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

4.28. The Real Payoff—Moving from Developer Leap to Enterprise Leap

When you achieve the 10× boost in productivity that ADP can deliver, it has a dramatic impact on the enterprise. You have achieved a quantum leap in developer productivity. Now you can create disposable software because you can implement new code rapidly—and be confident that it works. With this capability you can react quickly to market changes and requirements.

That will already be a great improvement, but much bigger improvements are still waiting to be claimed. You will be making software the right way. But will you be making the right kind of software?

In order to make the most of your newly efficient IT crew, you need to make sure that they are building an open system built around the concept of software "services," what we call service-oriented architecture (SOA).

When you properly apply the techniques I have explained in this chapter to the kind of software I am going to describe in chapter 5, you gain the ability to make strategic decisions with your IT systems.

That is the key to achieving the second quantum leap of productivity, the Enterprise Leap. Unlike the Developer's Leap, which is measured in LOC per developer, the Enterprise Leap is measured using traditional business metrics with which you are probably more familiar—profitability, revenue growth, and market share.

Before we can get to that, however, we need to discuss enterprise architecture, which comes next.