“Knowledge is the asset of the future, and as companies transition to a knowledge basis, everyone in a company will start to move their knowledge into an executable software form.”
— When Executives Code by Phillip Armour via .NET From India

This interesting article in the latest Communications of the ACM can be found on-line by those who subscribe to the ACM’s digital library. Phillip Armour reviews a class for executives who have found that their manufacturing businesses have turned into software enterprises. Software drives processes which have moved off-shore. Modern innovation is in the business process which are encoded in software. He notes that “software development is primarily a knowledge acquisition activity.”

Many of the conclusions in the article resonated with me. In particular, I agree with the observation of “the two greatest motivators of the software developer: to learn and to create.”

“In businesses where software is the business or the means by which the business is conducted, the job of executives is not to stifle learning and creativity under a blanket of control and process and metrics and status reports. Their job is to create an organization that focuses these powerful forces, and fosters a climate in which they are nurtured and realized.”