I love working with technical people. I’ve either been one or managed them my entire career. When people used to tell me Unix wasn’t friendly, I used to respond “if you want friendly, get a dog.” One time when I was managing the Basis team for a client on a large implementation, the project executive called me and said my new “guy” had arrived and was lost. I asked him how did he know he was my guy, he said “he’s wearing suite pants 2 inches too short, white socks, and hard shoes.” I responded “He’s mine – which way did he go?” Not all technical people fit the stereotype and many don’t, but enough do that it rings true to anyone I’ve shared this story with.
Since I started my career in college swearing I’d never wear a tie (I was a biologist), live in cornfield (only home in Naperville, IL I could afford), or work for IBM (the implemented a great Unix variant: AIX), What I find so amazing about working with technical people is how they think. Technical people love to solve problems. In my career, I found I wanted to influence not just the details of implementation of the technology, but the thought that went into designing the project. To do that required more than just learning to tie a tie and put on suit. It meant learning to understand how business was conducted and how and what the senior leaders in companies thought.
Here are some great insights collected by IBM of how the executives at your company view the world. It has been collected, collated, and put into a readily consumable format. And yes, I work for IBM. I’m proud of working for them; however, this is my personal blog, so this is more me than the company. In fact, I required to tell you that this is my personal opinion, plus it really is.
Regardless, since irregardless isn’t a word, this is great information.
Global CFO Study
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/cfo/cfostudy2010/
C-suite insights
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/c-suite/insights/
CEO study
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/ceo/ceostudy2010/
CIO study
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/cio/ciostudy/executive-views.html
Recently, I read the following.
Leave it to Rob Carter, the CIO of FedEx, to clarify what’s really powerful about cloud computing. Carter, the company’s CIO since 2000 and an InformationWeek advisory board member for almost as long, has a knack for discussing technology in a way that cuts to the business payoff, but without leaning on buzzwords that whitewash the complexity involved.
Carter boils down cloud computing, when applied to IT infrastructure, to “general purpose computing.” It’s the ability to connect servers, networking, and storage that are “workload agnostic,” meaning the jobs they handle can be shuffled around among a company’s computers, so those machines are used as efficiently as possible.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/229100022
I agree from an operational view, but not from the bigger picture. Cloud is part of revolution of opening computing from being a model of the sub-set of our life to a model of our life. Cloud makes raw computing power almost free. Now it only a question of what to do with it and how to use it.
I’d also like to thank my friend, colleague, and mentor for encouraging me to first blog on SAP Developers Network and now here. I don’t think I would have done it without his encouragement. His is one of the few blogs I seldom miss.
http://andvijaysays.wordpress.com/
Thoughts, Theories, Facts, and Notions 