CTO Blog
Cultural differences, every now and then it takes some time to explain. Being a Dutchman, wherever I come abroad I have to defend the infamous Dutch lunch. And believe me, there is very little ammunition. We usually stick to a miserable sandwich with some Gouda cheese. If we are in a daring mood, there may be a croquette. And always, there is buttermilk, the unnecessary cruel incarnation of what originally was meant as plain dairy. I have seen tough, Mediterranean business men cry like little babies when they had taken their first sip. The pain, the agony!
Compared to that, our annual Queen’s Day celebration on the 30th of April is not even that hard to explain. A monarchy? Sure, why not. Charming. Celebrating the Queen’s birthday when it’s not even her birthday? Probably some good pragmatic reasons for it. Grown up people dancing in the streets with orange wigs on their heads? Well, we have seen that before on live television, haven’t we. Might even get used to it one day.
Only the ‘vrijmarkt’ (freemarket), that’s still a question mark to many. An American colleague who accidentally witnessed it once did an attempt to summarise. “So if I understand this well” he said with a worried tone in his voice “your idea of celebration is to open up your attics, get the old stuff out of there and then sell it on the street to other Dutchmen?”. I confirmed, hesitantly. It did sound a bit strange, the way he put it.
On the other hand, I do support the concept. In business, that is. It is a good idea to periodically go through your belongings. Wipe away the dust and have a good, contemplating look. Some assets shine more than expected. Others, no doubt can be thrown away immediately. It cleans up and creates more room to breathe. Exactly the energy boost you need after a long, cold winter. And then even make money with it, why aren’t they doing the same anywhere else in the World?
All in all, I believe it would be a good initiative to do this every year for the IT department. By means of a new folklore, really. Imagine, we would call it Digital Queen’s Day. That day we all stay at the offices and open up the IT attic. We have a thorough go through all these legacy applications, redundant solutions, obvious duplicates and home-brew hobby products. We may even find a few rusty servers, somewhere in a corner. We assess and then throw away what we no longer need. Normally, that is not negotiable but on this special day all caution is thrown to the winds.
Afterwards, it will be time for celebration. Liberated, clear skies, a path forward and even some additional money in the pocket. A true freemarket indeed.
Update: this item was obviously posted before the tragic events on Queen’s Day
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Another process to consider as part of the Digital Queens Day is a simple “health-check” of systems, involving someone taking a close look at the environment:
My analogy is of the engineer with an oily rag working on a steam-engine….. he will polish the brass, tap the dials to make sure they are not stuck, apply some drops of oil, and adjust one or two valves here and there. More importantly, he will start to ask “where did that pool of oil under the boiler come from?” and identify parts that are beginning to wear out. Ideally, he will also start asking questions like “what are you doing with an old steam engine anyway? All my other customers have gas turbines installed, and we have a nuclear option on the horizon!” Unfortunately, with cutbacks on staffing, the “engineer with the oily rag” is seen as an expensive overhead, to be replaced by automated monitoring tools….. but however good the tool, it will only monitor the things it was programmed for, and so could miss the leaks, the wear and the disasters about to happen!
Well, you’re not alone having “freemarket” days, we call them “vide grenier” (ie clean up your attics) in Alsace, and the clean up itself is called “Osterputz”, (Easter clean up), which is, roughly, next weekend.
For the rest really we prefer beer vs buttermilk
And from an IT perspective there is still the old fashioned way of doing taking the asset list sorted by acquisition dates …(the “rossignols” in French).
@Dave: and you certainly address the point of the power of being involved in managing the (dirty) daily operations and be able to find the best room for improvement. However, some engineers might get so obsessed with the engines they are managing, that they are not open to the idea of radical replacement of even rendering them obsolete… Thanks! Great build.
@Denis: ah yes, the Alsace. Slightly different quality there in terms of food and drink (certainly also lunch). I’d say this ‘Osterputz’ is a good thing and comparable, but to my knowledge the Dutch are the only ones in the world that actually make money out of it by selling their junk to fellow countrymen. And yes, the ‘rossignols’ approach is certainly better than nothing, although selecting on acquisition date might turn out to be just a bit too simple in a typical IT landscape…