Software as a Corporate Asset

I just came across a video recording of “The Canary in the Coalmine” from Agile 2006 where Ken Schwaber discusses the factors involved in getting companies to realize that software is a Corporate Asset. My conclusion, having seen many of the same effects in a number of companies, is that most of the decisions about projects status, schedules, delivery dates, features suffer from the same problem; they are not based on facts, or at least not on all the facts. For example, which is one of the main points in Ken’s presentation, the future cost of not having software that is well-kept, which in turn is a direct effect of pushing deadlines and increasing feature sets.
As a case in point, Ken’s anecdote from the “$14M, but just some features more” situation, is an example of how easy it is to make enterprise level decisions without hard facts, and what it might lead to.