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software in today’s digital age, the foundation on which our economy and now also based our society. Deliberately us this, when once again a software error, a company has jeopardized his economic existence or when millions of people are affected in their daily lives.
A striking example of how software company processes penetrates to the core, was the critical incident at Trader Knight Capital. After a failed software update, the solid, multi-billion dollar company was forced by the fully automated own commercial software systems almost in bankruptcy. The systems resulted from transactions by faulty algorithm and losses incurred in the microsecond clock. $ 10 million were destroyed per minute. After 40 minutes and a loss of $ 400 million desperately needed the power to be turned off.
Also, we as a society depend critically on for decades in software from functioning and dependence has increased dramatically in recent years again, since the “internet of things” more and more technical equipment to replace heating over garage doors to refrigerators digital and match. In 2002, we were able to watch in horror as had a due to a software error in a US electric utilities, the people in five US states and in many parts of Canada live for several days without electricity.
Another example of how our society permeated by software, the NSA scandal. You no longer as in earlier times observe individuals consuming. Nowadays, it is sufficient to install detectors in the software foundation for tapping in a very simple manner most intimate details of millions of people, motion profiles to chat with friends and business partners. Software is therefore an issue that you should have in view and under control as political leaders and as a corporate decision makers in terms of risk management best.
The reason and drivers that we have maneuvered us into this software dependency in, is the obvious economic benefits of software-based business process automation. No car manufacturer would want to miss today’s efficiency and can control the lever on the machine again by hand. No insurance could afford to calculate the rates at the desk again today.
The obtained efficiency in core business, however, has its corporate price. The IT budget of companies of any industry is growing steadily. Indeed, in recent years and decades, huge, tailored to the business processes software systems were built. If you were to print the source code of an average regional energy supplier, this would result in a paper stack height of a skyscraper with 15 floors. In order to handle the complexity of these systems in any organization of any industry, a large number of software developers is busy.
Always new business requirements must daily be programmed into the systems inside. To order: DG computer science Services GmbH Generali Insurance Group has hired 1,100 employees. The Swiss bank UBS employs even 7,000 software developers. The trend is on the rise, as the demand for developers shows. Prof. Dieter Kempf, President BITKOM, notes in the latest IT job market study that we in Germany currently have an unmet need for skilled workers from 30,000 software developers. Around 88 percent of all surveyed CIOs expressed as their biggest challenge of being able to attract good employees and long-term commitment.
With the increasing strategic and existential critical importance of software in recent years in the business, a change in to monitor the levels of management. The topic of software is no longer considered a child theme, but increasingly responsible at board level. This is an important step because the software landscape can only be sustainable and cost-effective fashion when obsolete, over the years has become highly complex software systems are being replaced by modern systems.
For this urgently needed from a risk perspective modernization measures, however, are often applied budget in a scale that can only be decided by the Board. It is not enough if the “engineer” the technical risk but notice, but do not have the money to improve the situation. A company can compliance, governance, quality and cost aspects only get a grip when software is perceived and treated as an issue of top-level management.
The great difficulty here, however: Software is abstract. It has no physical form. It is not tangible and not visible. How should a CIO make fact-based decisions when both the software foundation as well as the daily work of many programmers are invisible? A way out of this dilemma management is characterized recently by new Big Data and Visual Analytics methods from, making it possible to produce understandable visual representations of the many abstract data of the code area.
The hope is to make software so natural that even non-techies to involve them in decisions confidently among decision-makers. With every day that is important.
Johannes Bohnet describes in his column on manager-magazin.de the non-experts often hidden interactions between economically relevant events and the software matrix, businesses and society now pervades. Bohnet has in this topic, a self-interest: He is the founder of Software Diagnostics.
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