Twilight Zone Complete Series

"If you do not piss on someone, you're probably not doing your job."
- Bryce's Law

INTRODUCTION

This essay represents my 100th in a series of weekly newsletters, I wrote over two years. Meanwhile, I wrote about a variety of management issues and technical matters relating to IT, for example, systems design, database design, software engineering, etc. My intention was show the wide scope of information resources management (IRM) and try to get people to broaden their horizons and think beyond their immediate scope of responsibility. I received many reactions of these tests, some negative, but most were very positive and encouraging. I always tried to be honest and frank in my editorial, a shooter "Right" some say. Nevertheless. my comments are being welcomed with enthusiasm or disdain, there was little way. God thank you, I'm not in the business of managing a popularity contest. Whatever you think of my observations and comments, you know my position on an issue. It does not matter whether you agree with me or not, but if I can make you stop and think about something, so I achieved my goal.

I believe I saw a lot over the past 30 years, customers trying to conquer the problems of mass system, lights that have hit the IT industry by introducing new ideas, and charlatans selling latest snake oil. But I also think the speech with the people in the trenches and the meeting room to be the most challenging. From their observations and experiences that I have seen not only changes in technology, but in management as well, some for the better, some for the worse. I listened to both their frustrations and their achievements, their successes and failures. The parade passing over the years has developed a multitude of changes, large and small. So much so, the business has nothing to do when I started in the mid-1970s. It is interesting, I am now at the awkward age where I'm considered a radical by my elders and "disconnected" from my juniors (I like to call "Twilight Zone" period of my life).

OBSERVATIONS

Between my consulting practice and feedback from these newsletters, I observed some interesting changes in the work of the company. Some observations more pronounced, some will be fairly obvious, others less. Nevertheless, here they are, warts and all:

1. We now live in a throwaway society.

Information technology departments feel under incredible pressure to produce more with less. This is caused by the executive managers who have no appreciation of the mechanics of development. Officers wrongly equated with hardware development and, as such, spend too much money on hardware and software and little management infrastructure needed to create an industrial power systems (sort of "penny wise, pound-crazy" behavior). They can understand the value of hardware, but they have no idea about the value of information as it applies to their societies . However, because of the amount of money invested in tools, frameworks expect miracles among IT personnel. Since executives expect the short turnaround time, the department is able to produce a fraction of what is needed to adequately support the company. The programs are written with little, if any, thought of interfacing with other programs or to share and reuse data. Therefore, redundant data software resources and operate in most stores now. It has become so pervasive that it stores are resigned to writing software available by which they openly admit that it will become obsolete.