Technology

Becoming a post-software business

How to move beyond the old adages and truly transform your business.

10 March 2020

The late Watts S Humphrey, one of the great pioneers of the IT industry, is credited with coining the phrase 'every business is a software business'. It’s the title of the first chapter of his 2001 book, Winning with Software: An Executive Strategy, and as a snappy way of describing the underlying philosophy for digital transformation of the enterprise, it’s stuck. It’s also a favourite phrase of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, to name just one example, and has been cribbed as the title of countless blogs, speeches and reports over the years.

There's good reason for its popularity. It succinctly captures the nature of business in the digital era: since every process can and is represented digitally, optimising and improving it follows the principles of software engineering. It's a sign of these times that techniques for managing teams of developers, with exciting names such as 'lean' and 'agile' and 'rapid iteration', are spilling over from the IT teams into HR and accounting.

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