Random thoughts... 2004/1

Core Business vs. Core Activity

The biggest bullsh*t I hear as soon as outsourcing is mentioned is that IT is "not our core business", and thus a good candidate to be outsourced. Cleaning the office is not our core business, and has been successfully outsourced, feeding our employees (i.e. resources) is not our core activity, and has been successfully outsourced, so why not outsource IT, which is not our core business either.

I have a number of points to raise to anyone who is currently somewhere in that particular train of thought:

First of all, to most companies IT is indeed not their core business (because they are not making money from it), but I would like to postulate that it is a core activity. What I mean by this is that to many companies IT is the prime enabler for their business and even though they do not make money from it, losing their IT would mean losing their business. Ask yourself this: if your IT stops for a day, how does that impact your primary business processes? If the IT of a bus company stops life becomes difficult for them, but they can still send out their buses with drivers and transport customers. If the IT of a department store fails they can still (in theory) sell stuff to customers and receive cash payments. However if the IT of a bank fails they can close their doors because their primary business processes rely on IT to an extent that makes it impossible to do anything without the computers being available...

So ask yourself this: Is it wise to lose direct control over my prime business enabler (a core activity)? If the insourcer screws up, whose name will be on the front pages?

The second point I would like to raise is to ask yourself whether you as an organisation are capable of outsourcing your IT. Outsourcing requires that you are capable of:

1. Specifying exactly what you want
2. Checking whether what you received conforms to the specifications

That's why outsourcing the company cafetaria is so successful: Anyone can explain exactly what they want (food for a 100 employees per day, three types of bread, 2 cheeses, peanut butter and a different soup every day) and it is easy to check if that has been delivered...

Can you say the same about your IT? How good are you exactly at writing specifications and requirements? And how good are your acceptance testers?

Outsourcing is too often seen as a quick win to cut costs. If costs are out of control, why can't companies solve that themselves?

Colonising Mars...

Anyway, if you really want to know how the colonisation of Mars will happen, read The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Taalvirus: Het kan niet zo zijn...

Er waart wederom een taalvirus door het land. Na het "zeg maar" virus horen we nu te pas en te onpas: "het kan niet zo zijn".

Hoezo "het kan niet zo zijn"? Het kan wel zo zijn!

Met name in kringen van politici en bestuurders is de uitspraak zeer populair. "Het kan niet zo zijn" wordt gebruikt om een mening over te brengen op een wijze die doet vermoeden dat iedereen die mening deelt. Er wordt namelijk niet duidelijk gemaakt wiens mening het is!

Kijk bijvoorbeeld naar het volgende stukje tekst van Europarlementariër Joost Lagendijk van Groen Links (over de situatie in het Midden-Oosten; volledige tekst hier): "Het kan niet zo zijn dat wij maar gewoon doorgaan alsof er niks aan de hand is, terwijl bijna de oorlog uitbreekt."

Wat hij eigenlijk bedoelt is: "Ik ben van mening dat we niet gewoon kunnen doorgaan alsof er niks aan de hand is, terwijl bijna de oorlog uitbreekt.". Of, "Groen Links vindt dat we niet gewoon kunnen...".

Als je iets vindt, ZEG DAT DAN GEWOON! Durf uit te komen voor je mening!

Het "het kan niet zo zijn" taalvirus past in de Nederlandse cultuur van breedtrekken en het presenteren van de eigen mening als een sociaal gegeven (met name leden van de Tweede Kamer maken zich hier veelvuldig schuldig aan).

"Het kan niet zo zijn" is indirect taalgebruik. Strijd met mij mee tegen dit taalvirus!

You learn something new every day...

The hotel I am in offers laundry service, but the prices are highway robbery in plain daylight. Even though I can expense these kind of things I hate to feel that I (or somebody, my customer) is being ripped off. And thus I asked the hotel concierge for a good laundromat nearby...

