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Monthly Archives: June 2006
Too Much User Interface
Many of you are planning to go on holidays soon. I know I am. And I’m confident that you don’t want to spend your valuable free days doing perfectly nothing or – even worse – read that Da Vinci Code for the third time. So during the next week or so, I will point you to some books that you may want to pack in your suitcase. Yes, books. Good, old-fashioned paper. There’s nothing else …
Are the Users taking over from the IT Department?
I heard a new term this week from an experienced CIO running a good operation, well matched to the enterprises business aims, etc. He reckoned that ‘Shadow IT’ is fast becoming the order of the day as the Users, individually or in groups, enact something locally. His problem was he didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing from the perspective of the business, though he certainly wasn’t too comfortable about …
2.0 Considered Harmful
I just wanted to state that I used the 2.0 concept in my previous blog-item in the sense of – well – plain irony, I guess. Before you know it, you end up being flamed by a large community that simply cannot cope any longer with all the cooked up hype of IT trends. Oracle still seem to hold on to their claim of the ‘SOA 2.0′ concept. So does Gartner (with a 75% probability, …
Panel Debate 2.0
Imagine blogging like it’s supposed to be. Not minding too much about the correct wording. Just trying to be crisp and focused. Possibly building on blog-items of others, or trying to provoke new feedback, exploring the edges of an argument or concept. Imagine blogging like that, but then performed in real life, using spoken word. Don’t confuse this with podcasting: it’s not about writing a blog-item and then simply putting it ‘on tape’. It’s much …
Is Amazon now an ASP? And if so will every business be one?
Amazon is a great business, while certainly for books, or CDs, and may be even as a ‘mall’ for other smaller speciality retailers who want to sell to the market using Amazon for both the technology and the store front. All these activities are connected with Amazon’s core business and any respected financial analyst seems to think that an essential feature of modern business is to ‘stay focussed’. So is it still part of the …
IT Department: Eat your Own Dog Food!
There’s no better way to show commitment than eating one’s own dog food, or – as some of my French colleagues would call it – drinking one’s own champagne. I can imagine why that Ford plant manager in Michigan recently announced that only Ford- or subsidiary-built vehicles are allowed to park on the plant premises: it must be discouraging to see the place swarmed every day by Daihatsu’s, Suzuki’s and Toyota’s. If even the creators …
Why e mail is killing us, and the real root of the problem
You know the problem, keep active on your email account, or die. Well maybe not physically, but it feels like death when you grimly contemplate several hundred emails. I have to travel a great deal and these days the expectation is that I will always be available every day online to handle e mail. Its not even acceptable that I use an ‘out of office’ message, that’s just for wimps, and it gets me down …
Mummified architects
Yes, we’ve heard it all before. A good IT or Enterprise Architect is supposed to be able to bridge the gap between business objectives and technology solutions. In order to do that, architects still need thorough analytical skills: even with (some might argue ‘thanks to’) service-orientation the solutions landscape seems to be more complex than ever. Clearly, there is also a need for excellent communication skills: no architecture will be successful if it is not …
Why couldn’t I get the airline upgrade? — turned out to be an Architectural question!
I was facing an eleven hour flight back from India after an IT Industry event, had checked in and was sitting in the lounge contemplating an uncomfortable sleepless night with others I had become friendly with over the last few days. In breezed someone else from the event who happily announced he had been upgraded to first class. Took a moment before half in joke someone said ‘give you $50 for the seat’, but it …
Free Service-orientation
As a true Dutchman, I’m ready to be happy with anything I get for free. But it gets a lot better when it is for free but also excellent. And that’s certainly the case with Dan Wood’s new book on Enterprise SOA. ‘Enterprise SOA, Designing IT for Business Innovation’ is the latest word on SAP’s ESA vision and its NetWeaver platform. I am not claiming that this book will suddenly demistify all the Walldorf Complexity …
