Doesn't "binding arbitration" mean that you agree to be bound by the decision of the arbitrator before he/she actually makes their actual decision? It's my understanding that you agree up-front to be bound whatever they decide. I don't think you get their decision then get to decide, "Nah, I don't like that, never mind.".
Instead of starting with a joke, it can also be fun to start with some bit of trivia about what you're going to talk about. Asking a question of the audience gets them engaged a bit more. Something like, "Show of hands, how many think our bandwidth utilization last year was between a and b? between b and c?..." or "Can anyone guess how many servers/miles of network cable/switches there are on our network?" Maybe have a can of redbull or a candy bar as a prize for the best guess.
I work at a company where every presentation has to have a PowerPoint deck and it's almost heretical to do a presentation without one. Nothing's worse than having someone drone on, reading their PowerPoint slides that have so much text that they're impossible to read.
The point of focus the presentation should be you and what you have to say and not what you put on a set of slides.
One of the best presentations I ever saw was by Peter Senge (MIT Prof, author of The 5th Discipline). He had no slides at all. Only at one point did he turn on an overhead projector and draw on it. He was incredibly engaging and I could have easily watched him present or another hour. The interesting thing was that while he was drawing on the projector, everyone was very drawn in to see what what going to come out... it was very dynamic.
I'm no authority on presentations, but here's what I like to do: * start with some kind of joke or bit of levity to lighten things up and make people (and yourself) more comfortable. It's hard to go wrong with a relevant XKCD or Dilbert comic (if you have slides) * keep the slides to a minimum and make them graphical so you can talk about them but not read them * plan to actually use about 75% of your alloted time. This gives you a chance to entertain questions and builds a buffer for going into details if needed. Nobody will complain if you finish early. * have a "what's the one thing I want them to remember" and close with that * try to stay on topic and don't let questions derail your presentation. We sometimes have a "parking lot" written on a side board for writing down issues to be raised later so they don't break down the current meeting.
In contrast to Senge's presentation, I was stuck in one at an Army Birthday Ball that started optimistically enough but ended badly. The keynote speaker started with "Be bright, be brief, be gone." and then proceeded to miss all three while killing the mood of the evening with a 2 hour briefing on how bad things were.
In any case, try to have fun. If you're having fun, there's a better chance that the others will enjoy your presentation.
Lastly, if you have control over the order of presenters, try not to follow someone who is much better at presentations than you are.
One of my best friends is a public defender... and she's really good at her work.
I once made the joke that I'd do my best to keep out of trouble and not need her services. She retorted that I could afford them.
I'd have to be essentially destitute before I could use a court-paid public defender.
But even then, you're not going to get through the process cost-free. There are plenty of other court costs and fees you'll have to pony up, just for the privilege of being charged with a crime.
Books about chaos and nonlinear dynamics tend to use "dynamical". I'm not sure how it might be distinct from "dynamic".
For example, a "classic" book, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, by Strogatz has a section titled, "A Dynamical View of the World" Now that we have established the ideas of nonlinearity and phase space, we can present a framework for dynamics and its applications.
So within the title and the first sentence he uses dynamical and dynamic. I don't think it was a mistake, but I'm not sure what difference there is.
I can second that. I've been a happy customer of both Virgin Mobile and Straight Talk. Both have usable $35/month plans. I augment mine by using Skype from home.
I've also had good luck with both when returning an unwanted "trial" phone (got an upgrade phone, didn't like it, took/sent it back). I particularly like the LG Optimus V I'm currently using with Virgin Mobile.
Every now and then I check the rates and phones on Verizon or Sprint but it usually works out to about double what I pay per month. Even when you factor in that I pay for the phone up-front, it's still far cheaper.
I was really fortunate because he was giving a presentation in my city last night, sponsored by the Center For Inquiry.
He was vibrant and sharp, but clearly not in the best of health. He talked about recently going through chemotherapy and then later having open-heart surgery. I'm really glad I got to see him.
Several of the prepaid smartphone plans come with data included. Mine is $35/month for 300 minutes and unlimited text and data. Virgin Mobile and Straight-talk both have some decent Android phones with unlimited voice and data for under $55/month.
