Tech Innovation and Products - who should be the one to bring it up?

Question

So - The typical thing I hear alot is only do what the customer wants, business requirements.

These tend to be about the "functioning" of the system - there may be some technical requirements - "must be web brower based", "Must be persitantly stored"

But who in your opinion specifys

WebForms v WPF v SilverLight

Performance is a business requirement - but who should be the one to say use this type of technology?

Should it be the

• developers?
• project manager?
• software manager?
• software architect
• enterprise architect
• users?

If users how do they know what is coming and available? Do you do show and tells about new gui features?

Developers - tend to want to move to new shiny things - but some dont want the learning curve again (change issues I know)

Answer 1

At our company it is a combination of developers and "graphics department" (the guys who decide what the interface should look like). I don't think there should be only one part making this decision, because sometimes you can do "cooler" stuff in eg. Silverlight than in eg. WebForms.

We have sites that have to be "cool", here we tend use more Flash. We have other admin-sites that do not need to be cool. Here we use WebForms. We (developers) do try to avoid flash as much as possible, and the graphics guys want it a lot.

Project managers/software manager/architects etc usually don't have a say in this. Sometimes the stakeholders can have requirements about this though (eg "the user interface has to be sexy and smooth, use Flash"). Users? Well, honestly, nobody really listens to them regarding this matter... :-/ And we have had no input from the users in this matter either. (But we are changing that soon, actually)

Answer 2

Solution Architects makes the decisions of what technologies to use to implement a solution given a set of customer requirements. They're usually the ones with the broadest knowledge about various technologies and their suitability for particular requirements. Some of the factors that may weigh in on their decision making process would be actually suitablility of the technology but they may also need to consult with the dev manager about human resoureces. Perhaps there are skills limitations within the existing team, or financial constraints that prevent or discourage the use of a particular technology.