Our civilization is rather an "open loop" system. We exploit resources (materials, energy, water... and labor) produce something, use it and permanently try to get rid of the waste. We all feel that this is somewhat not right and can’t go on forever. In contrast nature - a system which has been working well in the last couple of billion years before we started tampering with it - is a closed loop system. Every kind of "natural waste" is reused somewhere else so material waste doesn't exist and the use of other resources is also optimized. Also engineers are turning increasingly to resource efficient system and try not only to reduce but wherever possible reuse waste. Could it work in software?
I'm inclined to think that real successful business models in the information technology industry are all closed loop systems; with social networking it’s obvious, but search engines also use the input of Internet users to produce better results, and websites increasingly rely on customer feedback. And the PC revolution gave tools to people and programmers to innovate new things for them and so increase demand for computers.
Let’s assume you are maker of accounting software. You develop the application; sell it to accountants who use it to deliver services to their customers. How to make it closed?
The first we can do is feedback from customers. And the feedback should concentrate on their work because it contains a lot of waste; every movement which is not generating value (loading the application, clicking through menus, waiting, printing, doing administrative tasks ...) is waste. We should use this feedback to move everything out of the way to help our clients focusing on their work. Collecting feedback is easier if we move online which - as a next step - makes personalization easier. The more personalization user do, the more useful information we can gather like reports, macros, processes, links, topics... etc. All of it is useful input for the next release.
And what if we would create an accounting platform? A website where businesses can request and use accounting services and support, accountants serve their clients and find new ones, experts give advice and define algorithms which programmers could realize, content management people deliver news and research information and reports and all this managed in a single environment with interfaces to other systems.
Such a system is actually a social networking environment. Maybe these will be the new platform of development?
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