It doesn't take much insight to work out that businesses generally want two types of software.  Firstly, they need commodity stuff such as email, word processors and document storage.  It doesn't much matter what business you are in, generic packages can do the job.  Secondly, they might need bepoke solutions that meet highly particular requirements or which provide a vital commercial edge.  That sort of software requires a really strong understanding of the business being supported.  That's a challenging area for many IT professionals, but it it's my comfort zone.

What do most businesses do when they need bespoke software?  Typically, they get some developers together with some business people, usally process experts if they have them, and then wait for the results.  What they almost always get is an incremental improvement on what is already there.  It's amazing how many companies think of that as a success, but it is a really bad investment - a 100% investment in new software achieving maybe a 10% improvement in capability.

So what goes wrong?  In my experience, it's very often a lack of imagination or a lack of vision - neither the business team nor the IT team can envisage how software could really change the company.  Sometimes it happens - the Swift Cover insurance business grew out of a conviction that car insurance could be sold entirely over the Web rather than through High Street brokers or via telephone sales teams.  SalesForce.com grew from a conviction that software did not need to be hosted on-site to support business development.  These success stories were inspired by the insight of an individual who had the determination to make it happen.

Businesses can't always wait on some charismatic insightful maverick to come along - indeed, they would be unlikely to risk much in case the charisma and insight were missing and they were only dealing with a maverick.  What would be useful is a path to the insight that doesn't involve the maverick.  Without wishing to generalise much, I've found that most business people are very bad at knowing what they want from software because they don't really know what they could be realistically asking for, and most IT people shrink from taking what they believe is a business-leading stance: their job is support, right?  Both groups of people recognise incremental improvements when they see them, so that's what the business gets.

I've spent the last few years trying to understand the dynamics of this familiar and depressing situation and identify the mechanisms that could help break out of it to provide software businesses want, even if they don't actually know they want it.  Watch this space...