Software development is no longer the exclusive realm of big business Silicon Valley hi-tech startups. It is becoming increasingly vital to all companies small, medium and large across the globe.

Software technology continues to advance at a blistering pace, new products are increasingly dependent on software as part of their overall deliverable solution. Mobile devices that are built on an internal operating system and add on apps that guide the user, all provide an ever increasing canvas of software expansion into ever facet of our lives. Full process automation and fancy algorithms that measure and improve performance, mini devices designed for monitoring health and performance for athletes.

In short, software is everywhere and it’s creeping into every aspect of our lives.  

The Technology Highway

As we advance down the technology highway, software embedded product solutions in the fields of retail, transport, management and insurance exceeds more than forty percent of total revenue in these market segments. In addition, the introduction of software is also drastically reducing the traditional costs, inefficiency and poor user experience associated with these industries to date.

Expanding Your Value Chain

There is almost no industry that has not been effected by the advance and implementation of software into their value chain. Software evangelists promising increased productivity and efficiency in almost every aspect of product life cycles have been pushing hard to convince entire market segments that they must enter the software market. Some ventures have had a huge customer impact and success, and others of fallen short of expectations.

Technological Evolution, Expansion and Change

Many industries have gone through massive changes and upheavals as a result of the technological advancements over the last twenty years. Specifically, with the introduction of the internet in the nineties. Additional improvements in computing technology and software development in recent years have also had a massive impact, as well as the uptake and inclusion of software solutions as part of product portfolios by different business sectors.

The media industry for example, has been completely turned on its face. Software has caused the end of traditional forms of information transfer such as newspapers, printed books, cinema and the music giants. As a result of cheap computing technology and broad accessibility to powerful software, the media industry has spun out of control into a “free for all” open market realm of the masses. A true free market of thoughts, ideas and expression.

Not only have these industries fundamentally changed and morphed into something completely different, the personnel qualifications and built-in filtration mechanisms once the “jealously held ransom” by a privileged few have been exposed to the entire global population. Anyone can today be a budding editor and create an online newspaper, be a published author and write an eBook and post it online, be a movie director and make a move or be a recording artist and record a song. All this has been made possible because the underlying technology has become cheap and easily accessible and is based on software that simulates old expensive hardware devices and is installed on a cheap home computers with the power of what was considered a super computer just a couple of years ago…

Software Injection Creates New Business Models

By introducing software into your business, it will create new business models and opportunities on a global scale. Because software does not require physical implementation it can be installed and updated constantly giving instant gratification to your customer base and provide fixes and improvements based on customer feedback.

Customers can be charged on a usage or subscription basis. Thus, customers can have tailor made payment plans designed specifically for their specific needs and not as an off the shelf product that provides a standard product that may not be applicable for all customers which in turn reduces the unit cost. 

Building a Software Product for your Business

A quality software product is hard to build. The history of software development is rich with examples of products that took too long to build, cost too much and failed to deliver according to expectations. This is mainly because of the way the software was developed as much as whether there was a market justification for the product in the first place. So, once you have researched the validity of your software product and have an idea of how you want to implement it into your company, it’s time to consider the development technique that best suits your needs. There are many different methods out there. I personally prefer an Agile type of situation.

The Agile development methodology provides all involved parties the ability to assess the advancement of a project throughout the development lifecycle. This is achieved through regular work segments, known as sprints. At the end of each sprint, the development teams must present a product demo increment

The Bottom Line…

No matter what size or type of your company, business continuity can be difficult to achieve without a little help from software development tech experts. By expanding your companies product portfolio by providing a software solution you can drastically increase customer interactivity with your company, as well as open new avenues of revenue, product feedback and improvements.

Every business deals with issues focused around the best methods to update, improve and manage product efficiency, receive and implement customer feedback and create new revenue business models.

If your business model interact with any of the issues that I have raised in this article you should give serious thought to creating a software product option for your companies portfolio. Implementing a software solution requires a lot of patience and can be time and labour consuming when starting from scratch.

Make sure to research your market segment thoroughly and don’t waste time with poorly qualified practitioners that lack knowledge and experience and promise your the world in three quick and easy steps, they’re either lying or they haven’t got a clue.

I’ll write more about the issue of leveraging experienced and knowledgable practitioners with the correct skill sets when planning and building of software solutions in a future article. Until then, keep on rocking……