Editorials

Company Values Drive Software Implementations

I once wrote an application that allowed a company to reduce its accounting staff from 10 to 1 person. They had a requirement to report to their investors the state of their holdings on a monthly basis. It took 10 people 1 week to produce the necessary reports. The work was tedious and time consuming. My team built an application that was able to automate the gathering of the necessary data and produce the necessary reports according to individual investor requirements in minutes. A single accountant was then able to audit the generated data for accuracy in the same week that used to take ten accountants.

As a software developer, that is a big success. From a business perspective, that is a big win. It reduces your cost of doing business so you can compete with other competitors. But what about the 9 accountants that were no longer necessary? Thankfully, their being released from this tedious duty allowed them to take on other accounting work that was being ignored previously.

I sometimes wonder how much we buy into the philosophy of success being defined as making the most profit. I really enjoy the success of optimizing things. That’s my prime motivator. I have seen that mindset get twisted when driven by greed. When the intention is to provide a great product or service, with the best value, while embracing the humanity of those who help you achieve, that can be a real game changer. When the motivation changes to making a lot of money for yourself or your investors, things begin to morph, and the choices that are made have long lasting consequences.

One application I worked on years ago exemplifies the balance for profit and value. I worked on a medical claims data warehouse we used as a resource to identify risk. We sold health insurance services to companies large enough to provide their own health plans. The problem for any company being self-insured is that they can lose a lot of money by not accurately analyzing the risk they carry. Our massive data warehouse allowed us to compare the risk of their employees needs to that of a large population, allowing them to predict and cover scenarios appropriately. They weren’t paying for coverage that wasn’t probable. They weren’t risking the demise of their company by not having enough coverage. This value added system provided a service for companies to provide health benefits to their employees while managing their costs and mitigating risk.

Because the data from this warehouse was used to predict future expenses, and risk managment decisions were based on the output, it was essential that the software be as accurate as humanly possible. Quality and Performance were driving factors in the application. When profit is your only motivation, it radically changes your approach to implementing software.

Not every job we do provides this kind of reward. Sometimes you just have to put food on the table. I find it to be really motivating to work on a project that helps people do their work more efficiently so that they can do more of those things that only a person can do.

Cheers,

Ben