Over the falls

So, the conference is over, and I took a lot of notes. Rather than post them all here, I've compiled my own Gartner Research document that I think sums up being at the conference. Normally, these kind of research documents sell for US$95 - but you can have this one for free: Build a Virtual Team to consolidate success in the Real-Time Enterprise 28 April 2005 Gordon Taylor, Maverick Gartner Analyst, Asia Pacific The pace of modern business today is accelerating. Customers are demanding more immediate, dynamic business solutions that meet their expectations. Organizations can no longer engage with previous models of interaction - ones that take time to interface with the supply management chain. Instead, they need to actively improve customer relations through one thing: Better Business Flexibility. Virtual Teams are frequently being proposed as a solution to this all-too-common problem. Virtual teams can be thought of as the central hub of an Enterprise Nervous System - taking adva...

Bored and wandering around the sydney airport, waiting to go home after the gartner ADIWS conference. Internet connectivity was really hard to come by at the conference, so I wrote posts offline, which I'll post later - suffice to say that, while there were some really intriguing and useful elements, there was also a ball-bouncing amount of unadulterated architecture wank like I've never heard. It was interesting to realise that most of the people who deploy TRIM (there are lots of customers on the attendee list) have architects who are dealing with all these big IT system problems, and more importantly, have the power to chuck out, integrate or replace legacy systems. I'm not sure if TOWER has a marketing strategy for these enterprise architects (very few of the ones I spoke to were aware of TRIM), but if not there's possibly some imperative to do so sometime soon. Curse this crappy internet kiosk! Some engineering genius at webpoint decided to prevent people from rese...

Sitting in a fancy hotel waiting for room service, and feeling rather lonely. There’s something about a house with 4 (sometimes more) screaming kids that creates a lovely homely familiness. It also drives you bonkers, but in a nice way. I’ve arrived in Sydney to attend the Gartner Application Development and Web Services Summit. I don’t want to be one of those negativity pants guys who bemoans everything, because that’s just too easy, so I’ll just say now that I’ve never met a single Gartner analyst who impressed me much, and that I’m hoping to have that view rectified by this shindig. The flight up was okay, although there’s something terribly unnerving about being strapped into a big metal thing and hurtled through the air like that… Anyway, I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s Purple Cow on the way. Seth asserts that there is an additional P to the standard marketing rules (Product, Price, Position) and that that P is a Purple Cow. (Obviously he went looking for someth...

I just opened a Flickr account. Now, I'm nowhere near the photographer that my brother is (as is clearly evident from this picture of mount painter sunset taken on mobile phone:) But the signup process was actually fun. Easy, and actually fun. Without doubt the best internet signup thingy I've ever done. Every single other internet account based service provider should take note. The Writ Large ability to totally skip the "identity rape" section meant that I actually filled some of it in. With real information! If you're looking for an excellent free service to host your photos on the web, (which is kind of an odd thing to be looking for, I suppose), it comes highly reccomended.

I spent some of today reviewing resumes for a position at TOWER Software . I also devised the GoodGord Shabby Resume Rating System. The GSR2S is a scale of one to five, with one being good and five being bad. I don't know why I did it that way. That's how the top forty works, but maybe that's not the best model. Anyway. in the unlikely event that I'm hiring you one day, here's the good oil on how it works: Looks like a potential hire. Will Interview. Looks like a potential hire, but something is in the way - work permit, other hassle, or something else that would basically make them less attractive than a 1 Had the right skills for the position, but something about the resume or portfolio made me feel creepy. Wrote their entire resume in Comic Sans MS, for instance. Their blog bitches and moans about everyone they know... Had limited exposure to the required skillset, or no supplementary evidence. Had a really long boring resume that was over 5 pages ...

Do you suck at Tetris? Ever wish you hadn't built a big monolith, waiting for the long thin red bit to fall from the sky? Well Here's the solution you've been waiting for...

Alison is a huge coffee fan - but I wonder if she would balk at this: Prepare for weird...

