2020-04-23 Thursday - Today's Meditation - Where & How Do I Add Value

Last Updated: 2026-07-25 Saturday

✅ Accelerate
✅ Innovate
✅ Elevate 

[This is also my posting to answer the question: "What do you do?"]

My original LinkedIn post on this topic.

As a consultant - that focuses specifically on providing services in the areas of Architecture and Software Engineering Consulting & Leadership - I recently spent some time distilling my thoughts on  where & how I add value. It was a clarifying exercise, and a worthwhile meditation for this day.

A bit of elaboration on those areas:

IT Strategy & Roadmaps

• First, listening skills are paramount. Before espousing a viewpoint, or promoting a vision - you must understand the landscape, the history, and the experiences of the other participants. 
• Second, effective communication skills are critical - to enable to build consensus, to persuade, to establish rapport, and to solicit and understand objections (so that they may be addressed in an open and transparent way - and thereby build TRUST). 
• Establishing strategy & roadmaps can involve both long-term strategic planning - as well as interim tactical planning. Think phases (or waves). 
• It is important to cosider the ideation to support transition plans for moving from the AS-IS, to the TO-BE - and any interim staging / transition plateaus / scaffolding that may need to be introduced.
• This effort must be closely aligned with the business plan - to include competitor analysis, alliances, partnerships, merger/acquisition opportunities, as well as creating competitive advantage.
• Another vital component of this level of work is understanding the Change Management dynamics - and planning the collaboration and coordination appropriately.
  

IT Governance

• Governance (regardless of the size of the organization) is essential - to avoid chaos, waste, and inefficiencies. The amount of ceremony and formalism are the only real essential differences.
• Do you know what IT assets you have - and what are the costs to maintain/keep them (hardware, software, licenses, support, maintenance, etc.)?
• Are you legally compliant with respect to the software licenses that you are using?
• Do you have a documented understanding of what your Business Capabilities and Business Functions are?
• How well do your applications map/support your Business Capabilities and  Business Functions?
•  What are your Technical Capabilities - and how do those capabilities map back to your current | planned technology stack - and your enterprise roadmap?
• How are those capabilities and functions delivered?
• Are there any gaps or inefficiencies - or duplication - in how those capabilities and functions are delivered?
• Are there any material risks/concerns with respect to the way those capabilities and functions are delivered (security, performance, reliability, scalability - to name just a few aspects that fall under the purview of IT Governance)?
• What is the projected end-of-life of a given application (or technology) - and how will you plan for the transition? 
• What are the vulnerabilities that may exist for a given application, or technology?
  

Technology Thought Leadership

• A famous quote often attributed to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky: "Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been".  There is a useful corollary in that phrase - for IT leadership. 
• While you may have your IT Strategy and Roadmap well established - and you may have your IT Governance processes fully implemented - the landscape of technology is constantly changing underneath your best intentions. 
• Technology Thought Leadership is more art than science. It requires experience - but it also requires good instincts - and an intuitive level of being able to discern what is a technology fad - from what will be a truly sustainable technology trend. What is a differentiator vs. what may merely be fancier drapes.
• To be able to provide this kind of thought leadership requires "Think Time" - and the ability to leverage a global network of professional connections (today, my carefully curated network includes over 6,800+ [as of May 2026] world-class executives, leaders, managers, engineers, inventors, creators, thinkers) to help me monitor the pulse and the heartbeat of what trends may be emerging, which are thriving - and which may be beginning their decline. 
• Sustaining this kind of thought leadership requires a substantial investment of time in reading, exploring, experimenting - and conversations with other thought leaders across multiple business sectors - and fields of expertise.

Architecture Design

• An essential component of holding any position of Architecture and Engineering Leadership - is the ability to roll-up your sleeves and craft a world-class architecture design - leveraging current/emerging patterns, and identifying the best-in-class technology platforms, services, libraries, tools, etc.
• The key difference between the level for a practitioner of any craft (novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert) - is in their ability to properly consider the scope & scale of trade-offs and balance-of-forces - and being able to integrate those concerns within a conceptual weaving that approaches the level of a maestro composer writing a symphony.
  

Design Reviews

• Equally important to the ability to craft an architecture design - is the ability to guide others (Enterprise Architects, Business Architects, Security Architects, Infrastructure Architects, Integration Architects, Solution Architects, DevOps, Tech Leads, Principal Engineers, etc.) in the design review process.
• This may involve reviewing Enterprise Architecture Roadmaps, Solution Architecture Designs, Transition Plans, Data Architecture - or Data Models, or diving into the API or algorithm-level Detail Design Documents. 
• Sometimes, it requires doing deep dives in Code Analysis & Code Reviews.
  