Well "nearby" is a flexible concept in Chicago. The Omni hotel is in the middle of the central district (or, "The Loop" as Chicagoans refer to it) and apart from classy shops, luxury hotels and swanky office buildings there is not much in the way of "real life" here. So he directed me to a Spin-Cycle franchise at 1685 N. Milwaukee Ave.

I went to Yahoo! Maps and looked up the zip code. I then synchronized the information from the Yahoo! map with my map of Chicago, and decided that I needed to proceed to the Logan Square station on the blue line (CTA).

After a comfortable train ride I got off and found myself somewhere near 2920 N. Milwaukee Ave!

And then it dawned on me. US zip code areas are BIG! Bigger than Dutch zip code areas. So the Yahoo! map had shown me the center of the area, but the laundromat was probably several miles south!

Lesson learned: when using Yahoo! Maps, enter the complete address instead of just the zip code! Using the zip code gives you the center of a very big area. The entire address is needed for a correct fix on how to get there!

(As a short explanation: In the Netherlands a zip code and a house number is a unique location index in the entire country. Thus the combination of zip 1112XC and house number 16 is enough to get a letter delivered. Therefore, zip code areas are small and routing to a zip will put you very close to where you want to be...)

Fortunately US cities are laid out logically and Chicago bus routes are predictable. I hopped on a bus going south across N. Milwaukee Avenue and after a couple of minutes we passed the laundry shop.

Which leaves me with just one hint for the Spin-Cycle guys: Include directions to your shops on your web pages!

Power over Ethernet

Link...

Popular pasttime on Schiphol...

The game: The first person to spot a smiling KLM stewardess wins!

Ridiculous...

On one patrol you run into a group of Iraqis that are looting a container. Your unit responds. Shots are fired. The crowd panics and reacts adversely. More shots are fired. One looter dies (but is carried away immediately by the looters and buried straight away. Really handy for an investigation).

The next thing you know is that you are whisked away on a plane to the motherland where you are imprisoned and charged with manslaughter and homicide.

HAS THE DUTCH MILITARY STAFF AND PUBLIC PROSECUTORS GONE TOTALLY MAD!?!?

I mean, we are not talking about the streets of Hoofddorp (suburbia close to Amsterdam). There is real danger there. The Dutch forces stationed in Iraq are risking their lives on an important mission (important for the people of Iraq, that is). They were under (some form of) attack. The Iraqi that was shot (however unfortunate it might be) was not leisurely walking his dog only to be shot point blank by the marine; he was a member of a group of looters that ignored the warnings of the powers that are. One should not do this!

I am not advocating outright shooting and unlimited use of force by our troops in Iraq, but I do think that "our boys" (I am sounding like my grandfather here) deserve a lot of leeway and that in case of incidents like this they deserve an honourable treatment and a good investigation "sur place".

I also condemn the foolish remarks made by the Attorney General who compared our heavily armed soldiers in Iraq to ordinary policemen. This guy must be sent looking for his marbles, preferably in a place where he is routinely fired upon.

Support our troops!

We need a Perl appserver...

Q: But do we want that we do not have?

A: A Perl appserver!

It would be an environment for distributed Perl applications. It would be named "Perl Harbor"; deployed Perl components would be called "Pearls"; the middleware that does stuff under water would be "submarines". An application consisting of multiple "Pearls" would of course be a "Necklace", and the containers in which the "Pearls" live "Oysters".

We would be able to develop cross-platform multi-tiered applications in our favourite programming language. There would be no need for a lenghty compile/link/package cycle.

Any volunteers?

This software ROCKS!

The Aduna AutoFocus tool indexes a set of documents (on a local hard disk, file server or web server) and then gives you a top rate user interface for finding documents that match a set of keywords. Instead of just allowing you to search random words it gives suggestions about other keywords and tells you how many document would conform to your extended search. The pictures it draws to visualise your result set are unbelievable!

Privacy worries...

Article... (by me :-).

Raar kapsel...

Dit is grappig... Zoek in Google op "raar kapsel", en .... guess what .... de pagina van JP de MP komt bovenaan in de lijst...

De reden, zie hier...

:-)