Good point by Thom Lawrence in the comments of the previous post:
This is, more or less, the central theme of all software development best-practice since time began. Procedures, Modules, Objects, Components, Services... MacGuffins of all sorts have yet to resemble the silver bullet you're after. All of these tools are just to defend against uncertainty and change.A while back I wrote a thing about technologists vs culturalists. So I suppose you can't build "Skunkworks" software and hope to sell it at a profit, unless you already have a "Skunkworks" culture ready and willing to use it.But it's not really a product you can sell. You can't have your cake made out of completely incompatible ingredients, sprinkle on magic middleware dust and eat it.
Infrastructure has to be a first class citizen in your business, right from the start. People _know_ how to build these systems. People are already building them. It's just a matter of commitment and stamina.
Technologists versus culturalists again?
[NOTE TO SELF:] Greed kills skunks. There can be no technological solution without a cultural solution. Cultural solutions are more valuable and profitable than technological solutions.
[NOTE TO SELF:] Stick to cartooning. You are so out of your league.
Posted by hugh macleod at April 28, 2005 1:37 PM | TrackBackGeoffrey Moores technology marketing classic "crossing the chasm" addresses this very well. As far as I know, the original Skunkworks developed military aircraft. Did any commercial aircraft come from that? Perhaps indirectly. I mention this because the military are in a sense your classic "early adopter" who are willing to make technology work at just about any cost to get a competitive advantage. Geez they are willing to make hammers and toilets work at just about any cost :-)
A skunkworks approach will definitely get you started, but it won't get you into the mainstream market. For that you need to develop a "whole product".
Anyway, for those with technoogy product's, Moores books really are a must read.
Posted by: john Allsopp at April 28, 2005 9:48 PMjohn: Skunkworks won't get you into the mainstream, but is that where you want to be? That's where you are fighting against commodity software, entrenched (and ossified) management, and zero smart conversations. Informal networks, both inside and outside the organisation, are already where most of the 'good' (sorry - value judgement there) work gets done even now, and 'mainstream' software, just like mainstream management, is about doing the same things with consistency, efficiency and repeatability. Now for SOME stuff in the business, that's exactly what you need (nobody wants the payroll system to work like a lottery!) - but growth and innovation and retention of the smart people is going to need something a little more adventurous than that. I've started thinking about some of this (I'm a software manager caught between a rock (ERP implementation) and a hard place (the "orchestration" somebody mentioned in a comment on the previous post)) - http://aqualung.typepad.com/aqualung/2005/04/to_dev_or_not_t.html
and I want to think a lot more about it, because I can see my own job disappearing into the gap between my personal philosophy of how software supports a business and how the business is implementing software.
