This year we again had the great opportunity to host the Developer Conference Hamburg 2012 (http://www.developer-conference-hh.de/) with over 400 participants and speakers. As one of the largest developer events in Germany we were able to draw substantial talent from everywhere in Germany for this two day event.
You might ask yourself as an eCFO whether or not such an event would be relevant for you … if you had asked me ahead of the event I would probably have answered that for an eCFO this event is a giant waste of time. After all how much do we interact with developers on a daily basis?
At least for me the answer to this question is: clearly not enough! In most digital businesses there is a substantial lack of communication between the business and developer side of the company. I can go on for weeks with my daily tasks and not meet or talk to developers – this is a big mistake!
During the conference you can often here and see that there is a profound distrust and massive misunderstanding between developers, project management, executives and business analysts. This is not good for the business and will make your daily tasks a lot harder. If interaction is not actively encourages you will never be able to accurately assess pricing estimates, development costs, project timelines and so on from the business side. This will require that you regularly work on your technical skill set and ability to interact with developers.
As an eCFO you should foster an active interchange between your developers and all other sides of the business, since digital businesses depend on excellent and well understood development resources.
