The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

1.10. Disposable Software

Even if you hire the world's best programmers, you're likely to run headlong into deeply rooted institutional challenges. As anyone who has ever tried can tell you, modifying any aspect of a modern software program can escalate rapidly into a task of Homeric proportions.

As suggested earlier, most of today's commercial software might as well be carved in stone.

Now imagine if you had the capability to modify code so smoothly and so easily that software would be considered disposable.

Unlike disposable diapers or disposable razors, disposable software would be environmentally friendly. It would leave no trace when you discarded it. It would be the ultimate recyclable product—and it would be endlessly renewable.

Best of all, disposable software would enable organizations to respond effectively within days or even hours to changing conditions by translating the intellectual power of their human capital investments directly into executable programs.

So what is stopping us from making the logical switch from traditional software to disposable software?

The answer lies in the hopelessly outmoded way in which we manage the creation of new software.

People outside of the software business would be amazed—and quite possibly shocked—by the premodern management techniques commonly used to develop new software. The industrial manufacturing processes of the late nineteenth century are models of efficiency compared to software development methods of the twenty-first ...