Working software in a maquiladora is a field that many have already touched. It's usually always the same pattern: traceability, quantities, authorizations, notifications, reminders, alerts, charts, and Excel, a lot of Excel.
What a maquiladora really is
The product that comes out is always based on things that are worth less. So a maquiladora is basically a value factory. What they offer is a reliable way to receive products, absorbing most of the responsibilities other people don't want to have.
Verifying if something is toxic, if it will damage the parts where you're going to implement it, all of that is responsibility we've segregated to whoever produces the product. The product has to be so simple to use that whoever uses it doesn't have that responsibility and just passes the buck.
Footprint of responsibility
Footprint of responsibility: it belongs to whoever created that complexity in the end. The complexity of eating a pufferfish was developed by whoever came up with the idea, but whoever gains value from making that idea reach more people is also responsible.
Distributing responsibility is a term I don't entirely like, because in the end the responsibility belongs to whoever took the last action. But we have products so complex that it's no longer simple to know who has it.
Only that being inside, developing software for a maquiladora, you can't think that far ahead. You're deep inside the value engine.