The Software Situation

Higher Education computing is in the same state as any other enterprise. Demand and complexity goes up while costs must be aligned with means. To reconcile these two forces is a cornerstone of this paper.

The current state, a simplified view:

It’s well documented that business applications are failing at an alarming rate. Some industry experts estimate that 66% of all U.S. development projects fail - that’s over $30B of wasted effort this year alone. Most of this waste is caused early in the process - by poor application definition and a poor integration environment.

Approximating the current situation:

Progress in software development is evident from the fact that it is feasible to build much more complex and larger systems. Just think how quickly and efficiently we would be able to build a monolithic mainframe application that has no graphical user interface and no connections to other systems. We never do this anymore, and that is why we do not have solid figures to support the idea that progress has been made.

Still, software development is an area in which we are struggling with a number of major problems. Writing software is labor intensive. With each new technology, much work needs to be done again and again. Systems are never built using only one technology and systems always need to communicate with other systems. There is also the problem of continuously changing requirements.

But things are getting better:

Over the years we have learned not to build huge monolithic systems. Instead we are beginning to build components that do the same job by interacting with each other. This makes it easier, or at least possible, to make changes to a system without affecting the other systems. The different components are all built using the best technology for the job, but need to interact with each other. Languages like XML and the internet offer common ground for interoperation.

The quality open source software being delivered to the component context today changes the equation by adding cost reduction factors that will enable wide participation.

To obtain the productivity levels that are needed in higher education much more is required. Merely selecting a software approach does nothing if there is no community agreement. Without that the leverage is simply not there.