I’ve been busy these last couple of months working with various clients around the country, from Electric Utility Cooperatives to Commercial Van Lines. It has been extremely rewarding and enlightening to see the far reaching and creative ways organizations have stretched our fleet management software. Reflecting back, I realize how far software in general has come over the last decade. It wasn’t long ago that users of software would need to “work around” the limitations of software. Fields lengths often being too small, or maybe the fields were simply absent. Perhaps the flow or process of the software didn’t fit with the function or the needs, but somehow people found a way to make it work with what they had. Today, expectations are higher. People don’t want to adapt their daily needs to accommodate the software. They want the software to accommodate them.
A new role in the organization
The software really needs to take over many roles that were once managed by people, sometimes a lot of people. With the ever-growing needs of software to accommodate, the expectations that the software will evolve and change to fit those needs is simply expected, as it should be. Software has become larger and more complex. People need to use more of it on a daily basis and because of this, software needs to fit and not be forced.
With the processing power of today’s computers there is no reason software needs to be static. It should be dynamic, fluid, and ever changing. It should adapt and stretch. It should support creative solutions and endless alteration. One thing I have learned from my recent visits with my clients, it is software expectations have changed. And that is a good thing.
