technology

Vendors sell technology (hardware and software) as silver bullets for business problems. Take a look at this fabulous case study from McKinsey Quarterly. Reading between the lines it seems to me the vendor's pitch was cobblers. The fancy aspects of the technology delivered nothing. The real gains came from process and culture change. When will IT folk ever lose our fixation on technical answers to non-technical problems? And when will the vendors ever step up and start delivering true solutions instead of boxes of crap?

There appears to be more vendors certifying their products against more processes on PinkVerify than the OGC scheme. Why is that? What can OGC learn from Pink about making it easier for vendors? or does it show that PinkVerify is too easy? Does it matter?

I hate technology. Really. I work with it every day, but I feel about it the same way that sanitation workers feel about their medium (or the way I HOPE they feel about it). I use technology when I have to, to do what I want to do. But I hate it. And it knows it and it hates me back. Take for example the weekend's outage on this blog.

The IT Skeptic's favourite quote of the month:
"People change slowly, so don't expect technology to alter the way business is run."
The Future is About Information, Not Tech

My paraphrase: people change process and process changes technology, not the other way around.

Vendors are making a fuss about their Root Cause Analysis (RCA) features in their tools. People Process Things once again: who says Root Cause is in the technology?

The IT Skeptic’s little brother is so excited by the iPhone he wrote an article about it.

A lovely example of the "Someone screwed up. What are you going to buy to fix it?" mentality that plagues this industry:

A recent article raises the interesting question of why there are far more Service Support tools than Service Delivery tools. The IT Skeptic knows why. The underlying assumption of the article that I would skeptically challenge is that there is a role for Service Delivery tools.

Here is an article that raises the interesting question why there are far more Service Support tools than Service Delivery tools.

People are drawn to IT by a fascination with complex technology. This is most unfortunate because this fascination blinds so many of us to the importance of the People/Process/Product trilogy.

Change and Configuration Management are processes. If the process is working, they collect and maintain good configration data (in a repository that you can call a CMDB if you insist). If the process is broken technology is not going to fix it. Bang your head hard against the desk while repeating five times "technology is not going to fix it".