An IT Industry Festivus Celebration: My Airing of Grievances
How tech vendors, CIOs, analysts and other assorted IT types have let me down during 2010.
Gather 'round, everyone, because Festivus is upon us (celebrated December 23, for all you non-Seinfeld aficionados), and it's about time we got started.
Print
"IT'S A FESTIVUS FOR THE REST OF US!"
First up: The Airing of Grievances, in which I will now let everyone in the IT industry know all the ways in which they have disappointed me during the past year.
Everyone Associated with These Software Disasters. You've got complicit enterprise software vendors, smarmy consultants, baffled CIOs, beleaguered IT staffers, frustrated users and various CEOs and elected officials making a mess of things in 2010. And, for the record: "Rip and Replace" is not "best practice" for enterprise systems.
Larry Ellison. Was it me, or did he seem to "lose his s#!t" at times during 2010? (See here and here.)
CIOs. For being lured into another IT trap that even Admiral Ackbar could see coming light years away: Rushing in to business intelligence rollouts without first building a comprehensive business case.
Foxconn Technology Group. A dozen tragic employee suicides at Foxconn's factory complexes (which include worker dormitories), and the famous maker of Apple products' plan is to install nets on buildings designed to catch people attempting to jump. Um, I suppose that's one way to solve the problem.
Bosses/Speakers Who Still Stink at Giving Presentations and Kill Us with Death by PowerPoint. Most of us are not Steve Jobs. But with all of the sound advice and tech assistance available today, why are most presentations still worse than a colonoscopy? (See HP's body of work at Oracle OpenWorld 2010.)
Blood-Sucking Social Media Gurus. Not my words (they're his), but the implication is spot on.
Léo Apotheker. His brief tenure as SAP's CEO was mired by mistake after mistake, a crashing global economy and a lack of effective leadership at the ERP giant. And yet we now have to refer to him as "HP CEO Léo Apotheker." Go figure.
Acquisitive CEOs, CFOs and COOs. Hey, friends, you might want to bring the CIO into future M&A discussions before you sign on the dotted line, especially if there are significant "expected synergies and savings" from "combined IT operations." Just a thought.
Apple Fanboys, Facebook Fanatics, Microsoft Believers, Google Groupies, RIM Addicts. The blind devotion has become so annoying and polarizing with these characters that no explanation seems necessary.
Oracle. Oracle is still the "Teflon Don" of ERP software maintenance and support fees. And, if 2010 is any indication, Oracle will take extreme action to protect those fees in the future, customers be damned.
Wall Street, Investment Bankers and Hedge-Fund Managers. Just feels like the right thing to say: Thanks a lot for this New Normal, guys.
Gartner. OK, OK, Gartner, we have accepted your annual "Hype Cycles" (and may actually like it a bit too much), but the "Cool Vendors" list just reeks of worthless, indulgent money-making.
Steve Jobs in the Sky with Diamonds. Really, Steve, the Beatles catalog on iTunes was going to be a day that we'd never forget? Hmmm, I guess Nov. 16, 2010, was more important than, say, my sons' births or my wedding day.
Previous Post: The Fallacy of Vendor-Driven IT InnovationNext Post: Like It or Not, Here Comes the Facebook-ization of ERP
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
