Category: Software Development

From HP Technology at Work newsletter article here

“While it’s true that alignment has improved and IT is more business-smart, the majority of business leaders remain fixed in their view that there is business work and IT work,” she writes in her white paper Circa 2015: The CIO of the future. “Without a change in this mindset, the IT-smart digital natives that are starting to populate the business ranks will have little positive impact on the future of IT.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself 🙂

My favourite subject, what the business wants VS what IT wants?

The analogy of the expectations of a coffee barista and their ability to deliver their service is used as an analogy to that of the business has a service in mind from IT that needs to get delivered according to a set of reasonable parameters (timeliness, cost, value for money).  IT on the other hand have an agenda of logic and process, which doesn’t gel well when business requires innovation and doesn’t have the rules or the process in place themselves.

I think personally the biggest barrier is that the business sees IT as a service and IT sees business as a consumer/customer.  Yet they are all on the same team and the goals of business sustainability, profitability and efficiency are all shared and equally valued.  There needs to be a bridge, and I dont mean of the heavy BA role variety. 

The bridge as I see it, is the increase in toolboxes.  Business for whatever reason innovate within the spheres of people, interactions and workflows, but either abstract too far or are focused on existing implementation when it comes to involving IT style solutions in their innovation.  Perhaps as our current Gen Y workforce begin to move into management roles that shape business thinking, they will have an IT acumen and understanding of the tools and patterns that can take a business workflow and cut out the redundancy – they’ll know what to ask out of IT better because they’ll be able to ask for the right shaped tools.

I’m not saying that IT should just be a bunch of monkeys coding to whatever requirements waiting for these super Gen Y managers to come up through the ranks and lead us out of bad requirements / bad direction hell.  IT need to step up into the business strategy to do the same thing – innovate with the business – show them where the efficiencies and sweet solutions lie.  And really instead of being put to task with what the business wants (an extension of a business domain area for example), they should innovate with the business, put to task on how to grow the company, taken out of the tunnel vision project and given the autonomy and self direction to grow the company.

The article asks something of IT which is important – professionalism and knowledge.  Having barrista’s scratching their heads about how to perform a request indicates a lack of experience and knowledge.  IT people know how to be innovative, but they don’t necessarily know how to innovate within a business environment where they have constraints on time, directions by different stakeholders, but to also be innovative, you have to be timely.  You cant be timely if you don’t have the experience or knowledge to respond in a timely manner.  But in order to be useful to the business, you need to be.

At the end of the day, my half baked utopia is that IT are the business decision makers, and conversely the business decision makers are also IT people.  Those companies that can leverage best of breed can at the very least save some unnecessary time and interactions.

Free

Quick Reads

This is a quick read: Making the Good Programmer … Better

And another: 5 Tips for creating good code every day; or how to become a good software developer

Longer Reads

Find where you’re at, Improve It and your Career in the process

**** Recommended ****  If you are looking to get a job or updating your resume, you might want to know where your competencies stand.  The Programmer Competency Matrix very thoroughly lists attributes in the disciplines of Computer Science, Software Engineering, Programming, Experience and Knowledge and provides 4 levels (numbered 0 – 3) for each attribute describing what knowledge you have to be considered at each level.  I think it should be a mandatory professional TODO for any serious programmer to rate where they are at and what they need to do to achieve further competency.  Its a career development guide for the technical and soft skills a developer is required to have in a world that is growing ever more competitive.

In Signs that you’re a bad programmer the blogger talks about Symptoms and Remedies of bad, mediocre and ‘shouldn’t be a’ programmer types.  Its an excellent tool to look at yourself critically and see where you could be improving. 

Stay Informed

Most of these articles I picked up by following the DZone site on twitter, who are also behind those awesome Refcardz that help you get up to speed or revise on a particular technology in very short time.

I also follow a lot of other renowned technical guru’s in the Agile, Java, Spring and Groovy spheres.  Usually, they are all following each other and when there is a good article, they all retweet it (a validation of what is good).  If you look at my twitter profile, you can see who else I’m following and add to your sources of development info.

Somewhat due to the number of developer emails and twitter posts I dont read tech books as often as I’d like, but there are some important ones that every dev should read, usually everyone has their own list with a bias to a particular technology they use more often.  The one here is a fair example of books I’ve read or own.  There are plenty more ‘good programming list’ posts, just google or look on Amazon.