How do digital threats change requirements for the software industry?

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes that digital transformation impacts society broadly, requiring the software industry to address societal, sustainability, and responsibility challenges, not just technical aspects, to ensure future resilience.

Contribution

It advocates for a comprehensive understanding of digital society and highlights overlooked societal threats, urging the software industry to adapt to new societal requirements.

Findings

Digital transformation affects societal systems and requires broader considerations.

Mainstream research underestimates societal threats of digitalization.

Learning from past failures can guide future software industry practices.

Abstract

Digital systems are, by definition, the core of digital transformation. This has led many to think that the system being considered in digital transformation is solely software. I argue that this approach is a fatal mistake, and it has induced a great number of already realized problems and even a greater number of concerns about the future. These problems and concerns have become evident along with rising requirements for sustainability and responsibility. In this paper, I call for a better understanding of the digital society in its entirety. By digital society I mean the societal system that is affected by the digital systems and the ongoing societal trans-formations. When shifting the focus to the effects of digital systems on societies, we are forced to consider all the anticipated outcomes, both desirable and undesirable ones. Unfortunately, the mainstream research has ignored, to a large extent, the potential threats, and unwanted outcomes, of digitalization, which makes the efforts to change software businesses to be more sustainable, difficult to succeed. In my paper, I will provide an overall picture of current and future challenges of digital societies and discuss what these challenges mean to the software industry in future. The easiest way to start with, is to learn from earlier experiences, especially from the unsuccessful stories.