> I'm a programmer but I don't spend all my day programming. There are long periods of time where I do no programming at all, I'm helping out others, answering questions,
Imagine now you help five colleagues solve their problems - they get the credit because they did the commits, and you get fired for being unproductive.
I once worked for a guy who said, "be careful what you measure - you'll get more of it".
Here it is: Three of them were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were mere pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in the black outer reaches of space. All of them, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life~, in the cases of the third and fourth planets their surface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogen monoxide-in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough to permit a degree of social contact.
He also referred to Mike (the computer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" as a "pocket of negative entropy".
Throw in something about metabolism and you probably have a pretty good set of parameters for identifying life. Including "negative entropy" eliminates fire from being a life form, since while it does reproduce and energy is metabolized, it is also increasing the entropy around itself.
> but life could generally be defined as the ability to actively resist entropy
Indeed, that's what I thought of too - I think it was in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land that he used a phrase something like "phenomena of localized negative entropy".
There's no need for a special tool. Just put unique serial numbers on each rag. Note which ones you check out at the beginning of a process, then make sure you can account for all of them when you're done with the process.
Sure, putting serial numbers on rags is more expensive than normal rags; but not as expensive as losing a satellite.
One thing to remember is that Idaho is pretty large in land-area and pretty small in population. There are lots of small towns with really small schools.
One thing this will help enable is kids in these small schools being able to take a wider variety of courses, or more advanced courses that their local school district simply can't afford to offer. Imagine a high school so small that there is only one "science" teacher for all science subjects. Now imagine you're a kid in that school and you love physics and would like to take AP physics so you can get a leg up going to college.
In Boise (over 100k population) there's no problem - there are plenty of teachers and plenty of courses. But if you're in Twin Falls or an even smaller community (like the one Napoleon Dynamite was set it), you're screwed as a kid.
Another thing to consider is that for everyone, the future of education will be web-delivered courses. If you've ever done one, you'll know that courses delivered this way require a different kind of discipline than a "forced to sit in a seat" class. If you agree that the idea of k-12 education is to prepare students for life, then it makes sense that part of the education process is to teach kids how to learn using this relatively new method.
By requiring it of all schools (large or small), it forces the issue of establishing the infrastructure to support it and it also helps level the playing field for kids who are at a geographic disadvantage.
Agreed. I don't give any biller direct access to my accounts but instead I use my credit-union's bill pay to transmit all payments (except one). The exception is the federal student loan folks... I let them auto-draft my payments because they give me 1/4% discount on my interest for doing so. Sadly, that's significant enough to make a difference in my philosophy.
In a similar way, I never use my "visa debit" card that's attached to my checking account as a credit card for the same reason. I only ever use it as a debit card where I have to key in a PIN.
The other obvious reason is that if the company taking the money takes too much. If they "accidentally" bill you for a year of service instead of a month, and you have this coming from your checking account, you suddenly may not be able to pay your rent/mortgage and might even have checks bounce.
Sure you might get it all sorted out with the biller and your bank but in the mean time it can cause a lot of problems.
Using a credit-card account as a buffer protects your checking account from these kinds of accidents. Plus banks tend to be more responsive to credit card problems than they are with checking account problems. With the first, it's their money that's messed with, with the latter it's yours.
Yup... I logged out and back in, and even rebooted. No dice. But thanks anyway.
Might I suggest you get a bit more bran in your diet or get a massage every now and then. It will probably improve your disposition and you might even live longer.
Well, I'd be more grateful, I suppose, if the so-called solution actually worked.
Here's another irritating aspect of the way they've implemented this... the stop and cancel buttons are very small and the whole area jiggles back and forth while the process is working, so it's hard to click the buttons when they're jiggling about. I suspect, however, you'll just call me rude for bringing it up.
Again, I'm not the only person to bring these problems up and I'm not going to bother when the other people get shouted down rudely with essentially "this is the way we're doing it, so tough"... even when they "ask nicely".
