Traditionally, capital investments were very concrete. You built your factory on the river because you needed the water to power your mill but nowadays with software, it’s a little bit more plastic and it’s easier to change, so adapting your strategies to accommodate for that change is really key. I think with a lot of custom software or legacy modernization projects, there is a temptation to use the context of what’s around you, the business as it is today, to help define the requirements for that software, but I think we need to take a page from Gretzky and skate to where the puck is going to be rather than where it is.
Barriers and Solutions
The first barrier to all of this honestly is inertia. Newton said it best: “things that are at rest tend to stay at rest,” but fortunately you can also use that to your advantage. Once you get in motion, there’s a tendency to stay in motion as well.
Vision of Future
One of the keys in achieving this is honestly just agreeing on what you think the future will be. Having those problem statements, having that vision and strategy shared widely through the business lets you pick a point on the horizon to aim towards.
Day-to-Day
I think it’s hard to escape the day to day, the keeping the lights on, the running of the business, it’s exhausting it’s hard it’s a full-time job. In fact it’s almost everyone in the company’s full-time job, so having that opportunity to pause from the day to day, pick your head up and look around is not always a luxury that’s afforded folks in business.
The goal is to have not just software that works for your business and for where it’s headed but to have this process, and to have the expectation, that it should continue adapting right along with you as your business rockets forward.
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