Step one: acquire a paddock.
Call it a “digital transformation practice.” Fill it with bright people, give each a Jira ticket, and ensure none can see more than three weeks beyond the fence.
Step two: appoint sheepdogs.
They do not write software. They move calmly between spreadsheets, stand-ups, procurement meetings and risk committees, keeping the flock facing the same direction: toward another discovery phase.
Step three: never build the thing that threatens the paddock.
A product with its own infrastructure, its own customers, its own payment rails, its own technical direction? Far too dangerous. Better to sell 800 hours of “strategy”, then import a SaaS subscription from California and call the invoice innovation.
Step four: worship the temporary contractor.
Pay a premium for someone who will leave before the consequences of their architecture arrive. Call permanence “key-person risk.” Call competence “hard to resource.” Call ownership “not aligned with the engagement model.”
Step five: make every engineer a consultant and every consultant a PowerPoint artisan.
No builder may hold the whole system in their head. That would be a single point of failure. Better to distribute the failure across fourteen vendors, three cloud accounts, an offshore queue, and a steering committee that meets monthly to ask why delivery is delayed.
Step six: declare victory when the dashboard is green.
Never mind whether the customer can use the product, whether the system survives load, or whether anyone can explain its data lineage. The transformation is complete because the slide has a blue gradient and the project has entered “hypercare.”
Australia has extraordinary engineers. What it often lacks is an institutional appetite for letting them build anything that might outgrow the procurement cycle.
The national software industry does not have a talent shortage. It has a courage shortage. Too many organisations want a safe flock; too few want a sovereign machine.
#AustralianTech #SoftwareEngineering #Startups #Innovation #BuildInPublic #EngineeringLeadership