Hi there Reader,

I highly recommend Kill it with Fire for data professionals building or inheriting a system. It’s just over 200 pages long and took me about 8 hours to read.

Modernizing systems will become a key part of many data professionals’ work.

When I was working in the construction industry, the elephant in the room of all the sustainable building design work I was doing on new buildings was that 99% of building stock had already been built, and refurbishing those to be more sustainable was going to be difficult and costly, but necessary.

Likewise, in the not too distant future, there will be less scope to be working on brand new data systems – we’ll be inheriting them. This book pairs very well with Switch: How to change when change is hard by Chip and Dan Heath which talks about strategies & tactics to precipitate large-scale changes and many of those approaches I see applied in this book.

A little epiphany I had when reading this is that many data system modernization projects actually start with a digitization project (at least in my world), and that digitization projects are also modernizations projects and all of these lessons are relevant for those.

The book deals both with starting a new modernization project but also how to handle coming in mid-stream to an existing one.

I’ve pulled out some main ideas below, and then captured all my highlighted sections and some commentary below that.

• The hard problems around modernization are people problems.
• The existing system is not a spec for the old one.
• Just because something works without thought or effort doesn't mean it’s simple.
• Architects should beware the pitfall of building their second system with too much confidence. It results in unnecessary complexity.
• Future proofing is to make small incremental steps that add value (not just upgrades for the sake of newness)
• Pick measurable outcomes, not feature releases (because the existing system already has those features and no one in the business will celebrate features they already have).
• The importance of building momentum by gearing all progress towards measurable outcomes cannot be understated.

​Read the full blog post for the more detailed notes and some commentary.

If you've read this book I'd love to hear of any main takeaways that stuck with you or even if you haven't, how you've been experience any modernization projects.

Thanks and cheers,

Oscar

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