Teaching, Coaching & Mentoring

• Another essential aspect of any position of Architecture and Engineering Leadership - is the ability to teach, coach, develop, and mentor others. 
• People are the most important component of any business.
  
• This is where the true value of leadership emerges - for it is in acting as a "force-multiplier" - assisting other members of the organization to experience personal and professional growth in their career development - that you truly create lasting and sustainable value. 
• Ignoring the need to continually invest in the development of personnel - is the surest way to cripple the effectiveness of any organization.

Proof-of-Concepts

• You can read all of the Gartner and Forrester Reports; you can read articles in CIO magazine, the Wall Street Journal, InfoQ, and the unending cornucopia of opinions that are published in blogs and on various platforms like Medium.com, or LinkedIn.com, etc.
• But, there are often cases - that unless you have personally kicked-the-tires  and taken it for a test drive - you can put at risk the very survival of a business - if you haven't invested the effort to personally perform some level of proof-of-concept examination of a potential solution, or new technology.

Research & Evaluations

• Beyond the periodic need to perform Proof-of-Concepts for evaluation of potential solution candidates - it is important to also maintain awareness of new and interesting developments in various areas of technology. What is on the horizon? What is just beyond the horizon?
  
• Additionally, when the business wishes to contractually engage third-party service providers - an essential aspect of risk mitigation is the Architecture & Engineering research and evaluation of those potential vendors - which may include collaboration during the prelude to a Request for Information (RFI), Request for Quote (RFQ), or a comprehensive Request for Proposal (RFP) process.
• Research & Evaluations also serve several other purposes:
• Researching and evaluating new emerging technology (in particular, many Open Source solutions) - provides you with context and a frame of reference - when/if you need to evaluate commercially available solutions. 
• Tremendous breakthroughs occur frequently - in terms of techniques, efficiency, performance, capabilities, features, etc. - and only by seeking out the emerging edge of those technology breakthroughs - can you be well-enough informed to provide input for the Technology Thought Leadership, Strategy, and Roadmap discussions. This requires spending some time allocated to reading recently published research papers, and PhD thesis papers.
  
• When technology breakthroughs can simplify process flows, reduce (or eliminate) manual procedures, reduce cycle times, improve response times, enable the development/delivery of new services and business capabilities, etc. - those all contribute to creating competitive advantage for the business.  That's why Research & Evaluations are a vital part of any Architecture & Engineering Leadership role.

  

My expertise is best engaged when the success of your company's {initiatives | modernization | new products/services} will be measured in results that equate to $billions, or hundreds of $millions – and the risks of failure are comparable (or greater). 

A copy of my resume is available by request (see my contact info, on my LinkedIn profile). 

The 70+ recommendations on my LinkedIn profile may also provide insights into additional dimensions of value that others have perceived when my services were engaged...

Also see my personal approach to continuous learning.

2016-04-20 Wednesday - Are You Serious About Innovating?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-serious-innovating-kelvin-meeks

I've been pondering this question lately - and thought that sharing this small sample of my own introspective questions might benefit others who struggle with nurturing the seed of innovation within organizations.

This is written from the specific perspective of a software engineering discipline – but is applicable to so many different types of organizations and teams.

Further, these thoughts are based on a slightly constrained premise that you have an existing product/service - and that stagnation has set in - and your innovation muscles have atrophied...

Questions that you might want to consider, in assessing whether your organization is serious about innovation…

1. Does your culture allow for errors and mistakes? If your organization operates under a threat of punishment and fear – how will your engineers ever have the courage to try something new and potentially innovative? I recently heard a CTO proudly state: “We have a perfect track record of tech choices and implementation so far, and we don't want to risk that”. A search of review comments on his company’s Glassdoor page – appears to reflect what I expected - a culture of fear and punishment. Which begs the question – are his engineers too afraid to try something new? Are yours?

2. Do you plan – and give your engineers time to “throw the first one away”, especially for critical new  components? If you are racing to the finish on every release – how much of your solution is designed (for maintenance, for scalability, for extensibility) – and how much is simply hacked together? How much innovation can be introduced – if there is no luxury of time for trial-and-error?

