The challenge of building flexible solutions

Yesterday, I was talking with a colleague about his platform, which had been deemed a "mature platform", which means it doesn't get new product development investment dollars. As a result, it is largely ignored by our internal customers in favor of the sexier, new platforms.

But our conversation was not about how passe his platform is. Instead, it was about how many times in the past two weeks we have decided to incorporte his platform into our next-gen solutions for business units. His platform is tried and true, people in the business know how it works, and it makes introducing new innovations easier to digest when there's a strong whiff of the familiar as part of the new solution.

His platform is quite flexibile -- even more so than most of his internal customers take advantage of. Yet, this platform has not been getting the credit it deserves in driving innovation forward. That got me to thinking why.

I realized that the platform team did a great job of designing a very flexible platform. Yet, without people educated on that flexibility and how it is relevant to new innovations coming from the business, that flexibility could lie forever dormant.

Great software developers and architects know how to design software that is flexible, but they don't always know how to market that software so the flexibility can be harvested and achieve the benefits it could.

This caused me to think back to my Master's thesis on the topic of applying options theory (like stock options) to management decision-making. Basically, the theory says that any project or investment that has embedded options is worth more than one without options. That makes sense intuitively: if you're "locked in", that's worth less than if you have the ability to choose among outcomes. And, flexibility means you have embedded options. Options to take advantage of opportunities with less or no investment that, if you didn't have the option, you'd have to spend a lot more money and take a lot more time to seize the opportunity.

It dawned on me that building flexibile platforms (with embedded options) not aligned closely with market innovators means those options will likely expire worthless. That's bad. It means you have paid for these options but never got to take advantage of their value. So, you just overspent. This is a reality that does not often occur to engineers and architects. They often see their job as designing something that is flexible (modular, open, interoperable, etc.). That flexibility is expensive, and they often find themselves fighting for the funding to "do it right." What they mean is they want to build something that will last, and to do that, it needs to be flexible -- and you have to pay for the options of flexibility while the thing is being designed or built.

But market innovators (to engineers, these are "the business people" ) who don't understand the nature of these embedded options are like investors who buy stocks that come with options, but they don't know how to exercise those options in such a way as to get the value from them. A financial manager who let that happen would be fired, but the disconnect between market innovators and options-building architects and engineers is all too common in my discipline of software.

I often see engineers asking business people, "What do you need? What will you need in the future?" as if these business people had crystal balls back in their offices. And I have seen market innovators become very frustrated when they ask for a solution from engineers who implement what the innovator has literally asked for -- not what they actually want. As hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky would say, they are skating to where the puck is, not where the puck is going to be.

I feel I've made some progress on thinking through this disconnect, but I don't yet have my finger on how to articulate it...