From the book
From the book
From the book
The authors have found that today's C-level and other executives are a different breed than their predecessors from decades past. Many are tech savvy and might even be considered experts in their business domain. They have a vision for making things better in a specific place, and they attract other executives and deeply technical professionals who grok what the founder or founders are driving to accomplish:
- CEOs who are close to the technology vision, such as startup CEOs, and those who want to be informed about the role of software in their future
- CIOs who are responsible for facilitating and enabling software development as a differentiator
- CTOs who are leading software vision through innovation
- Senior vice presidents, vice presidents, directors, project managers, and others who are charged with carrying the vision to realization
- Chief architects, who will find this book inspiring and a forceful guide to motivate teams of software architects and senior developers to drive change with a business mindset and purposeful architecture
- Software architects and developers of all levels, who are trying to firmly fix a business mentality in themselves—that is, a recognition that software development is not merely a means to a good paycheck, but to prospering beyond the ordinary and obvious through software innovation
This is a vital message that all software professionals must learn from by consuming, ruminating on, and practicing the expert techniques explored in this book.
Strategic Monoliths and Microservices: Driving Innovation Using Purposeful Architecture is not a book on implementation details. We'll provide that kind of information in our next book, Implementing Strategic Monoliths and Microservices (Vernon & Jaskuła, Addison-Wesley, forthcoming). This volume is very much a book on software as part of business strategy.
This book is definitely of interest to leaders who lack deep knowledge or experience in the software industry. It informs by showing how every software initiative must discover big ideas, architect with purpose, design strategically, and implement to defeat complexity. At the same time, we vigorously warn readers to resist dragging accidental or intentional complexity into the software. The point of driving change is to deliver software that works even better than users/customers expect. Thus, this book is meant to shake up the thinking of those stuck in a rut of the status quo, defending their jobs rather than pushing forward relentlessly as champions of the next generation of ideas, methods, and devices—and perhaps becoming the creators of the future of industry as a result.
The authors of this book have worked with many different clients and have seen firsthand the negative side of software development, where holding on to job security and defending turf is the aim rather than making the business thrive by driving prosperity. Many of the wealthiest companies are so large, and are engaged in so many initiatives under many layers of management and reporting structure, that their vision-to-implementation-to-acceptance pathway is far from a demonstration of continuity. With that in mind, we're attempting to wake the masses up to the fact that the adage "software is eating the world" is true. Our lessons are served up with a dollop of realism, demonstrating that innovation can be achieved by means of progressive practical steps rather than requiring instantaneous gigantic leaps.