Well maybe. To extend your metaphor, what I need is just a pallet jack that me and about 50 other people can use. I'd love to have IT provide a pallet jack because a forklift is overkill. Because they can't provide a pallet jack, I'm forced to hack together something the best I can... say a wheel-burrow, and make that tool available to the people who need it. I have no choice but to do this because the job has to be done.
What our business needs is an IT organization that handles all kinds of lifting and moving methodologies that can be applied to a range of problems, from small ones like simple ETL from Excel into a database to large ones like a new SAP implementation. Unfortunately, our IT is only interested in the huge-scale problems - yet the complain when the rest of the business then comes up with solutions without them. It's an unfortunate situation.
only for the users to stick with the existing mess "because it works", while at the same time the same users are whining about all the bugs in it.
The best you can hope for here is that your own management will support you "against" those users when you say you can't support it any more the way it is - that if they want any more work, it has to be the "new way".
I've had to make calls like that on side projects like where we had spent far more effort on it than we had been willing to, and I pretty much put an end to it - with the ultimatum that they had to pony up their own person to take over the work. I'm lucky enough that even though they complained, my boss backed me on the decision.
Ahh... I think we work in slightly different worlds. I assumed the inventory system was something used internally within the company and not a product sold to external customers. Those are the kinds of problems I consistently face... we have internal demands for data or reports and IT is a nearly impossible partner to work with with these requests. In my world, it's a matter of spending a lot of hours doing something like that completely by hand (and I mean as bad as drawing hundreds of little boxes on a powerpoint slide, putting numbers in them, and coloring them appropriately by hand) or figuring out some kind of macro or even lightweight application to accomplish the work in a more automated manner.
Products intended for customers are an entirely different matter and should be handled by product development teams.
Though if I'm misunderstanding and you mean "internal customers" by customers, then the question I would ask is: how did he "hack together" something that seems to work pretty well, yet the IT organization can't touch replicating that effort without $100k? Couldn't there be a middle-ground? Using another post of on this thread, are they trying to use the methodology, requirements, and standards used in building a skyscraper when what's actually needed is a garden shed?
Somehow, I think this struggle/balance might be one of those nearly intractable problems, and I don't think we'll solve it here. I hope you're able to come up with a good fix for what's going on with your customers.
I agree with what you're saying. The problem I encounter is an IT organization that is focused around making huge SAP implementation. They probably do that as well as anybody else, but they try to apply the same methodology and mindset to every problem and it quickly blows out of proportion.
The excel sheet example is already "in production" in that I have several people around the world using it - and pretty successfully (the VBA is in an Access file executed in citrix).
The thing is, this set of data is a "flavour du jour" of the VPs I make reports for - they want to see this data showing up in their reports "now", but in a year they're not going to care about it. This is is the kind of thing we have to roll-out fast and careful integration into other systems is really not that critical. It won't be around long enough to matter to other systems.
That's not to say this data isn't important - it is, for the problems the business is facing right now. But it's the kind of thing that has to happen pretty quickly.
It's vital to be able to do an SAP implementation correctly, since your business will stop running if you do it wrong. However at the other end of the spectrum, there needs to be an ability to handle the quick and dirty projects that can yield a business edge.
I like to use a construction metaphor. To build a skyscraper, you need to bring in many architects, engineers, and many other experts to build it correctly. You have to because if you don't, a lot of people will probably die if there's a catastrophic failure like a fire or earthquake. This is like an SAP implementation.
At the other end are people like me who just need a storage shed, with maybe an outlet and light. Sure, you'll want to use good design principles, but it just doesn't have to be done to the level of perfection that a skyscraper needs. Even if it fails catastrophically, at most the shed burns down and I lose whatever was in it. This is like the solutions I need to roll-out - if the hard drive crashes, my reports stop working, but nobody else is really impacted.
One notch further down is tarp set up as a sun-screen for a 3 day event. You just need some poles, wires, and a tarp. Even if the wind knocks it down, you just put it back up again.
IT organizations need to be able to do handle both ends of the spectrum in an appropriate and budget-sensitive way. And this isn't just me being a whiny business user. As long as the IT depts of our competitors are broken in the same way, we're okay. But as soon as one of them figures it out, we'll be at a real business disadvantage.
