Few days back I was at Project Management training and our excellent instructor asked what is the problem executives are trying to solve by going for ERP implementation. What he said rhymed with some thing Jeff Nolan wrote today on Future of Enterprise Software

CEOs are concerned about growing their businesses in an era of increasing uncertainty and efficiency demands; business managers need real-time visibility for intra- and inter-company events, as well as the ability to reconfigure processes with increasing frequency; the CFO, meanwhile, has to ensure regulatory compliance and business integrity.

For the CIO, these challenges come at time when maintenance costs are rising and the number of trusted partners are shrinking — systems remain undiminished, yet there are fewer vendors capable of supporting large-enterprise customers. We are down to less than 200 publicly traded tech providers from over 400 in 2001.

Thanks to Jeff for penning these thoughts and Om Malik for bringing all the folks writing thoughts on future of software.

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I am reading “The Business of Software” these days. What a delightful book to read about business of software as a product and services. After starting as a developer I have been in the services for the past few years. Michael Cusumano, the author distills the business of software in few succinct words

The Software services business … is about getting enough profitable accounts to keep your consultants and developers busy close to 100 percent of the time…..

It is usually important to mix senior people with junior to maximize profits for any given client project……

economies of scope are the holy grail….. they can come from structuring knowledge such as how to do requirements, manage projects, customize applications, conduct user acceptance testing, or reuse design frameworks and even pieces of code across different projects and customers.

Do read this book if you are starting a career in software in whatever side of the business - product or services.

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In his 1995 speech “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment” given at Harvard Law School, Charlie Munger said

“Well I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”

Coming from Mr. Munger, incentives as the very first cause or bias in Human Misjudgment, learning about incentives is quite important. And now Tyler Cowen, an economist and author of very famous blog Marginal Revolution has written a complete book on incentives called “Discover your inner economist”

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