Preface

Chances are good that your organization doesn’t make money by selling software in the “traditional sense,” and perhaps it never will. That doesn’t mean that software can’t play a significant role in making money for your organization. Software is at the heart of the wealthiest companies.

Take, for example, the companies represented by the acronym FAANG: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (now held by Alphabet). Few of those companies sell any software at all, or at least they do not count on software sales to generate the greater part of their revenues.

Approximately 98% of Facebook’s money is made by selling ads to companies that want access to the members of its social networking site. The ad space has such high value because Facebook’s platform provides for enormous engagement between members. Certain members care about what is happening with other members and overall trends, and that keeps them engaged with people, situations, and the social platform. Capturing the attention of Facebook members is worth a lot of money to advertisers.

Apple is for the most part a hardware company, selling smartphones, tablets, wearables, and computers. Software brings out the value of smartphones and its other devices.

Amazon uses a multipronged approach to revenue generation, selling goods as an online retailer; selling subscriptions to unlimited e-books, audio, music, and other services; and selling cloud computing infrastructure as a service.

Netflix earns its revenues by selling multilevel subscriptions to movie and other video streaming services. The company still earns money through DVD subscriptions, but this part of the business has—as expected—fallen off sharply with the rising popularity of on-demand streaming. The video streaming is enhanced for, and controlled by, the experience with user-facing software that runs on TVs and mobile devices. Yet, the real heavy lifting is done by the cloud-based system that serves the videos from Amazon’s AWS. These services provide video encoding in more than 50 different formats, serving up content through content delivery networks (CDN) and dealing with chaotic failures in the face of cloud and network outages.

Google also makes its money through ad sales; these ads are served along with query results from its search engine software. In 2020, Google earned approximately $4 billion from direct software usage, such as via Google Workspace. But the Google Workspace software does not have to be installed on user computers, because it is provided in the cloud using the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. According to recent reports, Google owns nearly 60% of the online office suite market, surpassing even the share claimed by Microsoft.

As you can see from these industry leaders’ experiences, your organization doesn’t need to sell software to earn market-leading revenues. It will, however, need to use software to excel in business both now and over the years to follow.

What is more, to innovate using software, an organization must recognize that a contingent of software architects and engineers—the best—matter. They matter so much that the demand for the best makes them ridiculously difficult to hire. Think of the significance of landing any one of the top 20 picks in the WNBA or NFL draft. Of course, this description does not apply to every software developer. Many or even most are content to “punch a clock,” pay their mortgage, and watch as much of the WNBA and NFL on TV as they possibly can. If those are the prospects you want to recruit, we strongly suggest that you stop reading this book right now. Conversely, if that’s where you’ve been but now you want to make a meaningful change, read on.

For those organizations seeking to excel and accelerate their pace of innovation, it’s important to realize that software development achievers are more than just “valuable.” If a business is to innovate by means of software to the extent of ruling as “the king of its industry,” it must recognize that software architects and engineers of that ilk are “The New Kingmakers” [New-Kingmakers]. To truly succeed with software, all businesses with audacious goals must understand what drives the Kingmakers to transcend common software creation. The kinds of software that they yearn to create are in no way ordinary or obvious. The most valuable software developers want to make the kind of software that makes kings, and that’s the recruiting message your organization must sound to attract (1) the best and (2) those who care enough to become the best.

This book is meant for C-level and other business executives, as well as every role and level involved in leading software development roles. Everyone responsible for delivering software that either directly results in strategic differentiation, or supports it, must understand how to drive innovation with software.

The authors have found that today’s C-level and other executives are a different breed than their predecessors from decades past. Many are tech savvy and might even be considered experts in their business domain. They have a vision for making things better in a specific place, and they attract other executives and deeply technical professionals who grok what the founder or founders are driving to accomplish:

▪ CEOs who are close to the technology vision, such as startup CEOs, and those who want to be informed about the role of software in their future

▪ CIOs who are responsible for facilitating and enabling software development as a differentiator

▪ CTOs who are leading software vision through innovation

▪ Senior vice presidents, vice presidents, directors, project managers, and others who are charged with carrying the vision to realization

▪ Chief architects, who will find this book inspiring and a forceful guide to motivate teams of software architects and senior developers to drive change with a business mindset and purposeful architecture

▪ Software architects and developers of all levels, who are trying to firmly fix a business mentality in themselves—that is, a recognition that software development is not merely a means to a good paycheck, but to prospering beyond the ordinary and obvious through software innovation

This is a vital message that all software professionals must learn from by consuming, ruminating on, and practicing the expert techniques explored in this book.

Strategic Monoliths and Microservices: Driving Innovation Using Purposeful Architecture is not a book on implementation details. We’ll provide that kind of information in our next book, Implementing Strategic Monoliths and Microservices (Vernon & Jaskuła, Addison-Wesley, forthcoming). This volume is very much a book on software as part of business strategy.

