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Walker Royce on RSDC 2006 Walker Royce is the Vice President of IBM's Worldwide Rational Lab Services. Walker joined Rational in 1994 and served as Vice President of Professional Services from 1997 through IBM's acquisition of Rational in 2003. He has managed large software engineering projects, consulted with a broad spectrum of IBM's worldwide customer base, and developed a software management approach that exploits an iterative life cycle, industry best practices, and architecture-first priorities. He is the author of Software Project Management, A Unified Framework (Addison Wesley Longman, 1998) and a principal contributor to the management philosophy inherent in Rational's Unified Process. Before joining Rational, Walker spent 16 years in software project development, software technology development, and software management roles at TRW Electronics & Defense. He was a recipient of TRW's Chairman's Award for Innovation for his contributions in distributed architecture middleware and iterative software processes in 1990 and was named a TRW Technical Fellow in 1992. He received his BA in physics from the University of California, and his MS in computer information and control engineering from the University of Michigan.
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Highlight of the year
For me, and I suspect, our field reps, a week at RSDC is the highlight of the year. Where else can you listen to, meet, learn from and network with 1000s of customers sharing their achievements and insights into software development?
Danny and others have talked about communities of interest, and we the RSDC attendees are certainly one of those communities. In my organization, attending this conference is earned by contributing to it in some positive way, either by leading a workshop, co-authoring a paper with a customer, or participating on the conference committee. I am sure the privilege of attending RSDC is also earned by our customer attendees as well.
We are seeing many new technical leaders rise up and contribute. The diversity in breadth and depth of topics is always impressive but seeing a new crop of emerging technical leaders in next generation best practice is quite satisfying. When our customers have asked me for a specific reference on some technology, I always lead with: "the best referential experience you can get is attending RSDC." The first 2 days this week have again proven to me just how true that is.
I hope this week is as motivating to others as it is for me.
Jun 06 2006, 10:25:55 PM EDT
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governance
As i listened to danny's keynote and talked with several of our progressive customers today, I was struck by the tension around the word "governance." This tension revolves around executives and project managers viewing governance as a positive thing to achieve more predictable, reliable outcomes, whereas practitioners viewing governance as a set of shackles and business controls that stifle their productivity.
History, and the world today, is full of lousy governance approaches. Precious few have prospered. So developers and architect's should, and will, have innate skepticism when industry titans throw their weight around on the topic of governance. Companies in the software business are also full of lousy governance approaches.
In the United States, our governance model succeeded because it was derived from a primary perspective of promoting freedom of its people. This is true in many other countries of the world. In my view, freedom and empowerment of architects and practitioners needs to be the primary goal of governance as well, or it will fail. Governance works in the US (and elsewhere) because the people generally have a stake in the outcome—i.e., they own property and businesses where they live and where they want their families to live.
Societal governance has many levels where certain things can be macro-managed (like defense and social security) and many things can be micro-managed (like neighborhood watch) and several levels in between (like education, policing, infrastructure, taxes). Governance in the software business world will need to be similar. We need macro-management (portfolio management, business strategies, skills investments), micro-management (open source communities, technical communities, configuration management, process rightsizing, artifact construction) and other middle level governance approaches (project management, scope management, resourcing, asset management, building codes, education, etc.)
Good ideas from architects cannot come to fruition unless there is a good governance model that provides a context for entrepreneurialism, quality achievement and efficient execution. And good governance cannot overcome practitioner resistance unless it delivers value and makes them more productive. Our platform has to provide automation, traceability, instrumentation, change propagation, and error avoidance support so that practitioners see it as the key to spending more time in engineering and less time in bookkeeping, bureaucracy and scrap/rework.
So I see the challenge to us all is to sell and deliver governance with the positive connotation of freedom, not the negative connotation of bureaucracy. Our governments have the same challenge.
Jun 05 2006, 06:11:42 PM EDT
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