Archive for March, 2012

Tuesday 6th March, Imperial College Business School

By Antoine Vernet

Anthony Finkelstein, dean of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at UCL and a professor of Computer Science was at Imperial College Business School on March 6, to give a talk entitled “Engineering Challenges of the Digital Economy”. His talk addressed discrepancies between technical issues of software development and the necessity to address consumer demand and to build sustainable business models for software companies.

The discipline of software engineering needs to rise to the challenges presented by the digital economy. In his talk, Anthony Finkelstein addressed 10 challenges facing software engineering in the digital economy. These can be roughly separated in two groups: first, those that have to do with software architecture, software design and software requirements. Second, those, perhaps harder to overcome, that concern software development tools, modelling and middleware.

The risk is that the influence of software engineering as a discipline on practice will decrease. If software engineering wants to train the next generation of software engineers, it needs to address those challenges.

1. The question of the evolution of architecture needs to be explicitly stated. Software architecture has been addressed predominantly in an ad-hoc way. The relation between requirements and architecture needs to be clarified and studied more formally.
2. The discipline has to move to an evidence-based practice and rely less on anecdotal and quasi evidence-based practice. It needs to encourage reproducibility, and reorganize the curricula to reflect an evidence based approach.
3. Scalability. Problems of scalability need to be addressed and studied in depth, not just approached on an ad hoc and in a learning-by-doing fashion.
4. Reconcile web standards and software engineering standards: w3c and OMG. This is a major challenge and work on the technical side as well as negotiation to set new standards are necessary.
5. Resources estimation. Probably the main challenge mentioned in Anthony’s talk: there is very little we know about estimation of development cost and time. Getting a better understanding of cost and time estimation for system development implies studying programmer productivity in depth, along with rethinking of curricula in software engineering, making business models an important object in software engineering.
6. Software as a service: the challenge is in maintaining quality of service and allowing for interoperability. Clients also need to have a clear idea on how to walk away if they want to change provider. Data hosting, security and ownership are critical issues here.
7. Think about apps as channels. More and more, apps needs to be thought of and conceived as channels capable of evolving and changing what they deliver. Another step is to use apps as building blocks for user-side customization of apps through personal combinations.
8. Adaptive system. We need to develop ways of building systems that account for themselves.
9. Reconcile business and software engineering.
10. Inter-product and inter-supplier dependencies are not properly addressed: the field has to move away from a “garage” approach to development to supply chain or software ecosystem thinking.

Finally, Anthony Finkelstein ended his talk by stating that, in his opinion, the biggest challenge was to reach a point where business model and software would be co-designed simultaneously.

An MP3 of the talk may be found here, and the slides from the talk may be accessed here.

Wednesday 8th March, Imperial College Business School

By Richard Foulsham

Lem Lasher, as Group President of Global Business Solutions and Chief Innovation Officer of CSC is in a unique position to assess the influences upon and potential future direction of the digital economy, having both the analytical capabilities of a leading edge consultancy and a business that’s involved in the day to deployment of IT around the world within his remit.

During this lecture he shared with us some of the “points of view” that his organisation has developed around “next practice”, likely developments that clever players in the IT market can use to gain an advantage, and identified some of the areas that he thinks will grow and become important as the digital revolution gets underway.

This revolution in technology has been brought about by the growth of the internet. Mr Lasher predicts that we are barely into the foothills of this revolution with another 20 years of change ahead of us. This development will consist of  a relatively predictable advance in the technology, but Mr Lasher sees the real source of disruption being the development in business models that will take place in this new, connected environment.

The drivers of the current market as Mr Lasher sees it are globalisation and everything that overworked word entails – increased competition, the rise of China and India – but more interestingly he also identified a consistently difficult regulatory environment as being something that is affecting companies ability to differentiate their products. One interesting thing to ponder is whether the technological revolution and the  process of globalisation are really parallel or dynamically entwined. It is hard to imagine the economic growth of India without the business space that has been opened up by technology. Equally, the globalised markets that are the bain of many democratic politicians’ existence have grown up around the opportunities offered by a digital market place.

Organisations have responded to these challenges by becoming more complex and adopting a greater variety of forms than has been the case previously. Mr Lasher identifies a process that could be described as a “democratisation of technology” which has affected the way technology advances:  technologies are available at low enough cost and can be operated by non-experts – the iPad and the child are given as an example and anyone whose watched toddlers playing Angry Birds will find it hard to disagree – meaning that public bodies and private corporations cannot dictate to the market, but rather they have to respond to the market in a way that keeps revenue intact and minimises risks from regulation.

These effects are not consistent across sectors, and Mr Lasher then went on to describe a matrix for predicting the degree of business model disruption likely to result from these changes in a particular industry. He identifies two major predicting factors: whether the organisation deals in physical product or data, and the degree of regulation in the industry. This model has a remarkable predictive power which two examples will suffice to illustrate. The music industry – no physical product and little regulation (or at least little ability to enforce what regulation exists) – has gone through an exceptionally torrid time recently, whilst banking, dealing largely in data, but doing so  in a highly regulated environment, has itself suffered little in the way of disruption whilst, ironically, wreaking havoc on the rest of the economy.

Mr Lasher ended his presentation by describing a number of specific areas that he sees as likely to become increasingly important in the future. Some are predictable, others more of a surprise.  There was also a list of things that may prove to be the downside of the bright, shiny digital future that glistens enticingly at us from the cover of a thousand company brochures.  Whatever happens, it’s not going to be boring.

You can access a recording of Mr Lashers presentation here.