April 29, 2005, 4:03 PM — Bruce Taylor spoke with Tom Welsh, senior consultant with Cutter Consortium on the topic of software configuration management -- a vitally important but not necessarily enjoyable discipline he colorfully likens to cleaning your teeth or getting the car serviced. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to the original interview here.
Hi I'm Bruce Taylor and this is Voices on ITworld. Our guest today is Tom Welsh, a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's enterprise architecture practice. Today we're going to learn some of Tom's expert views on the tools and platforms for software configuration management (SCM) based on the second of a series of three survey parts for a paper submitted to the Cutter library. Welcome Tom, thank you for joining us.
Tom Welsh: Thank you Bruce.
Bruce: Tom, this is the second in a series that you've authored, based on a Cutter survey of nearly 400 IT organizations. That's a pretty good sampling, I would say. And based on that, in part one, you talked about the general attitudes of the survey respondents to configuration management. So if you could, I'd like you to begin with what you've learned from that about how organizations view software configuration management in their overall architecture and what I'm particularly interested in is what surprised you.
Tom: You know, SCM is a vitally important discipline, even the people who are telling you to use it, the advocates will confess that it's a bit dull. It's kind of like cleaning your teeth or getting the car serviced and it's not something you enjoy, but you know the consequences of not doing it may be frightful someday. So one fact I'd seize on isn't actually in the survey at all. It can be inferred from it -- is that SCM is gaining mindshare pretty well everywhere you look -- whether it's geographically or in the world or in different marketplaces, different vertical industries. And this is big news. For years SCM was a Cinderella activity down in the basement with things like testing and support. People didn't want to do it. Now in testing, Mercury Interactive has made a big breakthrough and brought it right up to the CXO level and in the process, of course, they're able to sell bigger bundles of software and services at very good prices. In the SCM world, IBM was already in that area where they could sell high, but it's greatly enhanced its position by acquiring Rational, of course, and with it the premiere SCM and defect management tools which are ClearCase and ClearQuest. Another huge change in the SCM market was Serena's acquisition of Merant last year, the fourth biggest SCM vendor bought the second biggest. And now it poses a real threat to IBM because whereas IBM isn't even primarily a software company, Serena is a SCM company, that's all they do, and they do it very well. IBM and Serena have the clout to sell direct to the CIO.
Remember that TV commercial where all the managers are sitting around a table discussing some big failure and after a bit of babble, the CIO calls for silence and asks, okay, who is responsible for all this? And then there's a silence and one of the braver guys says, "That would be you." That's the message that companies like IBM and Serena are driving home. Software really, really matters to an enterprise's success. And if the software goes wrong, the CIO is the first person at risk. So they go in and tell the CIO, "Have we got SCM for you." It's really good because for all these years, people didn't understand how vital it is to get this right. It's basic hygiene for developers.
Bruce: So from your perspective, what are some of SCM's best and worst attributes in the minds of the people who are using the tools?
Tom: Well, the surprise here is that there isn't much of a surprise. The top benefits that they identified out of a list of a dozen or so are ones that nobody would quibble with. Mostly they're simple obvious things. At the top of the list comes better control of changes, which of course is what software configuration management is all about. But it does indicate awareness of the essential as opposed to the peripheral. Better quality software is the second most commonly cited and risk management is third. Note in particular that these are all things that the CIO or even the CEO can relate to and understand and perhaps feel the need for.
Bruce: They're almost strategic in nature.