After two solid days, of car-fixing, I've had enough. Saturday was replacing the radiator in the Nomad with an extra expensive, non-leaking model, and Sunday was changing the drum brakes on the Excel. Filthy, and quite exhausted, I solemnly cross my fingers in the hope that nothing goes wrong with either car for at least three months. Enormous thanks have to go to Chris, who is my candidate for human-most-likely-to-be-the-new-messiah-that-nobody-has-noticed-yet. Think about it. Chris seems to know everything, is polite and kind to everyone, and had no trouble removing most of the interior of a car in less than an hour. That's not the miracle, the miracle is that when we put it all back together, there were no screws left over! It's true. (I'm sure Jesus would've been able to change a radiator in a Nissan, no worries.) It may be that Chris has some competition though. My Stepfather Terry came over today just as I was cursing and swearing at the (unbeknownst-to-me) u...

From Lindsay's response : "We actually *are* thought leaders in this field. What we're try(ing) to do now, is be less shy about it." Agreed -we are. But, one of the tools that we'll use to promote this fact is publishing authentic stories that, while entirely true, create impressions in the minds of people that may not be. We've done it in the past. If I read Lindsay's case studies, they sound as though every single person using TRIM absolutely loves it. But we all know that that can't be true - it's just the impression that we get from reading the document. As I said, I don't have any qualms about this approach - we need to create a context where our product is attractive. It's a whole new skillset, and one that I don't understand. Is it ethical for a doctor to prescribe somtething like homeopathic remedies for a particularly easily influenced patient when he knows that they are absolute bollocks? I think that it is, because the docto...

If you're like everybody, you might dig this complete beatles songbook . It's got every song from every album. Man - If I'd found one of these when I was fifteen , I would have got much worse cramp in my hands...

One of the things that I find really fascinating is the whole concept of marketing. The fact that most perceptions of quality are no more than illusions, put in your head by skilled teams of people who's job it is to change the way you perceive something. Lindsay's post about the new world of marketing is encouraging, but it's hard to not believe that it's all just more lies. Check out Seth Godin's new book for proof... I spent a bunch of today working with our marketing team on where to position our new product, and I have to admit, it was really quite fun. I felt like one of the kids in Enid Blyton's Secret Seven - meeting in secret to determine which messages we would send (that's market speak for lies we will tell) to establish "Thought Leadership" (which is marketspeak for people who other people follow) Once upon a time, I would've believed that you could trust people to get the right impression of your product based solely on it's...

Man... ever have those times in your life where everything just seems to go pear-shaped? I'm in the middle of one of them right now. My Dad affectionately refers to these periods as "a visit from the Fuck-up Fairy". First I decided to replace the carpet in my house, and paint a room, and replace a cornice, and a skirting board, all in the space of a weekend. This led to consecutive trips to the hardware store, breaking things( lots of things), cutting and bruising myself with various sharp and/or blunt instuments, torrents of profanity, my dear kids asking me heaps of very reasonable questions while I tried not to swear at them, and me generally getting really, really irritated. The network at work has been up and down like a yo-yo - causing all my carefully laid out systems to break in bizzare and unexpected ways, and probably costing me at least two days worth of precious schedule. Then, both family cars decided that that was about long enough to function correctly , ...

The best of both worlds? http://yagoohoogle.com

Happy and high from playing music with my band, it dawned on me that blogging is a bit like poo. How so, you ask? Well, I'm going to tell you anyway. Sometimes, you just gotta do one, and you rush to the blogger and squeeze one out. Blogs are internet poo.

Our bank is insane. They've just given us another 10 thousand dollars credit. That's a lot. Now the dangerous thing about this is, that it increases the probability of us being an extra 10 thousand dollars in debt (with 0 being no chance, and 1 being every possible chance) to around 1. The reasons behind this are not very hard to understand. If I gave you a big wad of hundred dollar bills, and put them in a pile next to your front door and said - "You can spend all of these if you want, It's probably not a great idea though, because of... blah blah trailing off into the distance some boring crap about interest and financial responsibility..." When I came back there probably wouldn't be many bills left. Ali calls it "Shopping". I jokingly refer to it as "contributing to the impending financial crisis", but I'm just as bad. The reasons behind my inability to manage money in a responsible, accountant-like way are somewhat more interesting...