www.ceotodaymagazine.com 29 THE CEO INTERVIEW fun, nor efficient. If the software in question is old and not supported then we have to spend a good deal of time trying to figure out how to automate the use of the software so that we can encapsulate it with a modernised software tool. When the organisation in question is particularly large, how does that impact the work of developing software solutions for their needs? The time to start a project is directly proportional to the size of the organisation. That’s really the major hurdle with size when it comes to software. Once the project starts, the organisation’s size doesn’t come into play. Projects are usually done at the group level so we’d only be dealing with no more than 30 people in the organisation. In your experience, what are the typical software stumbling blocks encountered by your large corporate clients? Inertia is the most common problem. A large, established business always resists change, and the people who build the software at such an entity will resist changing it. In those situations, I have to be unassuming and move slowly through the shark tank until I can recruit some of the existing developers in an effort to refactor the software. So long as the existing team can come along with the changes and not be blindsided by them, then the project will succeed. It’s in the cases of “waterfall” when the project change is dumped onto the existing team that the new software encounters problems and business sabotage. How has the nature of these issues changed during the 20+ years that Beyond Ordinary has been in operation? They have not changed at all. The human element in software is very consistent and seemingly resistant to any change. With the advent of more advanced code generators, like ChatGPT, the software factory will change considerably. I like to make an analogy that I am stealing from my WPI computer science professor. In 1947 the transistor was invented, by 1960 the computing curriculum was changing and the last class of vacuum tube engineers was told that their academic knowledge was obsolete thanks to the invention of the transistor. 29 Jacob Anderson
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