Each year I think of several resolutions I usually don't keep. Why should this year be any different...
Be more politically correct in future blog entries: This does mean that I will remove any transparency in my thoughts. In fact, the exact opposite will occur as I believe transparency is a necessary ingredient to trust. Likewise, it also doesn't mean that I have to stifle my passion on certain topics. It does mean though that I may in certain occasions moderate myself as to what type of images I include with blog postings.
Lose weight: Figured it is important to have the same resolution that pretty much every other IT person on the planet has. There aren't too many of us that are skinny.
Benchpress 400 pounds: Early last year I blogged about my desire to be stronger than I was as a schoolboy and for the most part have achieved this. I can pretty much max out every machine in our gym but haven't made much progress at all in either curling or the benchpress. Not really worried about building biceps since my phsyique wouldn't show them well anyway. The bench though is important as this is a man's excercise and I simply need to lift more than any of my other peers at work. We got some big boys at work including former Pro football players but I will take them on next year.
CISSP: Over my career I have acheived at least twenty different forms of industry certification and have concluded that they are not very valuable. The thing though is that several insulting firms that back the school bus up to the enterprise have gotten their kiddies this particular certification. If they can do it with bootcamps, lots of books and mentors, I should be able to simply walk into the test without thinking about it and just ace it.
Get enterprise architect in other shops to adopt open source: Another architect came by my desk yesterday inquiring about .NET frameworks and how he couldn't locate any good ones via google. He of course made the mistake of also checking with various industry analyst firms and actually expected guidance. Of course, I pointed him towards the good work done by the folks over at Duke Energy with their .NET framework. We really need for analyst firms to stop talking about open source in terms of Linux and other boring technologies and start talking about it in terms of how it affects the enterprise. There are lots of enterprises doing things similiar to Duke Energy. Imagine if your friendly neighborhood industry analyst for example talked about what the folks at JP Morgan are doing to come up with an open source implementation of IBM MQ/Series. Do you think the enterprise will realize that they haven't been getting complete research?
Finish agile enterprise architecture book: This was a project I started about two years ago and is pretty much written. Haven't taken the time out to shop it though to a variety of publishers (the most time consuming process an author can do). Maybe I will simply publish it myself and/or license it under Creative Commons. Not really sure at this point. Would appreciate feedback from the community though.
Convince the top five industry analysis firms to adopt the notion of open source industry analysis: In my blogs you may have noticed that I have said wonderful things about many analyst firms including: Nemertes, RedMonk, ZapThink and Seybold. Sadly though the analyst firms that I interact with at work all tell me how they respond to customer needs yet I have failed miserably in getting them to appreciate the value to us customers, the notion of open source industry analysis. I have several outstanding inquiries though in asking for assistance in the creation of a report surrounding business rules. Maybe one of them will step up?
Take better decisions: The key here is not make better decisions but take better decisions. Decisions are made according to logical thinking, identifying the alternatives ad deciding based on either objectives or groupthink (subject of future blog entry). Taking better decisions says that certain critical ones go by default. Others follow the consensus rather than be a lone dissenting voice...
Contribute more to charity: In fact, I also need to encourage others to do same . The key problem that I have struggled with is how to get folks to break out of giving only to charities that benefit them. For example, if you grew up Catholic, it doesn't take much noodle CPU time to give to a catholic charity but may be more human to consider charities outside of one's own demographic. My own two charities that I have adopted for this holiday season are: Stand to Reason and Not in my name. I hope that others reading this blog will consider a contribution to these fine establishments.
# posted by James McGovern @ 8:00 AM
