Software engineering and the internet

To successfully compete in the drive towards e-business, businesses are faced with challenges that strain their resources across all fronts. In their bid to win new market share, businesses must balance the necessity of new innovative products, released on ever shortening cycles, with the maintenance of their core business" a core that provides the capital leverage needed to fuel this new growth. Businesses must succeed in these changes with a skills base that is, relative to the market requirements, diminishing. Achieving equilibrium between demands that historically have been treated as dichotomous will require nothing less than a change in the very culture of the software engineering community. This change is evident, but how will we, as a the software community, be successful in effecting this change? Successful modification of this culture begins with an understanding, at all levels, of the change in the skills pool and the exponential rise in the need for reliable, scalable systems that can accommodate millions of customers on ever more complex internet based e-business applications. While an increasing number of businesses deploy mission critical applications and begin to build e-market places on the internet, we need to be able to adapt our software engineering philosophy to create software in a more flexible enviromnent that focuses on delivering capability in a more time-critical fashion than we have been challenged to do in the past. The paradigm of designing to perfection must be scaled back to a model that facilitates progressive discovery for the growing population of programmers who are relatively new to the business. Only when we can deliver flexible software to support the deployment of these new e-business applications will we succeed in supporting the drive to e-business.