Contextualizing the Digital Backlash: A Brief Glimpse at Software Engineering Priorities for 2024

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Reflecting on Gartner Peer Community’s recent 2024 Software Engineering Priorities and Challenges survey, it certainly resonates with the recent research we published in (prepare for the paywall), Software Engineering Predicts 2024: Leadership During Disruption.? Concerns about budget are aligned across both pieces.? In our predicts research, we stated “By?2027, a digital backlash against new software solutions and experiences will prompt organizations to cut their budgets for application development in half, compared with?2024.”? Before we unpack that prediction, the Peer Community survey respondents identified budget constraints as the top challenge (60%), with other notable challenges including organizational resistance to change (38%) and aligning executive leadership (35%).?

Back to unpacking our prediction about budget cuts, let’s start with “digital backlash”.? The digital backlash is a collection of behavior and constraints across regulatory, sociocultural, political, and technological systems that can slow the demand for new digital capabilities:

·??????? Further government taxation, an AI Bill of Rights, or regulation/compliance, as examples

·??????? Change fatigue due to IT/tech-related changes (Gartner has survey data on this and its real. In fact, how many of you reading this have multiple and disjointed tools that you must use at work to complete a customer obligation?)

·??????? The tech layoffs we experienced in 2023 that affected many of us, our friends, and family.? Those layoffs signaled a weaker than expected demand for new/more digital.

·??????? Pursuit of green/sustainable software development and tech

·??????? Privacy and ethical concerns among users/customers especially regarding new AI advancements, IP infringement, or biased algorithms

Once we get through “digital backlash”, then we can get to the impact of the prediction, less money for software development.? Some of that is on us, like back to the change fatigue bullet.? Software development is also getting more expensive, like solving for all the regulation concerns beyond the functional requirements from our business peers. ?It will simply be too expensive for some orgs to build versus buy, and the software dev budget will reflect that with subscription costs being handled directly by the lines of business. Then there is more:

·??????? Innovating new software solutions rarely beats out other tech priorities like cybersecurity and leveraging existing investments in data and analytics.

·??????? Many budgets are already stagnant / decreasing (40% were in those buckets from our recent CIO and Tech Exec Survey)

·??????? The prediction is for the year 2027, and if the AI tools have helped with productivity by then, perhaps a reduction in our budget for software development won’t be as harshly felt.

That last bullet on how AI might help us with future budget cuts in software development takes us back into the Peer Community survey.? The two top goals (tied at 48%), include integrating AI and increasing developer productivity.? To me, those sound like the same goal and I hope the integration of AI is a goal that organizations place closer to customers and improving experiences across both customers and employees.? Sadly, only 30% of those survey respondents placed improving developer experience within their top three strategic goals.

Our predicts research covers many more uncertainties regarding software engineering leadership during times of disruption.? We’ll cover those and more in an upcoming episode in our Steering Engineering Podcast.? That podcast is available in many places, but here are a few links to Apple and Spotify locations: Steering Engineering Podcast Gartner(Apple) and Steering Engineering Podcast(Spotify)

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