Dear friends…

Logo Software has grown exponentially in the last 7 years; in addition to the success it has achieved in this growth process, in management, in institutionalization, financing, marketing and sales; of course, with the design and technological innovations and quality improvements it has made in its products as a software products company.

Good product management, good user experience design, strong technology, solid software process engineering is needed to develop successful products. We will share with you how we develop what we aim to achieve, how we achieve, how we are structured, and adapt to ever-changing technology while making this breakthrough.

The design and technology world also includes a number of decision-making processes. Some decisions produce good results; some of them do not bring the desired results, they are wrongly  maligned. In this blog where we share our experience opinions and ideas, we will be open and transparent unless it contains important trade secrets. I hope that our articles will be helpful in guiding, educating, contributing to our sectoral knowledge, and understanding how Logo works.

“Internet and mobile technologies are constantly changing lives. Very smart, careful and intensive work is needed to manage all of this in the way that customers want.”

Logo Software today has reached 35 years, a company that develops corporate business applications. This is a very important success in a country where companies have a very short life span and here technology is constantly changing. We have a very common client base. 80-90 thousand companies in the number, continues to use our products live.

We have different product families focused on different customer segments. These products are used in very important tasks in companies that do not tolerate interruptions and mistakes. Technology is constantly changing, legislation is constantly changing. Internet and mobile technologies are constantly changing lives. Very smart, careful and intensive work is needed to manage all of this in the way that customers want.

Enterprise business applications are very comprehensive and contain thousands of features. These characteristics need to be generalized so that they can be adapted to different business lines. For this reason, corporate business practices involve many setup and operating parameters. It takes 7-8 years for such a product to satisfy a wide range of customers, to have a rich content, to be flexible and adaptable, to be free from bugs and reliably completed.

In this sector where technology is constantly changing, this period is quite long. That is to say, no matter how advanced the technology is, the more technologically advanced it becomes.

“The day the enterprise software products are completed, no matter how advanced the technology is, no matter how good an engineering is done, it becomes technologically obsolete. We call it technical debt in software engineering. Technical debt management is one of the most important tasks of software companies that develop business applications like Logo Software.”

We have said that the products are set up according to many different parameters according to the business area or demands of the customers. Many versions of these products are available at the same time. If we add customizations and additional software, we see that almost all installations are different.

Sometimes customers integrate our products with their own software, or with other software that they outsource. If the business has become dependent on this software configuration in terms of business processes, it sees any change as a risk. In this case, you need to install and manage not only your own technical debt but also the debt of the whole configuration.

This is the main problem for organizations that produce enterprise business software. As the business world develops, you need to constantly develop products, technology develops, and you need to keep pace with new technology. Business models change in the sector, new competitors come out, you are expected to adapt to them. As products become richer in terms of features and options, they become more complex. Complex product is difficult to use, customer satisfaction is low.

You have to explore and develop new user experiences that make it easier to use. Even if we succeed in all of them, customer satisfaction is not very high in business applications sector. Because the competition changes the customer, the demands of the customer also change. When you finish the implementation, the existing software installation may even be inadequate due to the changing business requirements of the customer.

As the business world develops, you need to constantly develop products, technology develops, and you need to keep pace with new technology. Business models change in the sector, new competitors come out, you are expected to adapt to them.

Institutional business practices are ignored in the beginning, in the academic and technology campuses, not considered as highly advanced technology. The work is considered to be very simple, requiring no technical knowledge or skills. Its assumed that the accounting software is the only software required.

According to me, business applications like our software suites, are systems that can be distinguished by their existence and non existence.

The business applications handle the most important tasks in the business, but the impact is only seen when they are not. Why am I saying that? Because you need skilled engineers and talented specialists to do these things. Good software developers are very few and software developers can change jobs very quickly, they can find jobs abroad very easily.

It is in this environment that you can create a job description that will give good engineering and career path to the experts, develop products in new business models or new technologies while keeping existing customers’ 15 years old legacy technology functional.

In next blogs, we will see how the transformation in Logo Software has been achieved and how these approaches are implemented individually. For this reason, we began with where Logo started.

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TUĞRUL TEKBULUT
Chairman, Logo Software

Interview republished from Logo Software’s Blog – https://blog.logo.com.tr/logo-yazilimin-teknolojik-donusumu-anlatmaya-baslarken/