Crisis? What Crisis?
"Crisis? What Crisis?" was the title of a Supertramp album from 1975. What a band.
Now the development industry IS in crisis, and this is a fact. But some companies are doing well; this article has some good tips on how to succeed in this situation:
http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/thoughtworks/120020.html
Excerpt:
ThoughtWorks — Chicago, Illinois (www.thoughtworks.com)
During the past two years, the technology slowdown and price erosion caused by the influx of offshore companies have led to a 7 percent shrinkage of the North American development and integration service market. During this two-year period, ThoughtWorks has grown organically by almost 30 percent. Although still admittedly small, ThoughtWorks is clearly doing something right. Gartner estimates ThoughtWorks' 2003 revenue to be just over $50 million.
Several key strategies are part of ThoughtWorks' success. First, rather than trying to be all things to all clients, the company focuses on highly complex mission-critical applications that have volatile or ill-defined requirements well-suited to its core competency in architected rapid application development (ARAD). Martin Fowler, chief scientist at ThoughtWorks, is a leading authority on ARAD for large enterprises. Fowler's evangelism of agile methods combined with pragmatic implementation in large enterprises creates capabilities that are both cool and credible. Second, ThoughtWorks is clearly identified with the open-source movement. ThoughtWorks developed CruiseControl, a framework for continuous build processes, and made this available to the open-source community. Because the community consists of hundreds of enterprises, many companies that were not ThoughtWorks clients were familiarized with the company through CruiseControl. Third, ThoughtWorks runs new employees through a rigorous gantlet of exercises designed to evaluate developer's technology expertise, comfort with ARAD methods, and cultural fit with the intent of producing a developer-centric culture of elite technologists.
ThoughtWorks intends to grow aggressively during the next few years. It's principal challenges will be to preserve its culture as it scales and to find a mechanism for capitalizing on its open-source capabilities, without alienating open-source purists. While other systems integrators have struggled to keep their application development and integration services from becoming commodities, ThoughtWorks has grown and maintained its differentiation through a combination of careful positioning, premium developer skills, thought leadership in Agile methods, open-source tools, Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft .NET.