The idea for this panel came with an article by McKinsey in April 2020: Developer Velocity: How software excellence fuels business performance

Short version: Industry leading companies excel in software development and one of the means to achieve that excellence is empowering developers with world class tools.

Sounds easy, but life rarely is.

Software developers today have the choice between literally hundreds of tools for dozens of languages to solve problems and design their software development lifecyle. See for example the Periodic Table of DevOps Tools https://digital.ai/periodic-table-of-devops-tools and the multitude of add-ons on the Atlassian Marketplace. Many of them are open source and free, or at least you can try them before you buy either an “enterprise”/”Pro” version and/or support package. Sometimes it seems that every couple of weeks somebody promotes an earth-shattering new tool or a new language pops up that is suddenly all the rage for “cutting-edge” development.

Again, there are hundreds of “world class” tools and it probably has never been easier or cheaper to experiment - to find the right tool for the job and with the propagation of loosely coupled architectures like e.g. microservices, tools in the same building may vary from team to team and still produce working, even excellent, solutions in software.

Developers - on average - like to experiment. IT-managers, Procurement, Legal departments mostly do definitely not. And what role does (horror of horrors) IT-Governance have in this world of plenty?

So the idea is to assemble a panel to discuss the different aspects of “freedom of choice” in an enterprise environment with the audience to answer a few questions:

• Is IT-Governance dead?
• How do you negotiate the choice of tools in your enterprise`?
• Who chooses?
• How?
• What challenges does that pose for asset- and license management?

Join us to discuss with our panel and we would like to hear from you your solution for this challenge.

We are still looking for someone who could contribute the legal and/or procurement view to our panel.