survey

A survey of 548 business and IT leaders published this week finds more than two-thirds (67%) reporting there is a disconnect between business strategy and software development, with 69% noting they are frustrated because business teams are constantly changing priorities.

Conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Broadcom, the survey also finds only 91% of respondents are adopting value stream management (VSM) principles to help close that divide.

However, only 55% are specifically using that terminology, and less than a quarter (24%) are relying on a single integrated platform.

VSM traces its lineage back to lean manufacturing methods, which called for each step of a manufacturing process to be continuously measured. As software development has evolved from being a craft to a process that is automated as much as possible using DevOps best practices, an appreciation for the value of monitoring issues such as the impact of missed software development deadlines on the business has grown steadily, as more organizations realize how dependent on software they have become.

Most often, it is product management (49%) and software development teams (46%) that are involved in managing value streams, the survey finds. The survey also finds this methodology has improved data-driven decision making in their organization (39%), improved solution delivery (39%) and accelerated digital business transformation (38%).

In addition, 90% of respondents said they also expect advances in AI to accelerate adoption of VSM within their organization, with improving predictive analytics (47%), automating workflows and processes (46%) and improving product quality (44%) as being the top expected benefits. Many of those benefits will be attained as organizations embrace AI agents to automate a wider range of tasks, notes Lance Knight, chief value stream architect for Broadcom. “We’re just starting to get a glimpse of what AI agents can do,” he adds.

In fact, well over half of respondents (56%) identified adopting AI as their biggest business challenge for 2025, the survey finds.

Hopefully, as more organizations adopt platform engineering as a methodology for building software at scale. it will become simpler for them to embrace VSM principles, notes Knight.

A full 41% of respondents expect to be using VSM across multiple products (30%) or enterprise wide (11%) by the end of 2025, according to the survey.

There’s little doubt that more organizations can benefit from VSM, but it typically needs to be driven by senior leaders. The survey finds the top metrics being employed to justify the return on investment in VSM are customer happiness (67%), followed by increased sales (59%) and better customer support (53%). The challenge is that directly attributing those benefits to VSM is often an article of faith as much as it is hard math, so convincing business leaders to invest in the tools and platforms needed may require patience and fortitude.

One way or another, however, most organizations in time will conclude that the existing methodologies they are relying on to build products currently leave a lot to be desired.