Today I listened to an inspiring and very interesting talk by Adam Bosworth given in Salesforce.com’s annual event – Dreamforce. It is titled Intelligent Reaction. Summary of the talk is that companies should react to customer needs and use the customer data to evolve rather than going with a grand plan. It is in line with couple of things I am following nowadays – Agile development and Using customer/transaction data to make better decisions (I wonder whether there is a term for it).

I caught a lot of phrases maybe clichés but good to keep focus, so spewing it out here – talk to people, listen carefully, Iterate, evolve, intelligent reaction vs intelligent design, start small, lots of releases instead of one grand plan, change with times, follow your customer in real-time, learn and change, nothing is perfect.

This is the changing way of software development, but I wonder how many organizations adapt to this. I think it is probably easy to track the usage, listen to customer and change rapidly to the better ways in an application which is lightweight, but what about applications like CRM or ERP which dealing with business, revenue, people and life in much more real way. Will the sales reps working on deals which directly affect their compensation (who may not understand the working of software) be open to start with an application which is barely good but adaptable to change thereby constantly changing the process? It is a different case when your applications audience is internet savvy and understands software in a hands-on way when it comes to adaptability. But as he said, instead of a grand plan, it is exciting to try it out and learn from mistakes, change, improve and evolve.