Software intelligence is not about software.
It is about us.
The 21st century faces as many problems as opportunities. Software is critical to every answer and advancement, but humanity is building on a 20th century stack using 20th century techniques. Over the decades, this stack has grown into a worldwide labyrinth of interconnected black boxes. The stack supports our businesses, our critical systems, and our lives.
And there is no map.
As the number of applications, their size, and their dependencies expand, so do the points of failure and the time required to build anything on top of them. Companies manage 100x more code today than 10 years ago -- and now AI has joined the team.
A turning point
As IT professionals, we have a greater understanding of how fragile a foundation this is for business. As members of a society that runs on software, we have a greater responsibility to strengthen it.
We recognize that software has outgrown its creator’s ability to keep up with it. We recognize that the way software management worked for the past 50 years will not work through the next five.
We are taking a new path: Software Intelligence.
A new path
From lands to oceans, cells to space, people have traveled, observed, and mapped their way from ignorance to knowledge. Now, we bring this discipline to humanity’s most complex landscape: software.
Software intelligence is insight into the inner workings and structural condition of all the code that runs our lives.
Its starting point is knowing what we don’t know:
What is unknown?
The typical custom application is made of millions of lines of code. It has tens of thousands of elements and nearly infinite interactions between them. Software owners can’t possibly know everything about its composition, how elements connect, or the consequences of making changes. Even knowing where to begin exploring the code is usually a mystery.
What questions can’t we answer?
Lack of software intelligence means lack of business insight. What is the problem to be solved? Which problem comes after that? How do we approach tasks such as improving resilience and efficiency? How much time, money, and disruption will a problem take to solve?
What is the impact of opacity?
Like explorers without maps, trial-and-error, dead-ends, and wrong turns are broadly accepted as standard operating procedure. But what could change strategically and tactically if the right intel was in the right hands? What previously unrealistic goals could now be within reach?
From these simple questions, a new generation of thinking has risen. Powerful principles are guiding the way:
Where to begin
Software Intelligence – “S.I.” -- is valuable at every career stage. If you’re starting out, focus first on acing the basics such as learning composition, structure, and transaction flows. With this foundation, explore concepts like technical debt, business agility, and risk management. Finally, enhance your skills by applying S.I. to adoption of new cloud services, scenario mapping, and enterprise transformation.
If all of this sounds new, don’t worry. CAST, and a growing number of companies in the S.I. category, offer a range of technologies, training approaches, and insights for people starting out.
Software Intelligence is an emerging discipline and a vibrant community. Join us to build and lead this community within your own company, fueling your own success by:
Lighting the way
Share intelligence
Intelligence is valuable, and the people who generate it are valued. To become a leader in the S.I. field, it’s essential to engage others in the conversation.
Think horizontally
S.I. insights are valuable to CFOs for understanding the costs of business-as-usual versus modernized alternatives. Human Resources needs to understand the alignment between company priorities, skill inventory, and staff time. Chief Legal Officers must assess open-source IP risks.
Look around your company, and you’ll quickly see that most departments can benefit from what S.I. reveals.
Think vertically
CEOs and boards may not need to know the specifics of an application's architecture, but it’s critical to their own success to understand how quickly the company can innovate, change course, and recover from disruptions. Only S.I. delivers this information empirically.
Making decisions about software via guesswork, and governing critical applications based on subjectivity, are practices quickly becoming out-of-date.
Think for yourself
The difference between information and intelligence lies in the questions you ask. Push boundaries, upend assumptions, and pursue excellence.
The intelligence you find will open new paths to progress for your career, for your company, and for us all.