(…or, are smartphones also people too?)

One of my favorite words is retronym. A retronym is a new name for an existing (old) thing that becomes necessary because of progress. (what!?) Examples help – the term “acoustic guitar” was only necessary when electric guitars hit the scene. The term black and white TV was not born with the invention of TV – it was born with the invention of color TV.

But we don’t have color phones, we have SMARTphones!

And here is the twist – a smartphone is more than a new class of phone, its also an anthropomorphism (ascribing human attributes to a thing that is not human). Phones can’t really be smart – people are smart (at least in theory).

As I’ve already written in some of my more verbose entries below, smartphones are important because they combine the best of computing, communication, content, and social forces – to become something entirely new.

And as one more piece of supporting evidence that the smartphone hype is real – not only do smartphones promise to disrupt markets, business operations, and social norms … they have given us our very first anthropomorphic retronym – the dumbphone.

I didn’t make this up – see Dumbphone. Its the first of its kind - and i think that’s worth noting.

Can you hear me now?

I will be writing an ongoing series in this blog entitled “On helping software succeed,” in which I will examine pertinent and timely topics relating to the success of software. After all, software is unique, unlike other businesses. It is much more malleable than most physical businesses – there are only so many things you can do with machinery, real estate or other hard assets. But software, like putty, can become whatever it is designed to do. And to complicate matters, most software is dependent on other software:

There are tools for creating, compiling, testing, debugging, and managing software applications.

There are operating systems, external applications and functions required my many software applications to run.

In short, software is a world of multiple unexpected and unanticipated moving parts unto its own. At PreEmptive (link), we produce software for both Java and .NET that helps organizations protect, manage and monitor their software applications. Our unique honor, as the only 3^rd party application shipping inside of Microsoft’s Visual Studio development environment, gives us a unique perspective: a true insider’s view into the software development process.

As just one example, we surveyed (link) 300 software application developers at Fortune 1000 and other leading companies and found that just 42% of companies calculate return-on-investment of the applications they develop. In addition, just 7% of respondents say they measure the return against a well-defined set of metrics and success criteria.

Software is unlike other businesses, but it does not mean, that with a little effort, its business impact can’t be measured. For example, before companies commit to spending billions on machinery, real estate or other hard assets, they calculate the expected return on investment. Few companies do this with software. It adds up to a huge expenditure that is rarely measured as a genuine asset or balance sheet line item. As the economy tightens, companies will want to know how to measure the business impact and the return on their investments in applications.

Here are some starting suggestions for creating an effective system for measuring application ROI:

• Invest in developing meaningful and consistent usage and impact metrics.
• Tie these metrics to development, support and maintenance investment strategies. Usage and impact metrics must translate into smarter application portfolio management decision-making and development resource utilization.
• Incorporate application ROI management into broader business performance management practices. Success can only be assured when application asset management is fully integrated into operational and business performance management.

Your thoughts? Comments?