By Ir. Roel Westhoff March 2019
Digitization is essential. Today vital. Only with digitization can we meet the increased wishes of customers and citizens, without an explosive growth in costs.
Do you know Einstein's statement 'INSANITY: Doing things over and over again and expecting different results'. As far as I'm concerned, current government functioning and business refers to this statement when I read all the failure stories in the trade journals. Since year and day. People continue to work with the same IT suppliers and expect a different result!
Do people then learn nothing at all from the government and business community? Do the government and business clients not understand that the existing IT suppliers (= the large IT companies such as CapGemini, Accenture, Conclusion and others) are not at all interested in working faster and more efficiently? They have built an existing development line in India in particular, which must be deployed. They have invested in this and it must be recouped.
Productivity is measured in writing lines of code per unit of time per developer. And as long as you keep working with the same development languages, these values will not change. In other words, a hour-factory. You ask we turn. A small change in the desired functionality quickly results in an explosive growth of the budget. You can say goodbye to your planning. A recurring pattern. This has resulted in parliamentary inquiries, layoffs and bankruptcies.
Newer technologies such as 'low-code development environments' are rarely used. Applications are built traditionally. What are the consequences of the new technology for existing IT suppliers? There is a need for drastically fewer developers. Fewer developers means less revenue. You also need a different kind of developer. A higher educated with a more direct relationship with the customer. Less focused on the low-level writing of lines of code, but on a business level dealing with the wishes of the customer. These developers are not in India but in the Netherlands. The interaction with the customer is much more important.
Why do business and government keep coming back to existing IT suppliers? Are people not aware that things can be done differently or do they not want to take the risk? Are people being persuaded that complex systems can only be developed by large organizations? That is not true. In the IT world, it is not the law of the biggest but the smartest that rules......How do we break the power of the big IT suppliers?
Information provision and training. You must ask yourself whether "BIG" is still "BEAUTIFUL". Isn't it true that small companies innovate faster? We can change this.
A different approach is needed and some guts Are you willing to take the risk? .......