What a difference a weeks makes, (or in my case and regarding my last blog, the last 8 weeks). As you know, I always like to keep you up to date on political and economic factors that may affect our industry, and the last 2 months has exceeded my expectations as we’ve witnessed a dramatic shift in political thinking.
Not in my lifetime have I seen any government go about there business with such vigour, the Con/Lib government are certainly getting on with the job whatever your political persuasion. The effects of this are still unravelling as the public and businesses struggle to adapt to this shift. My last blog commented on the positivity of this change and I still believe this to be the case, however, there is still a great deal of uncertainty as we come to terms with this new age of austerity. This current uncertainty is being reflected in the recruitment industry; this year is better, of that there is no doubt, but the governments restructuring, cuts and new policies are creating an uneasy feel. We’re all still finding our feet, and businesses are still cautious about releasing funds for big, ambitious projects.
The events of this year leads quite nicely into my blog's title, Is Choice Good? As you know, the software industry is host to many languages, techniques, strategies and methods; not a day goes by without hearing about a new technique or technology; my argument and concern regards the viability of all this choice and whether it is good for our industry?
As a company that’s looking to develop a new application or migrate to a new system, how do you decide what to use? And can you be certain the man power exists? You are bombarded with so many different choices that making a decision can be problematic and often lead to errors. So many times I've witnessed projects being cut or scrapped due to bad choices being made at conception and so many times the language or method employed failed to live up to expectations.
One school of thought is that there are just too many choices and businesses find it difficult to identify a solution that works for them. Many people feel that solutions should be provided by established providers such as Microsoft or Oracle as they posses the knowledge, understanding and skills to provide good software development. It can also be argued that the established players will always offer “life support” long after many smaller software providers have been consigned to history (often leaving projects marooned and struggling to stay afloat) and that the “established industry standard” will always be there to support your software needs.
As always, there are many counter arguments which I will explore in my next blog but as with the election, I find myself asking the same question: Is it better the devil you know or better the devil you don’t?
