Operational Agility

My second comment on Bill Barr’s most interesting blog concerns his post Applied IT vs. Computer Science/Technology.

Wow – where to start – this post covers so much ground!

I hope he is not living up to his claim to be putting out ideas 5 years ahead of their time when he describes the “ever widening gap between the Business and IT” and “the miserable job the majority of IT has done with respect to delivering value to the business”.  I thought the gap was closing and that enterprise IT people these days are much more business focussed.

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I’ve only recently discovered Bill Barr’s blog (and added it to my blogroll) and found some really interesting views that I felt compelled to post about.

Firstly at Ivory Tower or Crow’s nest? Bill argues for the need for IT architects to take a high level view without retreating into an ivory tower.  I am pretty convinced that the role of an IT architect is to see the bigger (business) picture and always be looking ahead to prepare the matching and necessary infrastructure.

I am equally convinced that “if we could only convince businesses of the value of having a lookout place high enough to see beyond the next quarter ….” then the job of the IT architect would be much simpler.

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Allan Engelhardt is a guy I have worked with and respect a lot.  His knowledge of enterprise IT architecture is way beyond mine and he seems to successfully bridge the gap between IT purity and business need – in other words he is a pragmatist whose focus remains on delivering the end result.

So I found my thoughts provoked by his recent post on The Post GUI Era based on discussion from O’Reilly’s 2007 Emerging Technologies conference.

Now, I wasn’t at the conference but I do think that Allan has barely scratched the surface in this debate.  The theory goes that man wasn’t born understanding GUIs, and more natural interfaces such as speech, for example, are potentially better ways of managing the interface between human beings and technology.

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