1 of 2: More than ten years have passed since Marc Andreessen’s article on WSJ “Why Software Is Eating the World” and then years later this is even more true than before.

Every function within the organization depends on technology to succeed, engineering leaders should step up and take responsibility to support the entire organization. It’s critical to have a continuous conversation between engineering leaders and functional leaders around what opportunities and what trade-off modern technology offers: cloud computing, microservices architectures and containers have enabled new ways of building software systems. More will certainly come in the upcoming years.

When you buy an existing software and you pay external consultants to set it up, the intellectual property required to evolve this system will leave your organization as soon as this set-up phase is completed. Most likely, the consultants will not leave your organization with a way to assess the system is working correctly: you’ll find yourself so afraid to touch the system configuration and break it in ways you don’t understand, that that software has become hardware.

Gregor Hohpe

, Enterprise Strategist at

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

, dedicated an entire chapter in his “The Software Architect Elevator”, a highly recommended read for anyone interested in the relationship between technology and business.

Twilio

CEO and Software Developer

Jeff Lawson

says in his book “Ask Your Developer” (great read too): the choice is not anymore between “build or buy”, but rather between “build or die”. In particular, he underlines that all customers of the same software product get the same configuration options, and therefore no-one can really obtain any competitive advantage from that software. Your only option to build competitive advantage is to build custom technology.

However, the software industry sales practice largely relies on pitching functional leaders who might be making purchasing decisions that imply trade-offs they do not know and understand. Engineering leaders should be ready to spend time with functional leaders and educate them around these trade-offs, functional leaders need to recognize that technology is an important part of their job. While building technology is certainly  a job that requires studying and experience, anyone can understand at least the basic trade-offs in modern software.

hashtag

business

hashtag

devops

hashtag

leadership

hashtag

engineering