The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

4.1. Essential Software Concepts for Top Managers

When your enterprise software is built around the right architecture, small leaps in software development productivity can lead to huge leaps in enterprise productivity. So we have two kinds of leaps:

Developer Leap—occurs at the tactical level

Enterprise Leap—occurs at the strategic level

I firmly believe that these two leaps are truly revolutionary. But in order to achieve these leaps, the internal structure of your information technology (IT) group must change. Indeed, the entire relationship of IT to the enterprise must change as well.

As CEO, you can no longer delegate all IT issues to the chief information officer (CIO). You need to know enough about software productivity that you can determine for yourself whether your IT organization, and your CIO, are up to par. You do not have to get down into the bits and bytes, but you do have to understand the key concepts.

In this chapter, we are going to look at the Developer Leap, and I will explain how to organize your IT operation to produce large amounts of high-quality software, improving productivity by as much as a factor of ten. In later chapters, we will explore the Enterprise Leap.