Risks

• Competitive Risk: Software needs to have features that are distinct from what direct competitors are offering.
• Lack of in-house software expertise when needed: This can hamper or impede the development of the right product at the right time.
  
• Poor decision-making around outsourcing vs. building in-house: This is a risk across the entire spectrum of software.
  
• Cost: This is a risk factor in the development of any product, but too many companies are taking a CFO-driven approach to their software where they're handing over the reins of their technology to managers who do not understand the best way to create high quality, competitive software.

Opportunities

• As companies become increasingly digital they discover entirely new ways of identifying prospective customers and bringing them into their company’s customer base.
• Digitization allows companies to make knowledge-based, fact-based decisions in areas where intuition and judgment ruled in the past. 
  
• As software becomes the medium through which companies interact with customers, business partners, and suppliers, it opens the opportunity to create significant competitive changes in business ecology that can move enterprises ahead much more rapidly than in the past. 
• In particular, the right software creates an opportunity to improve supply chains, which could lead to new price points which were not achievable without the software component.