Paulo Rosado

Graduation speech for Lisbon MBA

I had the honor of recently delivering the graduation speech for the graduates of The Lisbon MBA program at Catholic University of Portugal. Here goes the full transcript.

A Cloud Platform before its time

In 2001, the group of founders got together and added the last details to the OutSystems business plan. We wanted to solve a big problem: fix the IT productivity issue of delivering large Intranet (browser-based internal apps) and Extranet (customer and partner portals…

Acid Test #4: The Deep Digger Test

• Does he dig deep when a problem occurs and becomes part of the solution?
• Or is he content to just sit back and continue managing from the top and let others do the (hypothetical) digging?

Going abroad can kill you

We all know that Europe is not one country. Therefore we should all know that Europe is not one market territory. But as technology leaders, selling to the enterprise, we sometimes forget this fact. We look at Europe with its unified currency and outwards seemingly cultural habits…

Speak to the layman

When you are planning on selling something to a lot of people I have found that a great exercise is to pretend that you have to explain it on national radio.

On radio you only have between 1 to 3 minutes to get the message through. This is great to train your elevator…

A culture of inclusion

I remember Cisco doing a pre-M&A due diligence on a former company I worked for. One of their must-have checklist items was the “size of the CEO office”. They had validated over, I am sure, a lot of trial and error that there was a negative correlation between the size of the CEO office…

Why CEOs and CFOs hate IT

This insightful article from Thomas Wailgum at CIO.com summarizes the typical situation organizations face when having to adapt commodity software to a changing business and to their specific processes.

OutSystems NextStep’09: thank you all

It’s only fair that I start this blog with a comment on the OutSystems NextStep’09 conference, held in Lisbon, the past April 15,16. We have come a long way since our first NextStep (2004). As a lot of friends and business associates congratulated me on how much…

12 business scenarios Web Applications can help optimize

The past years have matured the use of web technologies in optimizing business functions. From the initial experimentations with portals and Intranets to today’s wikis and a recent slew of innovative types of systems based on social…

Situated Software and the Long Tail of Software

I stumbled on this piece from Clay Shirky on situated software. Interesting notion: as you decrease the size of the user target base your (social) software can leverage the non-tech links that exist in these micro communities and create services…