DevCons, Kool-Aid And ROI
Software development conferences are not like other trade shows. Their typically enthusiastic ambiance often lack economic justifications for the Next New Thing.
Like Dan Herchenroether’s book Selling Air, software itself is an intangible, and the developers’ tools that are touted at these soirees promise much, usually addressing fixes to the previous versions of the tools that are usually regaled as enhancements. Pretty much like any vendor hype at any trade show.
But there are some differences that are unique to software, beyond not having to really demonstrate efficacy. The biggest is that tools that deal with tangibles (e.g., a CNC milling machine) have to prove they can pay their way with measurable ROI and payback times, and often the means by which these are measured are provided in easy to understand and commonly accepted accounting methods that anyone with even a little business acumen can easily grasp.
Another difference is that unlike, say, a turret lathe, software tools change at an accelerating rate, and often the changes are absolute and total (e.g., Word 2007), so there’s a constant battle to start with a new learning curve before the first inflection is reached on the previous tool, much akin to Sisyphus’ eternal labor.
Development Conferences have been around for some time. So have surveys rating the effectiveness of IT projects, published in the various trade publications. Often the data for these surveys is garnered at the very same conferences, and they uniformly paint a gloomy picture. One would like to think that the succession of new development tools unveiled at these conferences would gradually improve the success to failure ratios, but that hasn’t happened.
Overall, IT’s success ratio isn’t too far from an average baseball player’s batting average. This no doubt is a result of a lot of reasons, but over time they would tend to cancel each other out, something that has not happened. When the costs of increased technical staff, rendering existing infrastructure obsolete overnight, exposure to new security risks, missed deadlines, lost opportunities and other impedimenta are finally factored in, the shine of viewing software as an investment quickly vanishes: Better returns with a passbook, with vanishingly little risk and certainly none of the headaches.
CNC milling machines, turret lathes and the like are productive assets that have to justify their existence every day. All too often, software is just another overhead item, difficult to control and intractably unpredictable. Avoid the kool-aid when trying to find a positive ROI for software.
Tags: developer conferences, kool-aid, software roi, software tools