fbpx As a software engineer, I often find myself thinking about the world around us, and, of course, the technology that has gone into making our world what it is. You see, being a software engineer doesn’t just mean that I write software, it means that I engineer software and solutions for our customers. So, naturally, my thoughts gravitate toward not only technology, but engineering in general. For example, I’m sitting here enjoying a bowl of granola (it’s a breakfast meeting), and a cup of coffee. I look at the granola and think, “Somewhere, some nutritionist, chef, and probably someone with a title like ‘food engineer’ designed and tested the granola recipe. They decided the ratio of oats to almonds, what flavoring to add, etc. And someone designed that plastic spoon I’m using to eat the granola. Someone decided that it should have those little ridges on the bottom edge of the handle, probably to provide some structural strength so it doesn’t break easily…” If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering “What in the world does this have to do with RICS, and retail POS software?” In short – everything. My background is as a software developer, not in retail operations. I’ve certainly bought shoes before, many times, from all sorts of retailers – from big box stores, to shoe chains, to specialty stores. But I never really thought about how all of that process works – until I came to RICS. Since starting at RICS approximately 6 months ago, though, I’ve come to learn about a whole new world “under the covers” that I never had any exposure to – payment processing, inventory management, product cataloguing, retail financial reconciliation… Throughout my career, I’ve had many such experiences learning about the “iceberg” that’s under the water, on so many things we take for granted and simply don’t think about – everything from used car dealer inventory financing, to custom manufacturing, to university and municipal parking management, to insurance annuities. Software developers call all that information “business requirements” – the “what should it do?” of the systems we create. A lot of software developers view those as just the least interesting part of the job – a necessity, to be sure, but really just an excuse to create cool technology. At RICS, though, we’ve been very fortunate to build a team that, like I do, shares an interest and curiosity in learning about the business, and retail operations, so that we aren’t just creating cool technology, but useful technology for you, the customer. In other words, here at RICS, we don’t want to just know “what it needs to do” – we want to know the why and the how – so that we can make the technology to do “it” even better. And we’ll continue to do so.