Why are we afraid of shaking the ground?

Welcome to the first of hopefully many blogs in our new section – the CEO corner!

I love our regular blogs, providing valuable information for your business and always focusing on current topics. I encourage you to browse through the list on our local website or on knowmadmood.com. However, I do have many topics that do not really fit. They might be too far apart from our areas of expertise, or too provocative. But I feel it is necessary to cross red lines, driving change and sending wake-up calls.

Still here? Great, highly appreciated. After almost 3 decades selling software solutions in various positions, technical, sales, and management, it is time to look back on your career. Many things have changed, but others are almost identical, only the buzzwords and topics changed slightly.

As im now getting closer to the end of my professional career, I can look at myself as one of the last years that count to the boomer generation. Looking back to the final days of my school education, we have been here to rock the earth. We wanted to try new things and were not afraid to blaze new trails. Many others sharing my birth year are now in positions to cut decisions and decide how the IT and development landscape within their organization will look in the coming years. They are maybe 5-10 years away from leaving their jobs. I often think “What happened to them, they behave exactly like the decision makers 25 years ago?” (I’m still different, of course 😊).

You get stuck in endless debates whether or not a new technology should be adopted, the tool stack often can be moved directly to a museum, and if you have a one-on-one conversation they truly permit “I don’t want to change and start something new, I retire in a few years…” What the ****?

I’m sure age is not the only reason for this pattern, although the next generation is much more open to topics like SaaS, Cloud, AI etc. If they were in charge today, they’d start the transformation and refresh immediately. They understand there is no time to miss. It feels odd (and I now understand some reactions of decision makers in my first years a lot better) that exactly my generation is the roadblock. We don’t have time to wait!

I fully understand that change causes more challenges as you age. No longer as agile as in the past, it takes you longer before new concepts sink in and you fully understand the chances and benefits coming with it. But this is no excuse to solely manage the status quo.

You might ask “Okay, whimpy – anything else to complain?” Yes! For god’s sake, we are software engineers and here to create systems that make life easier. But we created a procurement system that allows us to implement processes that no one really can follow anymore.

I do have a recent example of an organization that wants to move away from a self-hosted tool to the equivalent SaaS option from the same vendor. The PoC was successfully completed, the ROI and TCO analysis showed that they save money even if the licenses are more expensive. The on-prem solutions are about to be shut down, everything is ready to go. After quoting it turned out that the proposal still needs to pass a committee meeting, followed by 15 approvals in the procurement process. Now one approval is missing, and his title indicates that he has likely no clue and interest in the features of the tool. Is it really providing added value to slow down the transformation by asking highly paid managers to check again what the experts have already evaluated? Wouldn’t it be a great idea to pass down more responsibility to the lower decks again, instead of managing the status quo? This is something that my generation can support, as we are currently in charge and able to decide if we want more of those unnecessary checks (Is there any decision in business that require that many people?) or if we drive our business forward and move it back to agility. It is not easy. But isn’t it a great feeling to make some dreams happen at the end of the career and experience, or drive, change for the better?

Yours sincerely,

Rainer Heinold

P.S: if you are born after the boomer generation – keep this blog in a time capsule and read it again when you get promoted! If, for some reason, my generation does not do what I propose, then it is your turn to make it happen.