5 Untold Truths of Software: Why Don't Features Lift Your Business?

In a highly technological environment, organizations need to understand the constraints of software-centric approach, and find the right balance between software and business outcomes. If we compare the way companies worked 20 years ago with the modern business world, we could easily see how software has shaped today’s enterprise growth and rapid advancement. Software has become a critical component of how companies operate, communicate and sell their products and services globally. However, the majority of organizations reported by academic literature and trade press had mixed success when it comes to naming direct benefits from software and IT efforts. Projects may be on-time and within budget and still deliver no business outcomes. Even when companies become aware their software investments don’t provide added value, most don’t try to understand where lines of code have failed. Instead, they lower expectations and consider software an expense that should be reduced, not an investment to be optimized. But in today’s highly technological environment, do businesses have the luxury to reduce software efforts? Why is the added value of IT investments so hard to pinpoint? Are most enterprise software projects really “designed to fail”? The present whitepaper attempts to answer these questions, helping organizations and leaders find the right balance in a software-dominated world. The paper also tackles the reasons why any software-centric approach comes with serious constraints for enterprises.