It is early March 2010 as I write this, the time of year when many of us in New England are of the mind that winter has gone on long enough. As it happens, the skies are mercifully blue at the moment, rather than their usual dull gray for this time of year – always a happy thing for those of us who prefer to work with a clear view to the horizon. Given the recent, extended season of economic cloudiness, I will take it as a good omen.
As we begin this new year and decade in earnest, I have decided to embark on a new adventure in my career as a technologist and, since last year, independent consultant. In this it seems I have some good company. Many of my former colleagues, refugees from the financial services IT sector during the recent dust-up, have also embarked on new enterprises over the past year. Some have returned to school. Others have given up on the profession entirely, looking to find their future in less frenetic pursuits. And a few have literally gone “walkabout” to the nether reaches of Tierra del Fuego or to the banks of the Ganges. I have decided to set forth too, but on a different sort of quest, one of words and, I hope, solutions.
The adventure I have in mind is one in which the integrity of the journey itself and the truths it reveals are what matter most, one in which the destination is not foreordained. This blog will serve as the journal for those travels, a record of impressions, descriptions, and reckonings, offered up from time to time for all of you to read and comment upon.
My plan is simple, yet ambitious nonetheless: to seek out and investigate some of the more challenging questions that present themselves today within the ever-changing, always contentious world of “enterprise technology.” The term, as it’s commonly used, conjures up images of large, complex, corporate settings, places with a great diversity of computing platforms, of desktops, servers, and mainframes, of numerous, varied, and equally complex proprietary applications, places that require prodigious amounts of processing power, and where the processing typically takes place in vast, silently humming data centers. For the most part, this is exactly how the term will be applied here. It is also the context with which I am most familiar.
I should note that I have a more capacious definition of the concept in mind as well, one that encompasses enterprises of all sizes, conditions, and configurations. Whether the largest of corporate entities or institutional settings, or the smallest of individually-owned, web-based businesses, all can be considered “enterprises” of some sort. All attempt to employ people and produce something, whether of economic, social, or intellectual value. In the 21st century, all struggle to make sense of putting technology to the best use possible for their particular interests. There are, of course, vast differences in the scope and nature of the technologies used in these various enterprises, and oftentimes different lessons to be learned from each of them as well. Yet all share something fundamental in common, for it is no longer a question of “whether” human enterprises will actually leverage technology in significant ways going forward, but rather of “how” – regardless of their size or shape. The answer, or answers, to that question will have large implications for us all.
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