3. As an engineering organization, do you periodically do collective code reviews and discussions of innovative Open Source software projects to glean great ideas? More specifically, for the individual, I think there are five essential practices to becoming a world-class innovative engineer:

• Read great code written by others;
• Write a lot of code – with intent - focused on solving meaningful problems;
• Be willing to experiment;
• Constantly be re-learning your craft (patterns, algorithms, new developments, etc.);
• Share what you learn

4. If you did a poll of your engineering group – and ask them what books they are reading, how many would have a ready answer? What percentage are focused on your current technology stack – and what percentage are looking further afield? Innovation benefits from cross-pollination of ideas.

5. What are you doing to support access to innovative ideas and continued professional development within your engineering group? Do you have a corporate Safari account program in place? Why not? When was the last time you invited an innovative leader to give a talk to your engineering group?

6. How many of your engineering group are members of the IEEE and ACM? Those two organizations provide access to their Digital Libraries – and are a wealth of ideas for innovation. Here’s a tip: Provide your engineering group with reimbursement for their membership dues. But that doesn’t go far enough. You need to close the circle. Institute a monthly discussion forum in which a rotating set of people present innovative ideas that they have gleaned from the latest papers, journal
articles, etc.

7. Do you have a wiki for collecting links to innovative articles and Open Source projects? Sometimes the flood of new things is overwhelming – but you can at least have a process for organizing information and curating it for later re-discovery.

8. When is the last time you sent any of your engineering group to a conference? It isn’t about picking-up new skills – it is about the exposure to ideas – and the invigorating surge of energy that is shared by being exposed to a large collection of people that are doing innovative leading-edge things. Sure, they could watch conference talks on Youtube – but that isn’t nearly as effective in achieving the transmission of enthusiasm...nor does it help you in spotting potential new candidates to recruit for your engineering group – or communicate with enthusiasm some of the interesting new problems your group is tackling.

9. Is there some bit of code, tooling, etc. that you could Open Source – that might be beneficial to the Open Source community at large? Trust me, being supportive of your engineers’ effort to Open Source something (that is truly meaningfully useful) will repay itself in all kinds of ways that you cannot imagine. Second best – lend some portion of your engineering team’s efforts to support an existing Open Source project. Again, the payback in innovation, enthusiasm, pride, etc. is beyond what you can imagine.

10. How much of your engineering development effort is allocated to re-factoring? Unless your code base is of a trivial size – planning for re-factoring efforts needs to be part of your technology road-map. That’s also where innovation can seep back into your solution.

11. Do you have a formal Innovation Reward Program? Why not? If your business is driven by software, or derives value from the software that runs it – you are insane to not have a formal Innovation Reward Program. Establishing a culture of financially rewarding people for game-changing innovative ideas is moral, equitable, and in your best interest. Your business is people. Your best, most vital asset, is people. Take care of your people, and they will take care of you. Invest in them. Reward your people in proportion to the value they create. If someone in your engineering group creates a solution that will reduce costs by 10% - why not give them 1% of that reduction as an Innovation Reward? Reward the behavior that is beneficial – and eventually, it will stifle the behavior that isn’t.

12. Are your key business processes documented? Without first assessing what you do - and how you do it, and understanding the underlying cost/value of that activity - how will you prioritize and drive change with a focus on First Things First?

13. Have you done time-motion studies of your key critical process flows? Why not? How could they be reworked to dramatically improve efficiency and eliminate waste - to provide an innovative competitive advantage?

14. Do you actively listen to your end users and HEAR what they need and want? I was once brought in to consult to a major software engineering group on the East Coast - to help alleviate some amorphous and undefined problem that Executive Management didn't want to specify. The Director of Engineering was quite proud of the fact that they had Nobel Prize winners in their organization - and that his group did 26 releases a year. But when I interviewed their end users (in another State) - their biggest complaint was that they were underwhelmed by the slow/buggy behavior of the application - and were not pleased with 26 changes foisted upon them per year. Sometimes the Art of Listening with Intent - is the missing ingredient to achieving breakthrough innovation.

A critical component of sustained innovation is establishing a virtuous feedback loop of positive reinforcing behavior. Change doesn't happen overnight, but with the right incremental steps, support, and nurturing - any organization, in any field of endeavor, can be changed into an innovation dynamo.

My name is Kelvin Meeks, and I help software engineering organizations achieve breakthroughs in changing their culture, envisioning  new products and capabilities, introducing innovative new architectures, and achieving breakthroughs in performance & scalability.