SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT:
Software on the fly

Gone are the days when a project team could spend six to eight months designing a single software application. Complex software now must be developed on the fly, and corporate IT managers—at places such as eBay or General Electric—face a daunting task of making that happen.

Current approaches simply are not suited for delivering high-quality software quickly. That’s because enterprise software applications are pretty much built from the ground up, without off-the-shelf components, says Thiagarajan Ravichandran, assistant professor at Rensselaer’s Lally School of Management and Technology.

“When you construct a house, you typically don’t cut down trees. Someone does that for you, and you have standard wood beams to use instead,” Ravichandran says. “It’s similar in using component-based software to create application systems.” For example, a company developing an e-commerce application could use a “shopping-cart” component readily available from component vendors instead of writing a program to create the shopping-cart functions from scratch.

“This component saves time and resources for the company as it avoids reinventing the wheel. More importantly, it speeds up software development,” Ravichandran adds.

CBD has been touted for years; but it’s been resisted, says Ravichandran, who studied 105 companies that ranged from no adoption to full adoption of CBD. In research that will be published in the “best papers proceedings” of the Academy of Management Conference, Ravichandran shows that CBD assimilation is thwarted by knowledge barriers, technology uncertainty, and adoption risks.

Ravichandran says vendors—and the software industry itself—must take steps to reduce both the learning burden and the adoption risks that customer organizations will have to bear in switching to CBD.

CONTACT: Theresa Bourgeois, (518) 276-2840, bourgt@rpi.edu