Enterprise Cloud Design and Development

Enterprise software is expected to serve a plethora of customer needs from different industries in an integrated and seamless way. Traditionally, the market leaders provided integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions as a suite of business applications that are being operated by their customers or hosted by third party providers. Today, customers and end users expect cloud-based provisioning leaving the operations and related costs with the vendors of enterprise software. Hence, established vendors have to rethink and improve the way they organize development in terms of skills and organizational design, development processes and methodology as well as tools and technologies needed. This lecture and applied projects introduces what enterprise software vendors need in order to continuously innovate, i.e. create and deliver value to their customers, while organizing software development and provisioning in such a way to capture that value sustainably.

Information Systems Development (ISD) comprises the development of systems that collect, organize, store and communicate information. In a cloud native context this also includes how these systems are being deployed and operated by the provider. In general, ISD requires understanding the people (end users), their jobs to be done in their respective business environment and the technology to support them. Besides software engineering issues, it is also important to understand socio-technical aspects and the task-technology fit.

Design Thinking (DT) is an innovation approach that takes desirability for end users, technical feasibility and viability in terms of business model into account. Therefore, the approach fits well with the ISD. DT is an iterative and human centered problem solving approach that works best with interdisciplinary teams as well as open and creative spaces. 

Lean Development (LD) is based on the lean thinking principles which optimize any process (incl. ISD) for customer value, i.e. what customers are willing to pay for. LD processes try to establish a pull-based system (rather than push), a continuous flow of customer value as well as a zero defect and continuous improvement policy. Agile engineering practices such as the Scrum process framework and Kanban are rooted in LD.