Corbis was a digital image licensing company owned by Bill Gates where Anderson served as Senior Director of Software Engineering from September 2006 to 2008. It is the most important institutional setting in Anderson's intellectual biography: the Kanban Method, with its six core practices, classes of service, lead time metrics, and operations review cadence, was developed and empirically validated at Corbis.
Founding and business context
Corbis was founded in 1989 as Interactive Home Systems, later renamed to Corbis, with the mission of building a digital rights management business for photographic and artistic images. By 2006, when Anderson arrived, it held one of the world's largest digital image archives and licensed images to publishers, advertisers, and media companies globally. The software engineering challenge was to deliver digital asset management, licensing, and e-commerce capabilities reliably and predictably in a business where customer needs were diverse, work items varied enormously in complexity, and delivery failures had direct revenue consequences.
The kanban experiment
Anderson joined Corbis after the microsoft-xit-kanban-2004 experiment and his subsequent conversations with don-reinertsen had given him a theoretical framework for virtual kanban systems. Working with rick-garber (process improvement manager), corey-ladas (process coach, recruited winter 2007), and dan-vacanti (ERP project development manager, joined May 2007), Anderson designed a kanban system intended to replace Corbis's broken project-centric approach.
By March 2007, the essential features of what would become the Kanban Method had emerged:
These practices, tested in the Corbis environment and refined through empirical observation, became the six core practices and supporting mechanisms documented in the kanban-book.
The corbis-kanban-presentation
Anderson's presentation at Reinertsen's 2007 LSSC conference — the corbis-kanban-presentation — was the first public presentation of the Corbis work. It introduced classes-of-service and lead time analysis to the broader product development community and established the intellectual connection between Anderson's empirical work and Reinertsen's queueing theory framework. This presentation was the direct precursor to the kanban-book.
Significance
Corbis is to the Kanban Method what Bell Labs was to transistor technology: the institutional context in which theoretical ideas were translated into a functioning system through empirical engineering. The transition from the Microsoft experiment (a promising implementation inspired by TOC) to the Corbis method (a systematic approach with explicit practices, metrics, and policies) is the central transformation of the corbis-experiment-era.