Forty years in IT

Forty years in IT, and still curios.

September 1986.

I moved to Stockholm to start working as a programmer (software developer) after I’ve done the compulsory military service in Sweden. Without any place to live, I stayed the first week at a hostel in central Stockholm.

Few weeks later, I got a second hand flat, and bought my first PC for 30,000 kr. In todays value roughly 120,000 kr or €10,000.

Borrowed a 300 baud modem to connect to BBS and connect to work so I could work from home using file transfer to my work PC. Went to the library to read BYTE about things like hypertext and a new workstation called NeXT.

Fast forward to 2026 and I’m still curious.

Can you develop large complex IT-systems with AI? Back in the days, development in assembler and Pascal. Today using Xcode, Visual Studio and Claude.

The challenge in the good old days was the 32kb program limit for Intel 8088, and 640 kb addressable memory for the IBM.

Today’s challenge is how to design a cloud solution with several billions of events, that doesn’t break when connectivity disappears. Rådighet.

Stay curious, always.

Design your own interface?

I’ve seen many examples of developers trying to create their own interfaces.

When I wanted to expand Sandkasten, my model railroad diorama, to something bigger, I did the opposite. I went out looking for standards working with my tracks.

MMM-3R was the answer.

A ready-made ”standard” how to interface model railway modules with Märklin C-track.

What I had to do was to drill a couple of holes at the edges, and adjust the track so it fits the integration point.

The other parts of standard, digital control, landscape design etc, are on top of the physical stack, and can be added later.

I can now design Ebelsbach as I want, but direct connect the module to a much larger world later.

This is architecture design in practice.

Who owns the mess?

Jonas Jaani asked who owns the AI-agents.

For me this is a relevant question as I’m preparing to set upp AI-agents to manage our business glossary automagically.

Each term is related to a business capability and each capability an owner. But what about the agent itself?

Develop and Manage Business Capabilities is part of the APQC framework for Broadcasting that we use. The person accountable for that capability is also accountable for the agent that describes and manages our business glossary and our management system. That accountability belongs to the business, not to IT.

Compete at work?

Comparing competing in sports with normal workdays is in my experience utterly wrong.

I played football in a team as a teenager, and one of the team members later played in the World Championships in UK for Sweden.

When riding today, it’s not competition. It’s about getter better and building trust between me and the horse. He can jump much higher than me. Yes, we will soon compete, but the reason is to see progress, not with others.

When you are in a team, you can learn from others and be better. If you are an individual competing with everyone, you’re alone. This even applies for a team of two.

My horse, Carayllio have been jumping on Grand-Prix levels, more than 150 cm height. For me as a beginner horse rider, 50 cm is high enough, so he is teaching me to be a better rider.

An experience rider on the other hand, can jump very high with him, and train young horses to jump.

This is more about mastery than competition, even if someone is faster and jumps higher in world championships.

In both cases I do sports for fun, not for anybody tell me to compete.

Work as a consultant is doing a job every day, with more or less challenging task to solve.

Collaborating with others, not competing. Learning from others, and train when you are a master yourself.

KPI targets

”Better stories, together.”

This is still the vision for Artmann Studio after the split where we separated film production and film distribution into two separate legal entities.

We updated our businesses plan in December last year with targets for revenue, profit margin, cash-flow, equity ratio and FTE. KPI targets from a business perspective and part of the annual report.

What is better stories? One answer could be, "In the eye of the beholder", but that is hard to measure.

Technical quality is easy to measure and should be part of the QA-process. Artistic quality is harder to evaluate.

Then there is a financial perspective about artistic quality. In the end, is the film profitable? If film critics love the film, but no paying audience, then we have a financial problem.

Today, we are lacking Quality KPI for film production projects, but the process are described in our film production handbooks, and partly implemented. E.g. not all productions in a consistent way.

Next, easy to measure or where we need to improve?

The biggest constraint we have is time, time is money, but also a limited resource. We must therefore assure that we are doing the right thing, as fast as possible.

Question is what to messure, and what is relevant from a business perspective.

Film production is based on projects. The classic love triangle is cost, time and quality, and you seldom get all three.

First one. cost is easy to measure as we follow up cost per project. Quality is more difficult as discussed before.

Then we have time. When we do activities on set, how long time do they take? Bottlenecks? Can we improve? Avoid doing them?

Data quality, does it matter? When shooting documentaries, the ratio of actual shots time compared to edited film time is a factor of 1:50 to 1:100 and good KPI in it self. Less footage, less time to find and select.

If we have better metadata about each clip, the editing will be faster and as a bonus, we have improved artistic quality.

Another KPI could be % of clips with meta data. If the coverage is low, then we probably need more time to find the correct clip for editing.

A third KPI could be % of technically correct clips. If too low, we have an equipment and/or skill issue to resolve.

Finally, sustainability. If you have production grants in Sweden, you must follow up on a number of sustainability targets, otherwise you have to pay back. Examples are CO2 emissions or percentage of vegetarian meals.

How does this relate to Enterprise Architecture?

Business goals, busuness. capabilities, value streams, processes, activities, information and data are all part of what we describe in our EA models. Without this, you can't measure or follow up.

The logical conclusion is that we have different types of KPIs depending on what we want to measure; business goals, processes or data quality.

What's important? Can we set targets and can we messure? Is it sometimes enough to be aware of the target, and have it as a guide?

The discussion can in it self be more valuable than an individual KPI that is easy to measure, like % number of remote employees.