In our last post, we described different visions of human nature and how the world works affected the team’s software development process for the Map Intuition product. As we continue our work on collaborative data architecture features for the product, our visions are being more exposed.
First, a confession: I am writing this on an iPad, which exists because Apple and Steve Jobs believed that technology should adapt to us and not we to technology. Meaning, that technology should be pleasant to use and beautiful. Technology should foster creativity and art. Technology should let us share and collaborate, in Apple’s vision.
In that vein, data architecture partially describes an enterprise’s sense of what it is and what it wants to be and its place in the world. Data architecture and integration software enables an enterprise to describe its vision of itself and then to use that self-description to create its technological central nervous system for the current and future visions, and for the transitions between the visions.
Why describe enterprise software in these terms? Liaison’s management team appreciates the Jim Collins books, which discuss the need to articulate an organization’s vision of itself and then wholeheartedly pursue that vision. This implies that certain kinds of people will fit well in a particular organization and others will not. And that implies that a given organization will be good at certain kinds of software — as people have commented that centralized Apple produces the unified iPad experience and decentralized Google produces cloud services.
Now to the point. If the people in a software development organization view the world in one way, they will (often unconsciously) create software that reflects the way they see the world. Non-profit organizations tend not to produce successful commercial software. Professional services organizations tend not to produce successful off-the-shelf commercial software. IBM and SAP tend to create software that reflects their own corporate cultures.
As Frederick Brooks commented in The Mythical Man Month, the software a team can create is limited by the communications within the team. We here suggest that the software a team can create is limited by the way the team thinks the world works, especially when creating something new which interacts with humans not as mute tools but as communicating, collaborative partners.
You now know key challenges the Contivo team faces as it shapes itself for its next round of challenges.