Coonan ACS endorsement hot air

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 02 November 2004 09:08

IT Industry - Development

The news that ICT Minister, Senator Helen Coonan has endorsed the Australian Computer Society push to enforce professional standards is just so much hot air. Aside from anything else, Senator Coonan, by ruling out mandatory membership of the ACS, at least had the wisdom not to try anything ham fisted.

Now that the prospect of trying to force ICT professionals to join the ACS has been quashed, what are we left with? Absolutely nothing is the short answer. ACS president, Edward Mandla, has been calling for the enforcement of professional standards as a pre-condition for ACS membership. So what's new? When I was a computer science graduate more than two decades ago, a pre-condition for becoming a member of the ACS was a recognised tertiary level computing qualification or demonstrated equivalent technical experience working in the computer industry. If that wasn't enforcement of professional standards, what is?

Mandla has copped a lot of flack for seemingly trying to force the ACS down the collective throat of the Australian ICT professional community. However, to be fair, what he is trying to do is in a way noble in intent. He wants to raise the level of the "ICT profession", or to be more accurate, software development community, to a similar status as accountants, lawyers or even doctors, all of whom have strong representative peak bodies, which also have a measure of regulatory power over their constituent members.

The problem for Mandla, however, is that there is no equivalency between the software development community and any of those other professions. For a start, all those other groups are pure service providers. Software development on the other hand, while it can have a service component, is essentially a creative endeavour and thus, somewhat anarchic in nature. In essence, most of the true innovation in software development has been effected by very unprofessional (in the recruitment agent's sense of the term) types. Witness the creators of Apple, Google and, yes, even Microsoft. None were your classical well presented, suit-wearing, silky tongued ICT professionals. In fact most of them were your classic computer nerds.

Yet in Australia, our recruitment agents are telling us that employers undertaking ICT projects don't want nerds. They want suit wearing ICT service providers - smooth talking, suit wearing sales types. The nerds that work on these projects, they say, are now in places like India. Meanwhile, our nerds are either out of work or working in a small innovative little software company, perhaps developing a world class product.

However, Mandla warns that Australian innovators may get locked out of Government contracts unless they spend money to get certified in some software development methodology out of Carnegie Mellon University that gets brandished like a badge of honour by every two-bit offshorer from here to Timbuktu. Never mind that the locally developed product may be the best of its type in the world. The company wasn't CMM certified, the developers don't belong to the ACS and there was no offshoring component, so the Government can't use it.

Good software development, as many programmers will tell you, is part science and part art. There is nothing wrong with having a process as a means of tracking, documenting and effecting the progress of a software development project. However, you can have the best software development methodology in the world but without a skilled and innovative software developer to paint the canvas, you can still wind up with garbage. Some corporations who have used CMM 5 certified offshorers have painfully discovered this.

Now, back to Mandla and his goal of uniting the ICT professional community under the ACS. The ICT community, including the software development community, is anything but cohesive. Ignoring the systems programmers and administrators, and focussing purely on the applications programmers and developers, there are so many platforms and emerging technologies that to try and bring them under one umbrella would be like trying to find common ground between Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates.

In order for Mandla to fulfil his goal, presumably he would want to conduct some sort of Bar exam or professional year. Would he also require work experience or articles as part of the entrance requirements like other professional bodies? in that case, he better think about lining up employers. But what if the employers don't want nerdy types, only salesmen in suits? Does that mean real software developers would be excluded from the ACS, while salesmen get accepted?

We'll say it once again. ICT is not analogous to any of the service professions. In the past three decades, for better or worse, advances in ICT have done more to change the world we live than all of the other professions combined, Trying to fit ICT into the confined space of a professional body like CPA, AMA or the Law Institute is like trying to squeeze an elephant into a cookie jar.

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