Working for more than my share of companies large and small, one commonality I find is that as companies grow their headcount the process must adapt. That seems to be obvious and almost doesn’t need to be said. However, the value in that statement goes beyond the immediate statement and into the implication that follows.

The fact of the matter, is that as a company grows the headcount the process will always adapt and change, but weather or not it adapts properly is a different thing entirely. Increasing head counts provide a business the opportunity to solve operational problems by assigning people to the new tasks as they pop up. This tends to hide operational inefficiencies and make people busy in the time consuming tasks that could be solved in a more scalable way.

I have seen common symptoms of operational process that could be better solved by software. If you see any of these symptoms at your job, this could mean one of two things. First, that there is an innovative software product waiting to be developed. Or, there is software that is already out there that can help make the process more efficient

These are the three biggest symptoms I look for when trying to fix a process:

1. Excel Files

Microsoft Excel is a pretty great program for a lot of reasons, but because of it’s variety of uses, I find that it tends to be used to band-aid operational issues.

• If you find that people are using Excel to copy and paste data often, there is probably something that needs to be fixed. Data should not need to be extracted and input into systems via copy / paste. This is slow, cumbersome, not scalable and most importantly has a high chance of user error. Data integrity is something that is important to software and every time people have to manually manipulate the data, the integrity is compromised. Systems should talk to systems, to solve this the magic word might be web services or possibly new software to accommodate the process.
• Excel files are being passed around and modified is another big one. Where there are excel files, or really any files, that are being passed around and modified by many different people there is something to be investigated. Again with the data integrity point, data is very important but it is useless if it is wrong. There might be an online sub version collaborative document solution (tongue twister alert) that is open-source and free or an enterprises solution if your company likes to splurge. Like always, after further investigation, you might find that there is room for new software creation that can accommodate the process.

2. Task Assignments

• If people are being assigned tasks and it is being handled by mouth or email, there might be something wrong here. Some things online are a solved problem, it is something that has been looked at and solved for way before your company found out there was even a problem. There are numerous free and enterprise that can handle management of tasks.
• If tasks are being assigned, passed around, need approval or need tracking; you might need some sort of workflow solution. This is slightly the same scenario as above, only it involves a workflow. There are also free and enterprise solutions that can help handle this, in addition to open-source (free) solutions that can help you create a workflow that suits you needs exactly. One really important reason for using a workflow solution, other than task management and notifications, is dispute resolution this is a big deal. When something goes down, you need to have records of how things went down and tracking to back it up. If you have records showing what went where and who did what, this can help resolve disputes where it’s one persons word against another.

3. Multi-System Madness

• Management of multiple systems is something that is pretty easy to identify. Here is a list of why it is inefficient: Logging in / logging out, transferring data around (maybe using excel files), having to manage login information and url’s. All of that madness wastes time and compromises data while at the same time compromises sanity. There are multiple ways to fix this and a great way might be to create an interface to manage this. Creating a unified interface that can operate via web services might be a great way to provide a solution to other companies with similar problems.

There are, I am sure, many more that could go on this list. However, when coming into a company that is looking to technology to increase productivity and process these are the biggest offenders.

There are may different types of products in the world from textile to chemical to mechanical and beyond. Our physical world hosts a verity of materials and mediums for us to product products. We, as enterprising beings, can use these materials and mediums to patch together a product that has value to someone else. This product can then in turn be sold for money and the more people willing to pay for your product, the more financially successful one can become.

However, with physical goods there are a number of factors that inhibit them. They can be limited in resources, in production, in storage, in transportation, in distribution, just to name a few. These limits eventually affect the price of the product which eventually changes the ability for the product to penetrate further into a society.

What I like about software products is their ability to bypass many, if not almost all, of the same limitations on physical products.

1. Build ability – Time to market / Cost

Software products are great in this aspect for two reasons. First, a software product can be up and running as quickly as you want it to. Fully functioning prototypes can be built in a matter of days to months. If it takes longer than 3 months for a functional prototype, then you are either solving a really large problem or something is wrong.  Second, software is relatively inexpensive to build. If you can’t locate someone who can build you a prototype given the amount of freelance and outsourcing solutions, then you are not looking hard enough. A quick search on google can turn up people to build whatever your heart desires. A couple months down the road and a couple dollars (if you didn’t it just do it yourself) down the road; you should have a prototype out there for people to play with.

2. Skillets and personalities

I really love how easily it is to find passionate people out there to help create software products. There are passionate designers, engineer/developers, passionate technologists and marketers. A high amount of passion means that these people make it their life work to stay up on the industry and these people also tend to be highly entrepreneurial. Its fantastic to see an industry of people so enthusiastic that they all have side projects and their day job doesn’t stop at 5:00. Passionate and high energy people create a unique feeling of excitement that not many companies or projects can achieve.

