Sunday, October 07, 2007

Great parody on technical IT

Pete Lacey has a great parody on the technical focus of IT folks. Its a wonderful trawl through the way that business people ask for solutions and how IT in return focuses on technology.

In this hilarious romp through how businesses continued to ask the same questions and the IT department continued to offer them yet another technology that would this time solve the problem. There is a great bit in there where he demonstrates his comedic brilliance by pretending that he thinks that VOIP is a business requirement (rather than the requirement of course being to reduce the phone bill), this wonderfully highlights how technologists can't see the difference between a business requirement and a technology solution.

There are great bits in there to highlight, almost too many to mention, but for me the real bit that made me realise how great a parody was this bit

"And… Well, you know the rest. They picked the wrong technology again, despite the fact that the right choice was staring them in the face. Like CORBA before it, SOAP..."

Brilliant, a superb highlighting of the extreme arrogance of technologists in thinking that the next technology really will be the silver bullet. He then drives the point home by brilliantly misunderstanding SOA and equating it to network oriented computing (although I think just saying Distributed Computing would have underlined the parody a little better).

Thanks to Pete for the shout-out at the end to my BSA post. He hilariously pretends to misunderstand the difference between architecture and requirements gathering, a common problem for technical IT.

I don't think I've seen a better post that sums up the problems of technologists thinking that technology is always the solution and that anything more contextual is a bad idea.

Truly well done Pete, a great post on the issues of technologists focusing only on the technology and assuming that this will meet the business needs.


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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perfect perfect! It's such a lark to watch the "king is dead, long live the new king" chants.

How about, "My magic bullet is better than your magic bullet because, you see, mine actually isn't a magic bullet, it just solves all your problems".

At some point this pattern of good ideas advancing to ego then advancing to narcissism is going to be so clear that we're going to have a nice name for it. I think we're almost ready for that level of enlightenment.

Anonymous said...

How about this, we always deride the person re-inventing the wheel.

How about the person re-discovering Occam's razor.

Finding a new way to apply a universal truth never means that its a universal solution. I'm not up enough on my logic theory to know for sure, but that seems safe to say. In other words, the universality of Occam's razor isn't transitive to any particular application of the principle.

PetrolHead said...

"Distributed Computing" - another term that is as widely misunderstood/abused as SOA.

SOA == WS* and similar - I remember back in the day a long discussion about the fact that these two things were being incorrectly conflated but it seems no-one listened.

The tech community has since compounded things further by using that assumption to reason about why Web tech was superior.

Brilliant...

Steve Jones said...

Distributed Computing its what DHL do for Dell :)

PetrolHead said...

"Distributed Computing its what DHL do for Dell :)"

I'm just going to pray that particular definition doesn't stick (shame on you if it does :)