SDLC Is A Vertical Too U'no!

So I'm going to all these "business" meetings now as part of the new gig (don't know how long I'm allowed to use "new", but I'm going to go with 3 months), and everyone keeps talking about "verticals". They then look at me as if to say, that's business speak for business.

Yeah yeah, I know! But people forget that as a developer, I've been involved in one of the biggest vertical businesses around, software dev. And while they're all looking at each other longingly, talking about how tight their supply chain is, and how their inventory management is PHAT, and just how damn fine their remote sales team looks (not sure if that's technology related??), I'm thinking, talk to the hand, because I've been a cog in a vertical that manages everything from the digital supply chain to code inventory management! So put that in your MBA and smoke it ;)

But seriously, the more I get stuck into the business platform side, the more I realise how important it is to manage a process internally (and by internal I mean within the business unit), then integrate it with other parts of the business to create end to end business processes. And that's not easy, for example, if you look at your typical CRM, ERP and SCM systems, and then look at the SDLC, you'll find there is a lot of great business model support in the platform products, but very little of that very gets exploited to support SDLC.

So back to my context! I'm building a whole bunch of demo's around Visual Studio, .NET 3.0 and Dynamics, and instead of trying to pretend I know something about retail or manufacturing, I'm going to stick to what I know best, that's software supply. See, I ran my own software company for three years, and when I think back on how I actually managed the "software" part from the "business" part, I see so many opportunities where I could have streamlined the process and made my life a whole lot easier.

And so my CRM will track my software customers, and their will be processes within my ERP system for managing new software projects, and my integrations will hook information from TFS into my invoicing and timesheets system, etc.

See, if I can get all that wired up, then the activities of my SDLC team will flow into my business, and everything from the requirement to the delivery will be integrated into the resource planning, financials and reporting systems too.

As our dear Big Kev would say, I'm excited!