Year 2008 ended in chaos for the business world. 2009 became one of the most unpredictable years of the 21st century and will be an important year for all of us to rethink our future plans. The impact in the software industry was quite significant with corporations cutting back heavily on IT costs. This resulted in companies that provided software solutions and products yielding less revenue than forecasted. Salaries were cut across the board, people got laid off, hoping to reduce expenses and stay profitable.
The biggest impact was for the South Asian countries such as Sri Lanka that were exporting software into Europe and the US. Here are my thoughts as to how we can survive this period which could very easily go beyond 2009.
 |
| Picture courtesy-imagebank.com |
First of all, we need to understand the fact that IT is a basic necessity for any company. Even the smallest of companies would require a basic level of IT infrastructure in order to reduce overall cost. In other words, even with the recession in place there will always be a “need” for IT solutions. The obstacle lies in how appropriate and cost effective that IT solution will be for the customer.
The best approach to understanding this is to look at the problems from the customers point of view. Whether you are a software developer, a manager or a CEO this is a good way to find what really works and sells your solutions. Under the current economic situation, most executives will look at spending money on projects that will yield short term results. They will also look at reducing the maintenance cost of these software which spans over multiple years and which usually amounts up to millions of dollars. Another aspect they will look at, is to achieve the basic minimum not having to spend a penny extra.
So how does a software company adapt to these changes of expectations? The obvious first step will be to find ways of reducing costs which in turn provides a solution or a product that is cheaper and affordable. There can be several ways of doing this. Most companies will first look at cutting back subsidiary expenses such as AC power, entertainment budgets, travel and expenses, marketing budget and so on. Secondly they would look to reduce staff cost by cutting back salaries and worst of all lay offs. Reducing salaries is a fair decision to make as the entire company takes a hit. However, laying off people should be the last resort that the management takes simply because that decision can have a long term effect and most probably would go beyond the recession. One must keep in mind that a recession is a lower part of a cycle that occurs once in several decades. There will be a time when we come out of this period and when we do, having the right set of people and skills will be the tipping point in becoming successful again.
Perhaps the most common aspect of reducing cost is something that is ignored the most. Developing best practices in software development and using proper products that helps to increase productivity of developers can drastically reduce time in developing IT solutions. Time directly relates to incurring higher costs which has to be absorbed by the selling price. Ideally, the time that takes to build the solution has to be reduced as much as possible especially since companies are expecting quick returns on their investments.
Tech Talk e mail address: techtalk@gmail.com
Some of the best developer
tools to check out
- Git : A revision version control system
- JBoss Drools : A business rule management system
- Flex : One of the foremost running frameworks for developing rich internet applications
- HttpClient : An easy to use Web client library
- SoapUI : Easy to use and powerful SOAP testing tool
|
E-mail