3. Distribution

Electronic devices are becoming more ubiquitous by the day. From mobile phones to internet enabled tv’s to computers everywhere, our world is becoming more and more connected. Even in the developing worlds mobile devices are outnumbering computers because of their price and connectivity. A software product has the ability to be distributed to almost everyone, provided the software is useful to them. Software does not have to worry about shipping logistics or storage costs, although there are still companies who do, it is not necessary.

4. Changeability

When something in the software product is not working correctly it can be changed. In the world of bytes, anything is possible given time and resources; but it is still possible. Bugs can be changed, menu’s can be changed, taxonomies can be re-developed; and once the changes are made software can be upgraded remotely. Software does not need to research and develop a new prototype, the prototype doesn’t need to go into a factory, software doesn’t need to be recalled in the same manner as physical products.

5. Behavior tracking

I love data. Software can create more data than any one person can consume. In the world of atoms, a product would have to undergo a myriad of different testing scenarios to see how people would use the product. People are paid to come into a room with a glass mirror, paid to talk to a researcher, or asked to participate in a survey; there are many different ways that companies use to determine how people use their products. In the world of bytes, we have the ability to track how each customer is using our product. We can see how many people use a given feature, how many people clicked links, the paths that people are using to get through the system and much much more. Every customer can potentially be a participant in giving feedback about software with out having to be imposed on.

6. Flexibility

Software is flexible. There is a saying in software, “users are going to figure out how to use your products in ways you cannot hope to predict”. Lets take for example a vacuum. The user must plug it in, turn it on, hold it by the handle, run it over the carpet, turn it off and when they have clean carpet; they will empty out what they have picked up. This is the overwhelmingly correct way to use this product and 99.999% of people use vacuums as they were designed to be used; software however is much more flexible. A group of people can sit in a room and debate the logical path to their hearts contents. In reality though, there are going to be many different ways that people can use to navigate the system. At the end of the day, software should be flexible enough to allow people to use the software in the manner that they need to. There is no way around the fact that people will use it in their own way.

7. Innovative Posture

Software is set up to be innovative. With a quickly changing business landscape, no business can sit still. This causes business to be motivated to not get too comfortable and invest in the new and emerging. Software also has the unique ability to utilize an evolutionary philosophy, “survival of the fittest”.  With features that are quick and inexpensive to implement, product evolution is an easy game. As software becomes more prolific, the feature set that best meet the needs of the user reside, while the ones that don’t subside. Owners of a software product can deduce multiple different ways for the user to accomplish their task. After implementing all of them, one will likely be predominant. Paths that work best reside, while paths that are not as efficient subside. This allows for continual evolution of feature set through a robust iteration cycle.

8. Open Source

This has got to be the strongest point as to why software is the perfect product. My second point about skillets and personalities speaks a bit to the mindset of a highly passionate industry. Software professionals are so motivated and passionate that it has created an open market for free software. This is software that has been developed by companies and people that is free to use. The notion of the open source movement is based upon contribution. I am free to use open source tools (like drupal or wordpress) and change or modify them to my desire. I can build websites for people using Drupal and make money off of using the platform. The hope is that if I were to develop something custom for Drupal, that I in tern share it with the community. Thousands of contributions, in time and addons, have helped to foster this great free flow of knowledge. I have used Drupal for multiple sites and have contributed modules as my way of thanking the community for creating something I could not have created by myself. Open source lowers the bar for people to jump into creating software by utilizing already pre-built building blocks. I can now put together thousands of different applications with out having to code anything, for free, and make money off of it. When I do I am absolutely inspired to give back to the open source community by way of software contributions.

I am sure there is more that can be added to this list, but I feel that these are absolutely crucial pieces and these make up some of the reasons I feel that software is the perfect product.

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It turns the visual world around you into actionable information.

Built With  www.builtwith.com

This is a great web app for showing what technologies are going into sites. When I run across a site that I think has a nice feature or are wondering what type of technology is under the hood, I run it through Built With. I like seeing what CMS or Ecommerce technology a site is using.

Aside from helping to see what technologies are powering a site, they have a lot of statistical data around site technologies. Do you want to know what the most used blog software is? Or the javascript library running on sites? This allows you to see that. Now, just something to keep in mind, I am pretty sure that they only have data from sites that have actually been run through Built With. So the numbers in their statistics don’t represent the entire inter web. I hope to see the usage of this site increase to be a better representation in the future though