The Dark Side Geek

In an excellent article, Eric D. Brown argues that the way to drive innovation within IT is to radically realign the organization into Operations vs Strategy, a revamp that directly enables the strategic application of new technology to solve business problems. While this may sound like the typical IT split of operations, development, etc, Eric is keen to point out that he is actually talking about something much more substantial:

“Strategic IT contains the enterprise architects, business analysts and business technologists. This is the team that drives innovation. This is the team where you hire extremely creative people and point them at the business problems and ask them to solve those problems.”

As I read the article, my mind went back to 1994, when I was at NCR. (continue reading…)

I hate it when new vendors approach with the “we talked awhile ago and want to know if anything has changed” ploy. Don’t play the familiar card on me. I know we didn’t talk awhile ago because I never take vendor cold-calls – not even to say “no thanks”. (That would be a full time job in itself!)

Patrick Gray touched off a firestorm of controversy (at least in the TechRepublic world) with a posting about “The Biggest CIO Challenge of 2010“, BYOT – Bring Your Own Technology. The idea is that IT organizations should get ready to support a hodge-podge of user-supplied, user-purchased, user-selected technology. He even rattled off a couple big name companies that were embracing it, implying that everyone should.

(continue reading…)