Wednesday, August 11, 2010
People who manage purely by revenue or share price generally shaft their companies in the medium term. Bob Lewis, of IT Catalysts, is always worth a read and has many insights which I think all developers and architects should pay attention to. So you improve fulfillment (improved quality) and customer service (reduced cycle time). Revenue [...]
Many of us hear this phrase in our workplace. When you hear it, what you’re really being told is that the company is afflicted with one or more of the following: is afraid of change not interested in improvement has a rigid top-down process development style doesn’t care what you think I think the greatest [...]
Oh … now I get it, courtesy of Errol Morris, who made the Oscar winning documentary Fog Of War, among many other excellent films, who explains in this New York Times interview with David Dunning (part 1): DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make [...]
Its very common for software developers to be asked to build some software that is a straight port of an old software package, or to faithfully model (i.e. completely identical to) an existing process that the customer has. This is a huge mistake – try to avoid these projects. I hold that if the customer [...]
Thursday, February 4, 2010
There’s been lots of discussion the past six months about the fate of MySQL under the ownership of Oracle. Now that the purchase of Sun is complete, I’m much more concerned about the fate of the excellent JEE platform Glassfish. For example some people think that superior technology will prove to Oracle that Glassfish is [...]
Thursday, November 19, 2009
An interesting Wall Street Journal article, “Why You Can’t Use Personal Technology at the Office”, came my way courtesy of a Linked In group discussion this morning. In terms of the article, I agree it has been my experience for many years where I have faster/better personal technology than my workplace. At one place we [...]
Every now and again we get some customers who expect that they can get a custom website, portal, or services integration done by looking at a vendor’s “out of the box” experience. This can be very frustrating for us, as we need to get into their heads that no platform will delivery any website, portal, [...]
Monday, September 14, 2009
Peter Newton, “Director of Marketing” at American Express Australia Limited ABN 92 108 952 085, really likes Russian Mafiosa. Or maybe it’s Chinese Triads, bikie gangs, or maybe some local spivs operating out of a small rented smash repair shop near Beenleigh. Perhaps all of the above. Look at this email I got in my [...]
Johanna Rothman on agile adoption for the organisation: Agile requires the discipline to move projects through teams. Multitasking is nuts in agile. Moving team members around to have the “best” specialist available for a particular team is nuts. Performance reviews for individuals is nuts. Managers have to change everything they do, if they want to [...]
Many developers will have heard this term used as a justification for buying all, or most, of an organization’s IT infrastructure from a single vendor. And it is, like most of these idiotic aphorisms bandied around IT management, a complete crock of excrement. It’s the sort of thing that salesmen must tell credulous IT management [...]