviated radically from the practices in the other networking divisions of KPN. As an example, where ISDN was completely drafted by the CCITT before the implementation, the Internet isn't centrally governed. The standards are developed in working groups of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Within a working group, progress is made by establishing rough consensus and finding proof in the working software. These principles adhere remarkably to those defined in the agile manifesto.