Doug McGowan
- 24 years at HP in engineering, engineering management, and general management
- Led teams working on emerging technologies and enterprise mobility strategy
- Designed, developed or built HP's Cooltown innovation centers in Singapore, London, Palo Alto and elsewhere.
- Developed and marketed HP's VerSecure encryption technology and represented HP as encryption policy expert in meetings with the White House, U.S. Congress, FBI, Departments of Defense, Justice and Commerce
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Software and Technology Companies: From Legacy to the Future
Key Trends
- Expect location-based products and services to proliferate.
- A location-based product or service is a software app for a mobile device (or even a laptop) that leverages knowledge about the location of the device. Expect every device that is connected to the Internet to utilize this capability moving forward. As mobile technology becomes the standard, innovative location-based services will be in demand.
- Agile development techniques are becoming more widespread; methods like test-driven and behavior-driven development are being used by smaller companies.
Small- and medium-sized companies are starting to use more sophisticated development technologies and methodologies. For example, some companies are adopting test-driven development, that means writing the acceptance test for a piece of the code before you write the code. Then all you have to do is write code that passes the test.
Another approach is behavior-driven development. The team partners with the customer to write product behaviors typically on 3x5 cards. For example, they write, “Given this situation and given that I’m in this part of the application, and given that I have a database with this kind of data in it, then when I do this I should see that." In the end, you define thousands of behaviors on a large-scale product. Those behaviors get turned into acceptance tests.
There are tools that facilitate this process immensely. Small- and medium-sized companies have an increasingly sophisticated tool box available to them.- Global supply chains are common but the political and social situation in the world remains volatile.
In most cases globally dispersed supply chains were intended to cut the cost of development and to decrease time-to-market. However, continuing unrest, sometimes in surprising quarters creates difficulties for innovators. For example, there are many companies in the San Francisco Bay Area that currently have design teams in Ukraine and in Russia, among other places. Recent events in the former Soviet Union raise understandable concerns about working in this part of the world where tensions can flare up suddenly and with significant downside risk.
- Time-to-market – and product life cycles – continue to decrease.
Faster time to market is nothing new, but product life cycles are decreasing steadily. A company cannot wait three years to get its software out. The better approach is to launch a first iteration into the marketplace, even if it’s not perfect. If it helps the customer solve a problem or even a piece of a problem, you must get that piece of the product into the market as fast as possible. Smaller pieces, faster iterations, shorter product life cycles and faster overall product development cycle times is a trend that hasn't shown signs of slowing down.
- Expect competition from anywhere and everywhere.
- Competition is worldwide. This has been touted as a trend for some time but that future is now here. There will be new players in your marketplace. There will also be well-financed players coming into new marketplaces and coming right at you. Thinking about the future while doing nothing about it is no longer an option. The rule of the day is change, grow or die.