Cloud, Agile and What Startups Can Teach the Enterprise
Software engineering is still a young discipline. Until the Agile Manifesto challenged the accepted waterfall-based development model, software creation borrowed most of its processes from that of hardware. But those older, hardware-like methodologies failed to take advantage of software’s biggest benefit: that it’s soft.
What has emerged in the last 15 to 20 years is the idea of “failing quickly.” Developers want to get products in front of users as early as possible, learn from their mistakes, and iterate better versions quickly. This new process takes advantage of the “softness” of software and ultimately sculpts better products. Mantras like “fail quickly” assume that some large percentage of ideas are bad. The faster you can get those ideas in front of people and find out how they perform, the more “at bats” you’ll get and the better your chances are at finding an innovation.
Cloud computing and Agile development proved to be a good match for each other. Software could be developed quickly and at much lower hosting costs that match demand to lower scales—in a way that wasn’t possible when deployments were limited to physical hardware. Startups and venture capitalists (VCs) quickly caught onto this, as a 2016 graph by Pitchbook from an article over at GeekWire shows us:
Take a look at how the number of funds closed rose more sharply than the amount of capital received from 2009 to 2013. That is as a result of VCs spreading their bets across a wider set of companies, knowing they could invest less in each individual start-up because of the Agile/cloud combination. What this shows is that at a macro level, VCs now also embrace the “fail quickly” model in an attempt to get more chances to find innovation.
Most enterprise IT gets funded very differently—and forces organizations to act very differently. Typically, the CFO projects revenue for a particular year.