I think the real sweet spot would be where the IT department is able and willing to work those various levels competently. But even more, by providing common sets of tools and guidance for groups that need to roll their own. Something like, "If you need to store data, use a SQL Server. Here's how you request an instance, and here's how to request 40 to 80 hours of consultation to get it set up in a sane way."... "If you need a lightweight application, we'll support using _________ or _______; and here's how you get developers who can do that."
If you can get those kinds of processes working, what you end up with is actually a nice project pipeline. If a quick-and-dirty tool gets built and becomes useful, you now have a working prototype to serve as the foundation for building a bigger tool if it's needed. And because the initial developers were using a common set of tools and design principles, it will hopefully be easier to transition to a more "formal" tool.
This is kind of my fantasy of how IT could be an integral part of the business.
I know that if you walk down any hallway at our corporation, you'll find business users all over the place who are extracting data from one report system, then spending hours looking up details in SAP and adding information to the report by hand. There should be a way for someone in IT to spend part of a day with them figuring out another report the
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Well, not everyone is as incredible and amazing as you. For the rest of us mere mortals, they make GPS.
Doesn't "binding arbitration" mean that you agree to be bound by the decision of the arbitrator before he/she actually makes their actual decision? It's my understanding that you agree up-front to be bound whatever they decide. I don't think you get their decision then get to decide, "Nah, I don't like that, never mind.".
Instead of starting with a joke, it can also be fun to start with some bit of trivia about what you're going to talk about. Asking a question of the audience gets them engaged a bit more. Something like, "Show of hands, how many think our bandwidth utilization last year was between a and b? between b and c?..." or "Can anyone guess how many servers/miles of network cable/switches there are on our network?" Maybe have a can of redbull or a candy bar as a prize for the best guess.
I work at a company where every presentation has to have a PowerPoint deck and it's almost heretical to do a presentation without one. Nothing's worse than having someone drone on, reading their PowerPoint slides that have so much text that they're impossible to read.
The point of focus the presentation should be you and what you have to say and not what you put on a set of slides.
One of the best presentations I ever saw was by Peter Senge (MIT Prof, author of The 5th Discipline). He had no slides at all. Only at one point did he turn on an overhead projector and draw on it. He was incredibly engaging and I could have easily watched him present or another hour. The interesting thing was that while he was drawing on the projector, everyone was very drawn in to see what what going to come out... it was very dynamic.
I'm no authority on presentations, but here's what I like to do:
* start with some kind of joke or bit of levity to lighten things up and make people (and yourself) more comfortable. It's hard to go wrong with a relevant XKCD or Dilbert comic (if you have slides)
* keep the slides to a minimum and make them graphical so you can talk about them but not read them
* plan to actually use about 75% of your alloted time. This gives you a chance to entertain questions and builds a buffer for going into details if needed. Nobody will complain if you finish early.
* have a "what's the one thing I want them to remember" and close with that
* try to stay on topic and don't let questions derail your presentation. We sometimes have a "parking lot" written on a side board for writing down issues to be raised later so they don't break down the current meeting.
In contrast to Senge's presentation, I was stuck in one at an Army Birthday Ball that started optimistically enough but ended badly. The keynote speaker started with "Be bright, be brief, be gone." and then proceeded to miss all three while killing the mood of the evening with a 2 hour briefing on how bad things were.
In any case, try to have fun. If you're having fun, there's a better chance that the others will enjoy your presentation.
Lastly, if you have control over the order of presenters, try not to follow someone who is much better at presentations than you are.
One of my best friends is a public defender... and she's really good at her work.
I once made the joke that I'd do my best to keep out of trouble and not need her services. She retorted that I could afford them.
I'd have to be essentially destitute before I could use a court-paid public defender.
But even then, you're not going to get through the process cost-free. There are plenty of other court costs and fees you'll have to pony up, just for the privilege of being charged with a crime.
Books about chaos and nonlinear dynamics tend to use "dynamical". I'm not sure how it might be distinct from "dynamic".
