Chapter One: It’s Just A Product!
Computer software is so immensely powerful, so fearsomely complex,and so deeply embedded in our daily routine that it’s usually considered to be quite unlike all other consumer goods. To most of us, its workings are invisible and incomprehensible. Yet there’s nothing magic about software. It’s just a product—a man-made tool that’s developed, manufactured, marketed, licensed, and sold.
Software has much in common with every other product, with one very important difference:
We have come to accept that the software we use won’t work in the way we expect.
We maintain high expectations for every major product we buy, especially when we purchase or lease any form of business equipment—except one. Our experience with information technologyhas taught us that whenever we plan to install new software, whether it’s a basic word-processing program or a multi-million-dollar enterprise system, our most realistic viewpoint is to hope for the best and expect the worst.
Unfortunately, our low expectations concerning software products are justified. After a ten-year global survey of more than 50,000 information technology projects purchased and developed for firms both large and small, The Standish Group, a Massachusetts market research firm specializing in software, reported in 2004 that less than one-third of these projects were delivered on time, on budget, with the required features and functions. More than half of them came in late, over budget, or lacked required features, and the remainder were cancelled or never used.
We possess every resource we need to produce business technology that fulfills all its promise. By making small, low-tech adjustments to existing software systems, and by changing the way we specify, evaluate, and develop new systems, we can overcome their shortcomingsand exponentially improve their performance—but only if we begin to change the way we think about them.
