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Vol. 4 No. 2 
November 2000
Back to Basics on Global Software Competitiveness
Critical Questions
Global Software Competitiveness Studies
Sponsored by the
Center for National Software
Studies (CNSS)
http://www.CNsoftware.org
Conducted by Don O’Neill
ONeillDon@aol.com
(301) 990-0377
@Copyright Don O’Neill, 2000, used by the NSC
with permission
Global Software Competitiveness
What is it?
The CNSS views Global Software Competitiveness as a critical ingredient to the nation's prosperity centered around controlling scarce personnel resources, valued customers, ruthless competitors, and chaotic event threats. The Global Software Competitiveness Studies provide a collection of fundamental measurements and behaviors that integrate technology and business.
With the emergence of Global Software Development as a business model to produce software products rapidly enough to dominate their niches in a globally competitive workplace, there is a need to obtain the deepest possible understanding of global software competitiveness and the leading indicators that permit systematic reasoning about it.
Global competitiveness in software is accomplished by setting the enterprise direction, providing the fuel, and controlling the businesses environment. Over seventy leading indicators selected to support the strategic management of enterprise global software competitiveness form the basis for the Global Software Competitiveness Program.
How is it achieved?
An enterprise wishing to advance its global software competitiveness needs a framework to organize these leading indicators and a mechanism to assess its readiness to compete. The Global Software Competitiveness Program is evolving and prototyping such a framework. While the framework rewards those who effectively compete with others, it reserves extreme rewards for those dominate their niche. Mere competition is distinguished from competitiveness.
Global Software Competitiveness is achieved when:
- The enterprise has identified the Software Value Points that are strategically essential to its competitiveness.
- The enterprise is not characterized by the absence of expectation, achievement, and engagement in the conversation on global software competitiveness. Instead the enterprise is actively engaged in pursuing:
- The availability of personnel skills and resources and their deployment.
- Value to the customer derived through vigorous competition for current market niche with mature products that deliver value and earn customer satisfaction.
- Competing for the future by setting the industry standard and practicing reuse and domain architecture technology to meet it.
- Managing change and controlling event threats through strategic software management that raises the ability to improve software to a core competence.
- The availability of personnel skills and resources and their deployment.
How do you know you have achieved it?
The successful enterprise realizes some important things about competition:
- Software personnel are the most precious resource a globally competitive enterprise can possess. It is not simply a human resources task of correcting turnover through recruitment; instead software and its people impact the culture of the enterprise... profoundly.
- Supplier control is achieved by establishing an attractive workplace culture, achieving maturity in process and skills, deepening industry relationships, and retaining personnel.
- Supplier control is achieved by establishing an attractive workplace culture, achieving maturity in process and skills, deepening industry relationships, and retaining personnel.
- Controlling the customer has many faces. It is not simply satisfying and delighting; instead it is delivering value and achieving total customer satisfaction through an increasingly intimate relationship.
- Customer control is achieved by deepening customer relationships, balancing business factors, and achieving total customer satisfaction.
- Customer control is achieved by deepening customer relationships, balancing business factors, and achieving total customer satisfaction.
- Controlling the competition is the preferred tactic. It is not simply competing head on head with falling margins; instead it is inventing a new niche, occupying it alone, and avoiding head on head competition... perhaps even cooperating.
- Competitor control is achieved by deepening community relationships, fielding superior products, and setting the direction for the niche.
- Competitor control is achieved by deepening community relationships, fielding superior products, and setting the direction for the niche.
- Controlling event threats and change introduces uncertainty... where luck plays a role in the process of experimentation, and chaos is the ethos of competitiveness.
- Event threat control is achieved by guarding against government intrusion, applying strategic software management, performing due diligence, and understanding reality.