WHEN I was a kid, computer games were just starting to go mainstream. Games consoles were primitive, and most of the entertainment you got from personal computers was just getting them to do something … anything. The games themselves came in packaging that featured the most dizzyingly exciting scenes: Spitfires blasting Messerschmitts out of the sky, strikers blasting goals past leaping goalies.
It was all a good-natured lie, of course. When you fired up the game, vaguely humanoid blobs lurched around, passing a small white blob between them. That was gaming software then.
How things have changed. Games today have lifelike detail, with smoothly realistic movement and every part of the scene true to life, from fluttering leaves to falling debris. Modern game software can include multi-player support over the internet, with add-ons and sequels appearing in months — and somehow produced at an affordable price in an intensely competitive industry.
Business software, by contrast, gets progressively more expensive, harder to implement, with slower delivery cycles. Why the difference?
This progress in gaming software is because much of the heavy lifting in development is done by “games engines”, reusable pieces of software that handle recurring needs: rendering 2D and 3D objects, physics modelling or collision management. The exceptionally difficult technical task of programming these sub-systems is abstracted and handled by dedicated engines, so that games can be developed faster, more cost effectively, and run across more hardware. Many game developers now have several times as many artists and story- writers as programmers.
So why does business software development not work the same way?
In theory, custom solutions can make use of plenty of software technology that has been created before. In practice, custom software is generally developed from scratch, from the ground up, because someone has convinced the buyer that a new language or methodology or framework will future-proof them and be so much better.
So much of this expense and time is unnecessary. It is time for change.
At ViaData I watched for 15 years as we chased the elusive “reusable” code. We changed base architectures, languages, frameworks and methodologies many times, only to find the same issues had to be solved again and again, and our ability to deliver business value never really improved.
Our mistake back then — and still typical in the software industry — was wanting to create the perfect development environment, with the perfect language and perfect architecture, instead of finding technology that is useful and functional, and then getting on with the job of creating information systems that solve problems for businesses. This approach is madness. It’s the equivalent of a farmer spending his whole day in the shed building his own engine for the new tractor, instead of getting out in the field and planting crops.
Games developers realised this many years ago. A few specialist companies focus on building great games engines, the rest use these engines and focus on creating great games.
Four years ago we decided to stick our necks out and make a “Business Systems Engine”. An engine where the technical specialists focus on the generic functionality, flashy features and implementation issues — and where the business analysts focus on the business requirements, the data design and the business rules. Since developing our engine, Catalyst, we have looked for comparable products , and found very few. Most of these are more like platforms or frameworks than truly reusable engines.
Our engine is a start, but it should be just one from an industry that provides a variety of efficient, powerful engines for software developers to use in building their systems.
The priority for the business- focused software industry must be to develop core “business systems engines” that do the heavy lifting, so that we can replace the endlessly duplicated rooms full of programmers with rooms full of artists and writers (or “business analysts”, as we call them in our corporate world). These are the people that understand the business, that work with line managers to establish what they need. They are skilled enough to create the basic functionality using the business systems engine, which a small development team can then fine-tune.
The hard truth is that software companies will not make this change on their own. It’s up to the enterprise IT directors to demand a better way of developing from their software suppliers, since most seem unable, or unwilling, to abandon their fiddling with technology while the industry burns cash.
n Byren is MD of ViaData, and has been developing custom business systems for 20 years.
Specialist firms build great games engines, the rest use these engines to create great games