For example, a "classic" book, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, by Strogatz has a section titled, "A Dynamical View of the World"
Now that we have established the ideas of nonlinearity and phase space, we can present a framework for dynamics and its applications.
So within the title and the first sentence he uses dynamical and dynamic. I don't think it was a mistake, but I'm not sure what difference there is.
I can second that. I've been a happy customer of both Virgin Mobile and Straight Talk. Both have usable $35/month plans. I augment mine by using Skype from home.
I've also had good luck with both when returning an unwanted "trial" phone (got an upgrade phone, didn't like it, took/sent it back). I particularly like the LG Optimus V I'm currently using with Virgin Mobile.
Every now and then I check the rates and phones on Verizon or Sprint but it usually works out to about double what I pay per month. Even when you factor in that I pay for the phone up-front, it's still far cheaper.
I was really fortunate because he was giving a presentation in my city last night, sponsored by the Center For Inquiry.
He was vibrant and sharp, but clearly not in the best of health. He talked about recently going through chemotherapy and then later having open-heart surgery. I'm really glad I got to see him.
I hope I'm doing so well in my 80s.
Several of the prepaid smartphone plans come with data included. Mine is $35/month for 300 minutes and unlimited text and data. Virgin Mobile and Straight-talk both have some decent Android phones with unlimited voice and data for under $55/month.
> I'm a programmer but I don't spend all my day programming. There are long periods of time where I do no programming at all, I'm helping out others, answering questions,
Imagine now you help five colleagues solve their problems - they get the credit because they did the commits, and you get fired for being unproductive.
I once worked for a guy who said, "be careful what you measure - you'll get more of it".
Here it is:
Three of them were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were mere pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in the black outer reaches of space. All of them, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life~, in the cases of the third and fourth planets their surface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogen monoxide-in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough to permit a degree of social contact.
He also referred to Mike (the computer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" as a "pocket of negative entropy".
Throw in something about metabolism and you probably have a pretty good set of parameters for identifying life. Including "negative entropy" eliminates fire from being a life form, since while it does reproduce and energy is metabolized, it is also increasing the entropy around itself.
> but life could generally be defined as the ability to actively resist entropy
Indeed, that's what I thought of too - I think it was in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land that he used a phrase something like "phenomena of localized negative entropy".
There's no need for a special tool. Just put unique serial numbers on each rag. Note which ones you check out at the beginning of a process, then make sure you can account for all of them when you're done with the process.
Sure, putting serial numbers on rags is more expensive than normal rags; but not as expensive as losing a satellite.
I bought one once from this company:
http://pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Store_Code=PCK&Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=UltraClassic
It was nearly identical to the lab full of "original" IBM keyboards we had.
I've never used it myself, but I once worked with a librarian who tried out Koha and found it pretty feature-full.
http://www.koha.org/
It might be a bit of overkill, but it has a large user-base and probably has every feature you could want.
One thing to remember is that Idaho is pretty large in land-area and pretty small in population. There are lots of small towns with really small schools.
One thing this will help enable is kids in these small schools being able to take a wider variety of courses, or more advanced courses that their local school district simply can't afford to offer. Imagine a high school so small that there is only one "science" teacher for all science subjects. Now imagine you're a kid in that school and you love physics and would like to take AP physics so you can get a leg up going to college.
In Boise (over 100k population) there's no problem - there are plenty of teachers and plenty of courses. But if you're in Twin Falls or an even smaller community (like the one Napoleon Dynamite was set it), you're screwed as a kid.
Another thing to consider is that for everyone, the future of education will be web-delivered courses. If you've ever done one, you'll know that courses delivered this way require a different kind of discipline than a "forced to sit in a seat" class. If you agree that the idea of k-12 education is to prepare students for life, then it makes sense that part of the education process is to teach kids how to learn using this relatively new method.
By requiring it of all schools (large or small), it forces the issue of establishing the infrastructure to support it and it also helps level the playing field for kids who are at a geographic disadvantage.
Agreed. I don't give any biller direct access to my accounts but instead I use my credit-union's bill pay to transmit all payments (except one). The exception is the federal student loan folks... I let them auto-draft my payments because they give me 1/4% discount on my interest for doing so. Sadly, that's significant enough to make a difference in my philosophy.
