Software Engineering as an Agent of Growth

Like Tron, one of my favourite films impresses on us, “the ‘game’ has changed”. In this article, I wanted to explore how the game of growth has changed over the decades as a result of the catalyst of Software Engineering and indeed Software.

The game has changed

Digitalisation continues to drive saturation in traditional core markets; causing differentiation at scale to be even harder to deliver. Ultimately, this stifles business growth and squeezes profit margins.

Harnessing Digital is challenging for many reasons. In part, this is a consequence of needing to be nimble enough to adapt to the hyperconnected terrain being rapidly reshaped by evolving multicultural diverse customer expectations and technology.

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Additionally, this difficulty is exacerbated by the dynamics of the macroeconomics of legislations and policies. This generates further apprehension in C-Suites that have varying levels of digital quotient or technology quotient.

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Furthermore, in a society where people’s lifestyles firmly exist in both the finite physical and ‘virtualised’ digital realms, software is becoming more quintessential to winning in the current, new and future market frontiers.

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Never has software been so prevalent within the business organisation. Yet, many businesses' understandable hesitance to invest could be the very reason the necessary transformation remains unattainable; yet time waits for no one.

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As a result, to survive, thrive or become market leaders, businesses desperately require reliable next-gen capabilities and engineering talent that innovates and efficiently crafts software that is scalable, intelligent and differentiating.

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How do we navigate for value in the ambiguous space called the future?

How can a business differentiate itself in a crowded marketplace??

Ultimately, the essence of business hasn’t changed; digital has just disrupted it by injecting the scale of mass connectedness through mobility and virtualisation. Thereby, offering access to an amplified addressable market.

However, this said scale also generates a need to optimise the total cost to serve those respective markets. Additionally, the ‘phy-gital’ (physical and digital) paradigm means ‘being digital’ is fast becoming a prerequisite expectation and no longer a means of differentiation.

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Meanwhile, there is a deterioration of relevant and meaningful people relationships; the backbone to trust and influence.

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Therefore, how does a business scale ‘the value of meaningful personal relationships’ to the masses, when delivering its services via a myriad of channels?

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Over the decades, software has continued to act as a differentiating force; crafted by engineers and collecting valuable contextual data that has historically been difficult to mine.?

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In a ‘post digital’ industry X.0 era, could software offer the key means of differentiation sought by businesses?

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In many aspects, software targeted at functional domains is becoming increasingly commoditised. The complexities are in part being abstracted through the emergence of ‘building block’ platforms offered through interoperable Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service based subscriptions. Thereby, ‘evening’ the playing field.

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Furthermore, software engineers can often be viewed as ‘just the commodity coders’, a commodity ‘engine’ that is only required when scaling solutions or ‘coding’. Part of this is due to businesses placing too low a value on software’s craft and impact. However, software engineers can execute a value proposition that to a greater extent positively influences the path-to-value delivery of business outcomes.

It’s not just about having the play-doh, but rather what one does with it. Hence, the growing need for imagination, malleability, innovation, and creativity.

Engineering scalable, intelligent and differentiating software is difficult?

The role of the software engineer has evolved. In the 1940s a majority of coders were women and their responsibilities predominantly to ‘code’ the computers (mainframes) to complete assigned work or calculations (read more at - How women once ruled computing). Unfortunately, the stereotype incorrectly affirmed that this task of ‘coding’ must be menial work as women were able to do this (read more at - Coding used to be a woman's job so it was paid less and undervalued).

Over the next decades it became apparent that software coded by engineers was more valuable than the hardware, computers, or devices that housed the software. Therefore, the generation of software needed to be treated more like a ‘production line’. Thereby, introducing the proliferation of complimentary tooling and expectations on software engineers to deliver reliable working monolithic software despite the feature limitations.

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However, with the advent of the personal computer, and later the internet there was a rapid evolution toward the digital-dimension. No longer could the predominantly procedural logic flows and modular libraries suffice in meeting the growing meandering expectations of consumers. So, the software creation craft underwent a revamp of decomposing large applications using architectural and application design patterns, strongly-typed languages, quality engineering, DevSecOps and Site Reliability Engineering wrapped in an agile approach to delivering incremental changes.?

