Reinventing Organizational Architecture
Lone Star Software Symposium: Dallas
Dallas · May 19 - 21, 2017
About this Presentation
Since the dawn of software development, we've struggled with a huge disconnect between the management world and the engineering world – the clash of top-down control, money, and economics, versus art, freedom, working with our friends, and bringing awesome creations to life.
Overcoming these challenges in our industry requires a huge paradigm shift – rather than building organizations as money-making machines with top-down control, our organizations need to become thinking, feeling, interconnected social organisms, where our humanity isn't boiled down to a few numbers.
How do we shift the paradigm of the organization, to bridge these two worlds together? The short answer – with the help of software.
By measuring the friction in a developer's Flow, we have a data-driven feedback loop for personal improvement. What if we measure Flow across the team? Across team dependencies? Across the organization?
What would it take to build an organizational operating system, that uses our past experience and lessons learned as the foundation for an intelligent hive mind, that helps everyone in the organization make better decisions? What if we codified our organizational ideals into the business accounting rules of the software, then sold it as the “the next big thing” in the industry?
At the end of the day, business is a game. If we take responsibility for making up the rules, we can redefine the game we wish to play. In this session, we'll discuss a potential future for our industry, where we design the organizational operating system that runs the world.
Developer Experience Researcher, University of Victoria
Arty Starr has been a software engineer for 20+ years and is a researcher and pioneer of new theories of the developer's cognitive experience that help us recognize how developers' experiences are changing with AI. Her theories of developer momentum and troubleshooting help us see software development through an ecological lens, recognizing it as a living activity in motion and the living capacities of care and cognition that support this motion. Her aim is to bring heart, human-centric values, and agency to the craft of software development so we can build toward the type of world we want to live in. With richer perception and by recognizing what matters, we can light a path to a future of thriving habitats where humans and AI can collaborate well and thrive together.
Arty is the author of Idea Flow, a speaker, thought leader, and artist who loves mixing ideas across disciplines into a fusion of creativity to help make the world a better place through her projects.