Rant, Manifesto or Position Paper

Alright, before I get to the meat of the matter of today, a couple of housekeeping things:

I shaved off the soul patch. As an experiment, it was a success. However one of the variables I didn't consider was the fact while many men have their hair grow at an angle close to the curve of the jaw, my facial hair has the organization of a gorse bush. Grooming is all well and good but the 'product' I was using (and didn't work that well) was giving me zits.

So while giving myself the month buzz (hair cut, not inebriation), I chopped the chin-hedge off.

My chin is cold.

The weather (rain, more rain, humidity) is getting me down. I haven't taken a good bike ride in a week and it's driving me buggy. On teh other hand, I've gone from a two-on, one-off work out schedule to a three-on, one-off rate. I'm sore. And suddenly I'm pressed for time! Not sure I can keep this up. Maybe 3-on, 1-off, 2-on, 1-off? Nah, too complicated.

I now have one foot back on the no-smoking wagon, although I keep sneakin' 'em. As stated previously on many occassions, this is hard. I need a new job.

And I still can't get a hold of the guy to arrange my free beer!

Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!

Ahem.

So on to the main topic. Which I have entitled:

Ivory in Shadow: How IT has Failed Business, Business has Failed IT and the How the IT Business has Failed Everyone

Yeah it's a mouthful.

It's basically a commentary on how IT is still failing to deliver on promises to business, how business forces these failures in many cases, and how technology companies exacerbate the problem by offering more technology to solve what ails technology.

This came about from yet another marketecture presentation today. In essence, it was to add more software layers (and therefore more hardware, more network and more complexity) to make things all work together.

I'm going to have to research this a bit, but I'm thinking that the roots of the problem are a fundamental misunderstanding of what technology can and cannot do (and surprisingly, its the techs who don't seem to understand the most), business practices that are directly opposed to how software is developed (and vice versa) and a lack of will to address the fundamental issue of change.

So instead of a blog rant, it probably will be a paper. And surprisingly, I have a kernel of an idea on how to possibly fix some of the problems.

So I'm going to read a few things, talk to some people and who knows, look at maybe getting it published as an article. May take a while.

Oh yeah, the title refers to the "Ivory Tower" being overshadowed and threatened by an office building. Yep, English degree. I can see the cover of my ground-breaking, paradigm shifting (sorry) study on real software in real business now. Amazon, here I come!

Or Slashdot. Either is good.