The reason and driving force behind our software dependency is the obvious economic benefit of software-based business process automation. No car manufacturer would want to give up today's efficiency and have the levers on the machines controlled by hand again. No insurance company today could afford to have rates calculated at a desk again.
However, the efficiency gains in the core business come at a price for the company itself. The IT budget of companies in every industry is growing steadily. This is because huge software systems tailored to corporate processes have been built over years and decades. If you were to print out the source code of an average regional utility, it would result in a stack of paper the height of a 15-story skyscraper. To manage the complexity of these systems, every company in every industry employs a large number of software developers.
New business requirements have to be programmed into the systems every day. On the order of magnitude: GD Informatics Services GmbH of the Generali Insurance Group has 1,100 employees. The major Swiss bank UBS even employs around 7,000 software developers. The trend is upward, as the demand for developers shows. Prof. Dieter Kempf, President of the industry association BITKOM, states in an IT labor market study that we currently have an unmet need for skilled workers of 30,000 software developers in Germany. Around 88 percent of all IT bosses surveyed said their biggest challenge was being able to recruit good employees and retain them over the long term.
With the increasing strategic as well as existential importance of software, a change in the management levels of companies can be observed in recent years. The topic of software is no longer seen as a subordinate issue, but is increasingly being taken responsibility for at board level. This is an important step, because the software landscape can only be designed in a sustainable and cost-effective manner if outdated software systems that have become highly complex over the years are replaced by modern systems.
However, these modernization measures, which are urgently needed from a risk perspective, often require budgets of a magnitude that can only be decided by the board of directors. It is not enough for the "technicians" to notice the technical risk but not have the money or time to improve the situation. A company can only get a grip on compliance, governance, quality and cost aspects if software is perceived and treated as a top-level management issue.
The great difficulty here, however, is that software is abstract. It has no physical form. It is not tangible and not visible. How is an IT executive supposed to make a fact-based decision if both the software foundation and the daily work of the many programmers are invisible? A way out of this management dilemma has recently emerged in the form of novel Big Data and visual data analytics methods that make it possible to generate comprehensible, visual representations from the many abstract data in the code landscape.
The hope is to make software so understandable that even non-techies among those in charge can confidently incorporate it into decisions. With each passing day, this becomes more important.
What's that flickering? Photo: Corbis
