This book draws on several years of experience in winning competitive contracts for systems integration and application development projects. Although winning such deals is unquestionably about using innovation to outflank the competition, it's also about getting the money right. The price has to be within the customer's budget, the development cost has to be low enough for the bidder to make a good margin, and the margin has to be justified against the risk. There's nothing new in those ideas; they are true for any competitive procurement. What is different about software development is that we're only just learning to understand value creation. The most common view is that software development incurs risks and costs. Despite this, even the most hardened, risk-averse development house would recognize that software carries implicit value. If that value were not there, no one would pay to have software developed. Unfortunately, all of the creative and business energies of the development organization are normally focused on reducing cost and risk. This is as true in the bid phase as in the implementation phase. The developer applies the latest software methodologies, institutes the latest project management strategies, and constantly evolves risk mitigation techniques, primarily to do just one thing: control cost. The gestation of any idea is an unpredictable process. It's rarely clear exactly what will emerge until it does. Although the idea of incrementally funded software had shown some early signs of success, it needed to be more comprehensively proven. I was privileged to take over the management of Sun Microsystems' New York "Java Center" in late 1999. The Java Center is Sun's global Java Consultancy practice, and provides architecture and design expertise to customers creating solutions in Java and J2EE.
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