Fast forward and software is now able to deliver on the following key business outcomes:

• Optimise business operational cost and back office functions
• Release valuable insight from previously/ new ‘trapped data’ through the use of intelligent services
• Improved or new customer experience and engagement

The art of engineering valuable software has evolved?

Over the last decade, Software Engineering has undergone a number of evolutions due to a number of key trends such as, the democratisation of software engineering and the acceleration of virtualisation. The following are a few of those non-linear phases that has nurtured software as we know it:

• Mobility for all: Though, the key driver has been the mass adoption of technology by humans. This has naturally created sub-dynamics for example, the desire to be better connected. Ultimately, this signalled the age of mobility and left businesses faced with the issue of scaling software to primarily meet the demand of the larger addressable market. Device and data proliferation - creating a greater demand on resources and storage and ultimately security and privacy.

• Cloud and emerging service providers: Cloud engineering soon initially emerged as a means of meeting the scaled demand whilst optimising costs. Naturally, this dynamic increased the complexities of network management which in turn introduced the expectation of connectivity failure and the re-emergence of chaos, failover and circuit-breaker engineering which widened the footprint of required software characteristics to succeed.

• Digital industrialisation: However, due to so many changing variables in the ‘production line’ and environments. The reliability and quality of software solutions required a new automation-first mindset for development operations. The concept of DevSecOps and proactive observability diagnostics, health-checks and monitoring enabled teams to practically improve the predictability and repeatability of delivering software.

• Social boom: The relational drive for human connectedness and businesses need to market has acted as a vector in generating a digital-dimension that encourages society to be ‘always on’. An unintended consequence has been a growth of data and personalisation that has missed the mark in terms?of relevance. Whilst creating a desire and motivation for better experiences, and more interaction that engages the human psychological planes of social influence dynamics and in some cases addiction for human validation or mental health related issues.

• Please Cloud, can we have some more?: Consumers continue to demand more. Therefore, the need to have more efficient computational payloads that are consumption based continues to drive the cloud continuum. Wherein, cloud-native solutions, edge-computing or democratised access to complex intelligent tech and date is creating hyper-cycles of transformation and the need to differentiate due to more saturated markets. No longer can Enterprises disregard small-medium business or digital-native companies. Challengers and Unicorns do not live forever, but they definitely are here to stay.

• The rise of the social stewards: It was inevitable that we would arrive at the need for sustainability, ethics, inclusion, etc. For numerous reasons, businesses must take seriously the more socio-economic aspects of the ecosystems that they deliver their services. We have seen this played out with consumers becoming more transparent about their motivations and what drives their loyalty and engagement. And even though it can be difficult to quantify - there is a large industry of activity working on how to do so.

Software has become a viable wealth generator

Considering the aforementioned phases, it seems that software has been on a journey to become more conditioned to be human by design and yet, optimised for capitalist wealth generation. Ironically, this has allowed software to contribute to an echo chamber focused on capitalist wealth generation. Thereby, creating a reinforcing feedback loop and vicious socio-economic cycle.

Increasingly, a company’s value is intrinsically tied into its digital software and capabilities. Therefore, creating the clear demand for differentiated, market-wide yet reliable software.

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Furthermore, ‘intelligence’ has created a need for the use of more emerging tech like Blockchain, AI and ML to enhance software’s ability to behave more ‘human by design’.

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As such, engineers looking to build the future must contend with crafting software that is composable, creative and utilises ‘mosaic architectures’ that embraces open innovation and ecosystems to deliver solutions at ‘speed’.

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Therefore, there is now an opportunity to lead in reimagining the value that engineers can provide when they embody a mix of customer obsession, socio-intelligence, creativity and innovation capabilities; fusing the “dreamer and maker” into ‘one team’.

The not so obvious thing is that this network of engineers will partner across businesses, using software to deliver a ‘partner boom’ effect where growth as a result of amplified shared success will become the target.