Welcome to the Blur (from my Borland blog)

I wanted my first Borland blog entry to provide some insight into the kinds of issues we are now seeing in our global customer base.

I have been fortunate enough since Q1 of this year to participate in many IT executive forums, CIO councils, and executive briefings to customers. After speaking with the first 50 or so CxOs, VP’s of Application Development, and Development Directors, the theme of their business reality became clear – they called it “The Blur”.

The “blur” designation came from a C-level executive attending a Dallas event. He went on to quantify that this came from a confluence of two effects that were driving his team; the increase of the speed of his company’s business cycle (not the IT delivery cycle, but the actual product change cycle for the business they were in), and the increase in the rate of change of technologies, in fact even standards (or near standards) coming too quickly to track.

As this year has advanced the metaphor has been echoed in meeting after meeting. The conversation goes something like this:

- My business delivery cycles are getting ever faster.
- The economy seems to be heating up – but where are my increased resources? (Hint: There may not be any.)
- Do I need to be thinking about CMMI certification?
- Do I need to go offshore? How do I stay onshore?
- Ouch! Sarbanes-Oxley regulation is starting to cost real money.
- What about Java vs. .NET?
- What about Weblogic vs. Websphere vs. JBoss vs. JOnAS?
- Is SOA real? When is it real? What do I do with it?
- And so on…

At the same time this ad-hoc community of IT executives seems to be honing in on practical strategies for confronting these challenges. Common themes are apparent in how these managers are coping. Interesting to note is how their strategies are often time “refinement” strategies – not major shifts – just subtle changes in point of view. (But remember the saying of the great technologist Alan Kay “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points”.) Here are some examples:

- They are employing a “product” model for development, not just a “project” model. (Probably a whole posting on this difference in the future.)

- They are also differentiating process work from project work – with an extraordinary desire to codify and communicate the iterative and perpetual work items that make up their processes

- Developing approaches for managing requirements as opposed to merely capturing them.

- Along those lines, a shift to testing requirements as well as testing code.

- Understanding that Bug Tracking is only one workflow of many workflows in the broader domain of managing Change Requests.

What do these practical solutions have in common? They all reinforce why customers have been so positive in their response to our last 2+ years of providing ever better, highly iterative, highly integrated application lifecycle management. And they reinforce and imply the need for Borland to do more. They make it clear that despite the progress we have made in helping individuals and teams be more productive in writing software – there are tangible, actionable capabilities that are a mere arms length away from today’s capabilities, that will help businesses be productive in delivering their software.

At Borcon 2004 we announced the Borland vision for Software Delivery Optimization along with indications of the types of features, partners and integrations involved in its realization. Only time will tell, but it seems to me that its ambitions will make real progress in bringing The Blur back into focus.