Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

by Jeff Lawson

A university in Japan had a manual billing system that it wanted to automate. In the manual system, a worker sat at a desk with a pile of invoices on the left side of the desk and a pile of bank statements on the right. The worker matched invoices with statements, stamping invoices that had been paid. Naturally, they wanted to do this with software. So a business owner at the university passed the request to a buyer at the university who dealt with firm’s sales reps, who passed the spec to a project manager, who passed it to another product manager—and finally to the engineers. The solution requested: Design a computer program that has a virtual stack of invoices on the left side of the screen, and a virtual stack of bank statements on the right. The operator will click on an item in the left pile, then the corresponding item in the right pile, and then click enter. Over and over again. Literally mimicking the manual paper process, but on a computer screen. “Our sales guys were like, ‘Yup, we can build that.’ Then it gets to the developers and we’re like, ‘This is, well, not to put too fine a point on it—crazy.’” Clearly, a computer could just match up bank statements and invoices automatically, in milliseconds, without needing a human operator at all.