Brand Killer Robots reveals::For those who have experience of working on multi-million dollar software projects for Government or Commerce, we think you will understand where this article is heading. Also for those who run a small business and can never locate a truly independent computer consultant who you can trust to share the best advice.
The best advice for you!
The way we see it is that you first need to consider where the world is now in terms of information technology. Many of the worlds greatest software designers have long held the view that IT is going in the same direction as the industrial revolution, where the intelligence and sheer scale of deliverable required to build ever more complex structures eventually resulted in the birth of a new profession. A profession which we know today as that of the "Construction Architect", encompassing many fields of architecture, including buildings, shipping and aircraft, to name a few.
So when you build a ship you need a shipping architect, when you build a bridge - you commission an architect with those skills and so on. When we talk in terms of IT or software, things are not so clear cut. The IT industry went through a contrasting change because we started off with huge complex systems run by people called Data Processing Managers, then things got quite a lot smaller, yet no less complex and we called these people IT Managers until today where things are much smaller, more discrete, but responsibility is distributed amongst a great deal many more people, including IT Manager, PC Developers, Network Managers, Project Managers, Ecommerce Managers, Technical Managers, Helpdesk Managers,team leaders and so on. In fact there are even people calling themselves Architects, whether it be business intelligence architect, technical architect, creative architect, software or network architect and so on. Where "architect" is a term used in the main to mean "higher order technical lead" as opposed to "someone who leads the design and supervision of entire multi-million software projects".
If we were to compare the IT sector today to the construction industry before the industrial revolution one could conclude that there is very little difference, in terms of organisation.
As with the construction industry back then, IT projects comprise a lot of different people all empowered to do a specific type of job, but all working off a very different set of blueprints and all working for different people - with nobody in real control of driving the overall project.
Can you imagine how much more of a mess the construction industry would be in today if it allowed projects to be co-ordinated without architects? If the arguments work when discussing the functional aspects of the deliverable, then they certainly work even more strongly when one goes on to discuss the relative merits of empowering a single individual to take control and ownership of the project, in the case of ensuring consistent direction of the brand message, ensuring accuracy, creative licence, security, financial proprietary, style and good taste.
So we ask "why do executives expect software projects to operate effectively when they are at best run by managers without multi-disciplinary, multi-functional experience in software development and at worse run by a bunch of desparados, all playing every man for himself?
We ask for brands to thoroughly investigate the very real possibility of investing in the development of a new profession in the software industry.
We call for executives around the world to consider sponsoring a new Profession -
that of the internationally recognised "Software Architect".
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