Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

May 28, 2002

A Treasure Hunt

The true value of software is in integration and support, not the software itself

By Michael J. Hudson

Continued from Page 1

The point is simple: For a long time, companies have viewed their internal software development masterpieces as pieces of valuable intellectual property worth something big in the long run. However, many companies are starting to realize that any piece of intellectual property they own is at its most valuable at its initial creation and then its value slowly decreases over time. To keep your internal intellectual software property secret and tightly controlled provides no actual benefit to you or your company and, in many cases, may even stifle development of truly qualitative software because you'll never benefit from external resources and analysis.

The Value of Software

So, the question now is, "How do you make the most of the software you do need for supporting internal enterprise operations, and how do you make software development worth something outside of its immediate pragmatic value?" First of all, don't limit yourself by developing the complete software solution to your problem in-house. Many reusable components and frameworks are available that will do a lot of the work for you. So, make sure to research what's currently out there.

Second, make your mission for internal development more about integration and maintenance rather than the pure creation of a solution from scratch. Internal software projects shouldn't be about making more money, they should be about saving more money. Thus, the real value comes from discovering ways to cut your costs. In terms of software, cutting costs translates into finding ways to easily integrate and maintain your existing software, instead of trying to create and hold onto it as intellectual property.

Third, be open to open source. Open up pieces of your development to the community at large. You'll definitely benefit from having more people than you could ever dream of hiring looking at and improving your software. And in return, the open-source movement will benefit from taking pieces of your code and using it in other projects. In the long run, you end up with a much more qualitative, reliable, and flexible product without losing any of its internal value. Also, it will cost a lot less and increase your name recognition and respect further than you would have previously thought.

Rate This Article

Comments:

Optional e-mail address:

By in large, the decision still comes down to weighing your costs and needs. By no means do I mean that you should open everything and anything you develop internally or that all development should be outsourced in this way. You need to balance each project decision with mitigating the risks involved with these external interactions. You definitely need to weigh the cost and timeliness of accomplishing these feats using open source vs. complete internal development.

However, because software value sharply declines after creation, exposing your project and your enterprise to this more collaborative way of building software will involve little risk over the long term. You'll realize that the value of your enterprise development projects lies not in the software itself, but in how that software integrates and supports the rest of your company. A project's worth should be in how effectively it's used and gets the job done. Ideas about increasing a project's merit by trying to sell it or conceal it are leftover dreams from old-school economics. And if that's the case, why not open it up?

Michael J. Hudson [mhudson@blueprinttech.com] is a framework engineer for Blueprint Technologies, a software architecture firm based in McLean, Va. His current work includes developing enterprise architectural solutions for clients such as NASA.