I am worrying about 'S' which I'll define here as the quantity of commercial software source code under maintenance and 'delta S' how this figure is changing. And by implication what we should be doing to make 'S' and 'delta-S' bigger. I'd rather the government worried about this rather than subsidising super fast YouTube to cottage dwellers.
In particular I am thinking about my home market in Liverpool where I am hoping to continue to carve some kind of career in my day job. If there is not enough 'S' to keep me going for another 25 years I'm going to get bored, poor or a job at McDonalds.
'S' maintenance is only a relatively minor destination for our business information systems students (still the students with the highest exit salary in the business school I am told please send yourself and your children BIS Course), but it is important to me.
Back in the day job we are working on developing LabCom a business to business tracking system for chemical samples and their results. One of the things that appeals to my mind is the fact that it is building a machine that is making things happen. I like to see how many samples are processed on it a year. Sad I know. We are delivering various new modules that will hopefully allow it all to grow. However thus far the project is not really big enough to fund the level of technical development and architecture expertise we would like to deploy, not enough 'S' to on its own maintain and fund high level development capabilities. The alternative for software developers such as my team is to engage in shorter term development consultancy forays, but for these to be of sustained technical interest they have probably got to add up to 100K or more and alas we have not worked out how to regularly corner such jobs.
With few software companies in Liverpool I wonder how this translates into the bigger picture and whether we can measure it.
There is definitely some 'S' in Liverpool, I did some work a couple of years back looking at software architecture with my friends at New Mind who are a national leader in destination management services and have a big crunching bit of software behind it. Angel Solutions are another company with a national footprint, this time in the education sector, backed by source code controlled in Liverpool. I have come across only two or three others over the years although no doubt there are some hiding. For someone trying to make a career out of having the skills to understand and develop big software this lack of available candidates in Liverpool might be a bit of a problem. A bit like getting an advanced mountaineering certificate in Norfolk ( see news Buscuit).
With this in mind I wondered is there more or less 'S' under management in Liverpool than elsewhere. Is this really the Norfolk of mountaineering.
How can we know. There are some publicly available records, we could dig up finances of software companies and similar, although most of these companies (including my own) are principally guns for hire engaging in consultancy and development services.
Liverpool's Software/New Media industry has a number of great companies such as Liverpool Business School Graduate led Mando Group and Trinity Mirror owned Ripple Effect and the only big player Strategic System Solutions. However as I understand it these are service delivery and consultancy companies not software product development companies they make their money through expertese, they contain a relatively low proportion of 'S'. Probably the largest block of software under management will be in the IT departments no doubt they have a bit of 'S'.
So how could we weigh this here in Liverpool or elsewhere. How much software is there. Lots of small companies such as my own have part of their income from owned source code IP 'S'. There are the few larger ones. So we could try to get a list and determine what proportion of income is generated from these outfits based on public records and a little inside knowledge. We could perhaps measure the number of software developers deployed or the traditional measure of SLOC (Source Lines Of Code). I've in the past looked at variants on Mark II Function Point Analysis you can find out a little about this on the United Kingdom Software Metrics Association website . In my commercial world I’m interested in estimating cost hence toying with these methods while we ponder what we can get away with charging and is it more than the our estimated (guessed) cost. In this regional context I’m interested in whether we can measure how much value there is lurking to give a figure for 'S'.
Imagine we did measure that the quantity of commercial code under management in Liverpool was I’ll call it 'Liver-S', I then want to know how this compares to Manchester's 'Manc-S' (I suspect unfavourably) and perhaps more importantly from a career and commercial point of view how it compares to last year. Is 'Liver-S' getting bigger (what is 'delta Liver-S').
The importance of 'S' and 'delta S' is about whether we are maintaining enough work to maintain or indeed develop a capacity to ‘do big software’ in the local economy. Without which to be honest I’m going to get bored.
Any masters/mba students stuck for a bit of an assignment or even better funding bodies wanting to help me answer this question please drop me a line.
If there is not enough 'Liver-S' in the future at least I'll be able to sit at home with my super fast broadband.
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