Software Abundance in the Face of Economic Scarcity, Part 2

The paper is an editorial that discusses the economics aspect of software industry. The author states that we are in a period of global economic funk, by virtually every measure that we can take. The good news is that we´ve been here before over the years and we´ve always seemed to get by. Software is still the most fungible and liquid of resources, and its supply is limited only by human imagination and labor. For this reason, the author began to make the case that software-intensive systems are a necessary element in helping us operate, innovate, and even thrive in the face of lean economic times. There are many opportunities in IT for fueling business, ranging from issues of daily hygiene to opportunities for creating entirely new markets. Effective business strategies must involve some mixture of efficiency-based, innovation-based, and customer-intimacy-based efforts. Software development is an engineering activity. That means not reaching for a perfect solution, but rather evolving to a solution that optimally resolves the static and dynamic forces on that system. For software-intensive systems, these forces include the usual business ones (cost, schedule, and mission) but also development, environmental, operational, and legal/ethical/moral forces. The author also noted that the enterprise´s architecture, is the collection of engineering decisions and artifacts that steer the fleet (the organization) through the forces acting upon it and guide it toward its mission. Architecture-as-an-artifact is a manifestation of technical intellectual property and thus serves as an artifact of control. The author concludes that software-intensive systems are an inescapable and necessary element in helping us operate, innovate, and even thrive in the face of lean economic times.