SteveJ-restore-test

A thought on some new taxonomies in the I.T. world. Even the meaning of "I.T." has changed - it's now Business I.T. Somehow that also includes what we do at home... But not the development of embedded devices. So what about the tinkerers? (what's the collective noun of 'tinkers'? A gadget of tinkers?) What is it that they do?? It isn't Business I.T. - but is often done on the same hardware/equipment. These are the people that would've once been ' ham ' or amateur radio operators. My local Linux Users Group is where I find them now - or LCA - Linux.Conf.AU - if I was prepared to pay ;-) Business Systems, are constructed from all these components. In Business I.T., a chief concern should be for The Data. If you upgrade MS-Word or MS-Excel and can't access old documents, is that important to someone?? If your business includes such documents in a critical business process/system, it's now bought a whole whirl of cost and trouble ...

Creation Date: Fri Nov 24 13:00:35 EST 2006 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Title: Paint by Numbers Uses: Not to be used without attribution. Motivation: Explaining why Outsourcers do what they do. STATUS: ==ROUGH NOTES== ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Aim: + Organise my thoughts about and observations of IT Outsourcing and Services companies. + Explain to others why the same organisation & culture exists across many organisations and countries. + Explain why OpenSource happens as it does, and is generally anathema in these organisations. Synopsis: Outsourcers provide MacDonald's like certainity and product consistency to their large clients - exactly what the client management wants and expects. They achieve this through high-control management and fine-grained technical specialisation, or by "americanisation". Probably provably the most effi...