Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Enterprisey CIOs and the ruining of America
Would you expect a police chief to know how to write a ticket or arrest a criminal? So, how come you don't expect a CIO to understand how to also be hands on in IT?
The profession of IT is going into the toilet. You no longer are required to have any understanding of how those below you do your job. Us enterprise architects aren't even required to understand how software is created. As long as we have a shiney Powerpoint presentation and spend sufficient time on perception management, we could lead any organization and force best practices upon the masses that ultimately leads to loss of competitive advantage.
Have you ever considered what would happen if this mindset appeared within law enforcement? It would probably start with a retarded conversation on alignment where the police department needs to align with the public works department. We could argue that patroling the streets is a waste of capacity and instead should figure out how police officers can carry brooms to sweep the streets during downtime.
We could eliminate walkie-talkies and laptops in their cars as the mindset of rationalization and infrastructure consolidation could take over. We would simply assign them crackberries instead. Consider the possibilities if we could instill a governance model where we convinced criminals to arrest themselves using best practices.
Let's also eliminate the practice of orderly promotion and competencies in order to rise the career ladder and replace it with an HR approved method where college graduates with consulting backgrounds are now in charge of those more experienced. Their first task is to create an enterprise tracking application to measure how many donuts are consumed. We could hire lots of bean counters who can find interesting patterns in donut consumption behavior such as those who love sprinkles make for great project managers.
We would then be interviewed by magazines such as CIO where we could attempt to convince others that knowledge of the domain is less important and even possibly convince the criminals of the world that they will benefit from this new form of leadershit...
| | View blog reactionsThe profession of IT is going into the toilet. You no longer are required to have any understanding of how those below you do your job. Us enterprise architects aren't even required to understand how software is created. As long as we have a shiney Powerpoint presentation and spend sufficient time on perception management, we could lead any organization and force best practices upon the masses that ultimately leads to loss of competitive advantage.
Have you ever considered what would happen if this mindset appeared within law enforcement? It would probably start with a retarded conversation on alignment where the police department needs to align with the public works department. We could argue that patroling the streets is a waste of capacity and instead should figure out how police officers can carry brooms to sweep the streets during downtime.
We could eliminate walkie-talkies and laptops in their cars as the mindset of rationalization and infrastructure consolidation could take over. We would simply assign them crackberries instead. Consider the possibilities if we could instill a governance model where we convinced criminals to arrest themselves using best practices.
Let's also eliminate the practice of orderly promotion and competencies in order to rise the career ladder and replace it with an HR approved method where college graduates with consulting backgrounds are now in charge of those more experienced. Their first task is to create an enterprise tracking application to measure how many donuts are consumed. We could hire lots of bean counters who can find interesting patterns in donut consumption behavior such as those who love sprinkles make for great project managers.
We would then be interviewed by magazines such as CIO where we could attempt to convince others that knowledge of the domain is less important and even possibly convince the criminals of the world that they will benefit from this new form of leadershit...
