Skip to content

November 2008

What are we doing?? – Part Three

This is what got me thinking about “What (the %*&$) are we really doing?”. Are gazillions of dollars being invested in IT, by organizations just trying to maintain their status quo? As the study shows, this is partly true. Businesses require to grow for survival. Growth requires accommodating more and more people and systems into your business. It is very natural (and useful) to be paranoid of these new people / systems. As businesses grow they have to become more or less bureaucratic. Bureaucracy requires additional processing power. This power can either be man OR machine If the business chooses… Read More »What are we doing?? – Part Three

What are we doing?? – Part Two

Any system is inherently trust based but always tends towards being distrustful. Consider a prisoners’ dilemma example. (A) = A crook with a bag of jewels(B) = Another with $100 (A) needs the money and (B) needs the jewels. Now they are both “if you see my face, I’ll have to kill you” kind of guys. So they develop a simple system. (A) leaves the money a designated place in the forest and (B) leaves the bag of jewels at another designated place. If they both co-operate, they leave happy. But life is not so simple, is it? Once they… Read More »What are we doing?? – Part Two

What are we doing?? – Part One

I am doing what we call an Inception for a new project. The situation is not at all unusual. The Constraints An Organization with a bunch of generic e-commerce platforms Live customer sites on each of these platforms One of these platforms particularly painful Integration with proprietary back-office operations software The RequirementsBuild a custom platform that will replace all the existing ones, support all the customer sites and have a bunch of unique features. And BTW we need to go live in 2 months.How?The only way to do this is build a bare bones application that can take a couple… Read More »What are we doing?? – Part One