Can we learn anything from the Software Industry?
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How can we get people to collaborate more efficiently? How do you tap into people’s real motivation? How important is intellectual property to ward-off competition? Is a top-down control better than a bottom up... or should there a balance? Is it better to be a generalist, or more of a specialist? No matter the industry, these types of questions always seem to pop up. The building industry is not alone in grappling with these issues. What I find particularly exciting is exploring what types of technologies and processes other industries are using to solve these same core problems and what we can learn from them. One industry, in particular, that I think shares a lot of similarities with the building industry, is the Software Industry. Although the outlining all the similarities would be a blog post in itself, the following are just a couple.
Buildings, like Software Projects, can be amazingly complex, with many appendages and parts working in concert with each other.
Designing large buildings, like the design/development of large software projects, requires a large and diverse team.
Like software, the medium by which we design our buildings, is becoming increasingly digital.
Although the parallel is not exact, buildings, like software projects, are becoming more and more modular in nature.
When listening to a ‘software architects’ talk about potential new technologies or new ways of working, I always find it fun trying to envision if it would make sense if a ‘building architect/engineer’ were saying the same thing--approaching their problems in the same manner. Always asking myself, could an architect/engineer of the future, use these same words to describe how business is done? In that vein, I just got done watching a very enlightening video that put me into that re-thinking and re-conceptualizing mindset. In the video above, Second Life founder, Phillip Rosendale, shares the vision behind his new startup, LoveMachine I recommend watching the whole video, but things really start getting interesting around minute 19:00. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, the following are a couple bullet points worth noting. While reading the following points, imagine they’re describing a future in the building industry.
Software development can be super complicated and expensive... lots of appendages/parts.
They found top-down delegation of design breaks down at a point.
What are the alternatives? 1. Open source development 2. Service Marketplaces, like elance.com
Why not a balance? Their product/service, ‘Love Machine’, tries to strike that balance...enabling a distributed workforce to develop software through a micro-bidding process.
All work is transparent and open... done in an online sandbox, of sorts.
Transparency drives quality, since people can intervene to correct before too much time is spent.
So far they paid out about $500,000 in development cost, with an average contract size of $160, spread over about 120 developers.
“Lots of little parts of more people” little chunks of people. Being locked into full-time employees/contractors can actually restrict agile development
On one end, Pay someone to build it... on the other, pay someone to verify it’s quality.
He admits the ‘architecture’ of the code is slopper, but advantages outweigh disadvantages. Will it scale any worse than a more top-down approach?
Rewriting code to improve quality, is equally amenable to the same micro-bidding approach.
He mentions, however, that it’s important to have the right people, with the right architectural sensibility, writing these small contracts.
People can call their own payment. That is, do the job, then post their own fee. If continually too high, their bids will get accepted less in the future.
micro-bidding marketplace teases out good ideas. Often, proposed features don’t get picked-up. He mentions In a conventional organization, “that sucker would get built and it would suck”, “Designers need humbling”
Admits that not all types of work are amenable to this micro-bidding approach. ex: vision, marketing, community/customer development.
Mentions that this market-based system is actually really good at pinpointing the good leaders. “Leadership should be scrutinized under the same method as these peer review and payment mechanisms.”
Intellectual Property: He doesn’t care about protecting his code. The pace and agility of being open far outpaces the perceived disadvantages of exposing code or strategy.
So, did this video invoke any ideas? Any take home lessons for our industry? Would love to hear your thoughts.