5.2. Rethinking Enterprise Software Delivery

Over the past few decades, important advances in enterprise software development have enhanced the productivity, quality, and effectiveness of enterprise software delivery organizations. But the current challenges in enterprise software delivery have forced organizations to rethink aspects of how they perform their task. They’ve recently focused attention on three fundamental observations:

• The value a business derives from an enterprise system is frequently not clearly understood in relation to the investment in the development and maintenance of that system.

• Enterprise systems undergo constant change, both during their design and construction (as the true needs and necessities of the system become better understood) and after delivery (when end users start to exercise the system). The ability of these systems to evolve is a core quality that is poorly addressed in principle and expensive to support in practice.