Summers Ebb

It's early august and I'm feeling as if the summer is nearly gone. I've been completely obsessed of course with family issues this summer, barely coping, and yet now in the ebb my mind begins to twirl around what's next, what I need to return to. Sometimes these extended periods of stress prime the brain to look for answers to say, "hey, there's got to be something better?"

I've been getting more and more serious about a new web venture. I know, I keep putting it off when I should just sit down and the start building the fricking thing. I've designed and redesigned several times and I'm getting that I need to do step 1, step 2, step 3 etc, and stop trying to hold it all in my head. Agile development is definately the way to go!

"the road ahead is greater than the road behind!" Have faith that things will be better, but be prepared for long haul in this jouney forward.

IT versus BT

I'm sitting in a TOGAF enterprise architecture class today listening to an interesting discussion about the responsibility of CIO's and enterprise architects to communicate the value of IT to the business, but I keep wanting to violently slide back to the position that effective 21st century business leaders should completely understand business technology as much as 19th century leaders understood the power of steam, of railroads or the telegraph. This artificial distinction of IT as a separate function is insane.

Centralized IT infrastructure should be in the cloud, generic systems should be served up software as a service style and specialized business tool should be the province of business analysts, business technologists embedded in the business. Some business technology strategists may need to be centralized, but they should be an offshoot of corporate strategy and planning.