There are many disciplines involved in ATM and I was lucky enough to go through a lot of them, starting with software development, to requirements engineering, to sales, to leading FoxATM. The amount of advice out there about all of those topics is huge, and there are many examples to follow (or not to follow). But when reading business or engineering advice, there is one thing that ATM people should never forget: the size of the industry. One might think that ATM is an industry like any other, and to some extent it is. There are lots of things we can learn from others, but to me, the real difference is the market size.
With roughly two hundred ANSPs in the world and thousands of airports, the size of this market is small when compared with most B2B or B2C markets. Companies like Apple or Tesla have hundreds of millions of potential customers and therefore can use different strategies and tactics. Not to mention the famous "move fast and break things" motto once attributed to Facebook. None of this applies in the ATM business. No A/B testing, no peer groups, very few market studies, and so on. So you can forget about most of the generic business advice out there.
Actually, ATM is closer to being a handcraft than an industry. All projects contain a significant part of customization and local adaptation and business is largely based on relationships and reputation. In such domains, one buys from persons, and one sells to persons. Organizations play a role, yes, but it is mostly secondary. Teams are small on both sides and even an IT department made of a few hundred people is rare. Development teams are also limited when compared to larger companies operating in larger markets.
If you'd like to continue this discussion and would like to see how to adjust your own organization to this reality, don't hesitate to reply to this email!
Before leaving you to the usual extract of the news we captured this week, don't forget that we have
a new episode of our podcast with
Jannik Breum of Terma, speaking of SMR and of Terma's engineering philosophy.