Today, every company is investing heavily in software. Whether you’re a bank, a healthcare provider, or a car manufacturer, technology has quietly become your most important asset. For example, Goldman Sachs now has more software developers than traders. Tesla’s market cap today exceeds that of Ford or General Motors. And even 145-year-old manufacturing companies like Continental Tire have built up huge software organizations with thousands of developers. Traditional corporations have no choice but to undergo major software transformations. Ten years ago, their IT teams were focused on running tactical systems like SAP, while today this shift to software fuels their business. Every company has to embrace cultural change as they learn to become a software company.
Needless to say, in this environment, there is tremendous pressure to attract technical talent and accelerate the pace of of innovation. CIOs and engineering leaders are all trying improve efficiency, reliability, and velocity. Unlike long-established functions such as sales or manufacturing, which have proven systems for measuring success, most technology executives have to rely heavily on layers of trust.
Why is that? It is because software is the most complex thing humankind has ever built. The typical software development organization is managing legacy and new systems written in multiple flavors of programing languages. Their portfolio might include web sites, mobile applications, cloud integrations, strategic custom software, billing systems, third-party software, and more. What rests inside these applications is unknown amounts of complexity and intricate detail. Compounding this challenge is the fact that each developer and development team have different skillsets and use various methodologies.
Forward-looking businesses know that they need to move beyond bugs, releases, and PowerPoint slides as their primary tools for managing the development process. They need real-time, fact-driven data to guide their decisions and measure performance. In exploring the current state of software development, we’ve spoken with a wide range of experts and thought leaders about how to drive operational excellence. Through these discussions, we identified four key steps towards world-class software development, which we’ll explore in a series of posts that follow.
In the chart on above it is important to note that some companies and some teams are further along than others. The question is: “Where are we today and where does our organization want to be?” By moving up the software maturity ladder, businesses can put more energy into initiatives that fuel disruption, build lasting competitive differentiation, and create a workplace where top engineering talent shines.
