Category: agile waterfall

The Cooper Syndrome

March 24, 2008 by cspag

Yesterday's keynote speaker at the ESRI Developers Summit was Alan Cooper. Cooper is the author of The Inmates are Running the Asylum and About Face. His talk was entitled Post Industrial Management. Mainly, he discussed how to get non-technical people to have success and achieve their goals with software products. He did make some very interesting and valid points regarding the management and executive view of software development. In particular, he emphasized that organizational structure and technologies that worked in the past are failing today in the post-industrial bit-centric world. I completely agree on this point. Most of what passes for management today is based on industrial management, but the industrial age is over. We need a new wave of executives to find the right organizational cultures and management tactics to support the new post-industrial knowledge workers.