This book is definitely of interest to leaders who lack deep knowledge or experience in the software industry. It informs by showing how every software initiative must discover big ideas, architect with purpose, design strategically, and implement to defeat complexity. At the same time, we vigorously warn readers to resist dragging accidental or intentional complexity into the software. The point of driving change is to deliver software that works even better than users/customers expect. Thus, this book is meant to shake up the thinking of those stuck in a rut of the status quo, defending their jobs rather than pushing forward relentlessly as champions of the next generation of ideas, methods, and devices—and perhaps becoming kings of industry as a result.

The authors of this book have worked with many different clients and have seen firsthand the negative side of software development, where holding on to job security and defending turf is the aim rather than making the business thrive by driving prosperity. Many of the wealthiest companies are so large, and are engaged in so many initiatives under many layers of management and reporting structure, that their vision-to-implementation-to-acceptance pathway is far from a demonstration of continuity. With that in mind, we’re attempting to wake the masses up to the fact that the adage “software is eating the world” is true. Our lessons are served up with a dollop of realism, demonstrating that innovation can be achieved by means of progressive practical steps rather than requiring instantaneous gigantic leaps.

There is always risk in attempting innovation. That said, not taking any risk at all will likely be even more risky and damaging in the long run. The following simple graph makes this point very clear.

Image

Figure P.1 There is a risk in taking a risk, but likely even a greater risk in playing it safe.

As Natalie Fratto [Natalie-Fratto-Risk] suggests, it is generally the case that the risk of taking risks diminishes over time, but the risk of playing it safe increases over time. The venture investor side of Natalie can be seen in her TED Talk [Natalie-Fratto-TED], which explains the kinds of founders in whose businesses she invests. As she explains, many investors seek business founders with a high intelligence quotient (IQ), whereas others look for entrepreneurs with a high emotional quotient (EQ). She looks primarily for those with a high adaptability quotient (AQ). In fact, innovation calls for a great amount of adaptability. You’ll find that message repeated in this book in several forms. Everything from experimentation to discovery to architecture, design, and implementation requires adaptability. Risk takers are unlikely to succeed unless they are very adaptable.

As we discuss our primary topic of innovation with software, it’s impossible to entirely avoid the highly controversial topic of iterative and incremental development. Indeed, some form of the “A-word”—yes, agile/Agile—cannot be sidestepped. This book stays far away from promoting a specific and ceremonial way to use Agile or to be a lean business. Sadly, the authors have found that most companies and teams creating software claim to use Agile, yet don’t understand how to be agile. The desire is to emphasize the latter rather than reinforce the former. The original message of agile is quite simple: It’s focused on collaborative delivery. If kept simple, this approach can be highly useful. That said, this is nowhere near our primary message. We attempt only to draw attention to where “un-simple” use causes damage and how being agile helps. For our brief discussion on how we think being agile can help, see the section “Don’t Blame Agile,” in Chapter 1, “Business Goals and Digital Transformation.”

Given our background, it might surprise some readers to learn that we do not view Strategic Monoliths and Microservices as a Domain-Driven Design (DDD) book. To be sure, we introduce and explain the domain-driven approach and why and how it is helpful—but we haven’t limited our range. We also offer ideas above and beyond DDD. This is a “software is eating the world, so be smart and get on board, innovate, and make smart architectural decisions based on real purpose, before you are left behind” book. We are addressing the real needs of the kinds of companies with which we have been engaged for decades, and especially based on our observations over the past 5–10 years.

We have been slightly concerned that our drumbeat might sound too loud. Still, when considering the other drums beating all around technology-driven industries, we think a different kind of drumming is in order. When many others are on high mountains, constantly beating the “next over-hyped products as silver bullets” drum, there must be at least an equalizing attempt at promoting our brains as the best tooling. Our goal is to show that thinking and rethinking is the way to innovate, and that generic product acquisition and throwing more technology at hard problems is not a strategic plan. So, think of us as the people on an adjacent mountain beating the other drum to “be scientists and engineers” by advancing beyond the ordinary and obvious, by being innovative and just plain different. And, yes, we definitely broke a sweat doing that. If our intense drumbeat leaves readers with a lasting impression that our drums made that specific brain-stimulating rhythm, then we think we’ve achieved our goal. That’s especially so if the stimulation leads to greater success for our readers.

References

[Natalie-Fratto-Risk] https://twitter.com/NatalieFratto/status/1413123064896921602

[Natalie-Fratto-TED] https://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_fratto_3_ways_to_measure_your_adaptability_and_how_to_improve_it

[New-Kingmakers] https://www.amazon.com/New-Kingmakers-Developers-Conquered-World-ebook/dp/B0097E4MEU

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