In a similar way, I never use my "visa debit" card that's attached to my checking account as a credit card for the same reason. I only ever use it as a debit card where I have to key in a PIN.
The other obvious reason is that if the company taking the money takes too much. If they "accidentally" bill you for a year of service instead of a month, and you have this coming from your checking account, you suddenly may not be able to pay your rent/mortgage and might even have checks bounce.
Sure you might get it all sorted out with the biller and your bank but in the mean time it can cause a lot of problems.
Using a credit-card account as a buffer protects your checking account from these kinds of accidents. Plus banks tend to be more responsive to credit card problems than they are with checking account problems. With the first, it's their money that's messed with, with the latter it's yours.
Yup... I logged out and back in, and even rebooted. No dice. But thanks anyway.
Might I suggest you get a bit more bran in your diet or get a massage every now and then. It will probably improve your disposition and you might even live longer.
Cheers!
Well, I'd be more grateful, I suppose, if the so-called solution actually worked.
Here's another irritating aspect of the way they've implemented this... the stop and cancel buttons are very small and the whole area jiggles back and forth while the process is working, so it's hard to click the buttons when they're jiggling about. I suspect, however, you'll just call me rude for bringing it up.
Again, I'm not the only person to bring these problems up and I'm not going to bother when the other people get shouted down rudely with essentially "this is the way we're doing it, so tough"... even when they "ask nicely".
Well maybe. To extend your metaphor, what I need is just a pallet jack that me and about 50 other people can use. I'd love to have IT provide a pallet jack because a forklift is overkill. Because they can't provide a pallet jack, I'm forced to hack together something the best I can... say a wheel-burrow, and make that tool available to the people who need it. I have no choice but to do this because the job has to be done.
What our business needs is an IT organization that handles all kinds of lifting and moving methodologies that can be applied to a range of problems, from small ones like simple ETL from Excel into a database to large ones like a new SAP implementation. Unfortunately, our IT is only interested in the huge-scale problems - yet the complain when the rest of the business then comes up with solutions without them. It's an unfortunate situation.
only for the users to stick with the existing mess "because it works", while at the same time the same users are whining about all the bugs in it.
The best you can hope for here is that your own management will support you "against" those users when you say you can't support it any more the way it is - that if they want any more work, it has to be the "new way".
I've had to make calls like that on side projects like where we had spent far more effort on it than we had been willing to, and I pretty much put an end to it - with the ultimatum that they had to pony up their own person to take over the work. I'm lucky enough that even though they complained, my boss backed me on the decision.
Whatever. I'm not the only person to raise this particular issue and most of them were dismissed as rudely as you're dismissing me. That's fine.
Merry Christmas.
Ahh... I think we work in slightly different worlds. I assumed the inventory system was something used internally within the company and not a product sold to external customers. Those are the kinds of problems I consistently face... we have internal demands for data or reports and IT is a nearly impossible partner to work with with these requests. In my world, it's a matter of spending a lot of hours doing something like that completely by hand (and I mean as bad as drawing hundreds of little boxes on a powerpoint slide, putting numbers in them, and coloring them appropriately by hand) or figuring out some kind of macro or even lightweight application to accomplish the work in a more automated manner.
Products intended for customers are an entirely different matter and should be handled by product development teams.
Though if I'm misunderstanding and you mean "internal customers" by customers, then the question I would ask is: how did he "hack together" something that seems to work pretty well, yet the IT organization can't touch replicating that effort without $100k? Couldn't there be a middle-ground? Using another post of on this thread, are they trying to use the methodology, requirements, and standards used in building a skyscraper when what's actually needed is a garden shed?
Somehow, I think this struggle/balance might be one of those nearly intractable problems, and I don't think we'll solve it here. I hope you're able to come up with a good fix for what's going on with your customers.
I agree with what you're saying. The problem I encounter is an IT organization that is focused around making huge SAP implementation. They probably do that as well as anybody else, but they try to apply the same methodology and mindset to every problem and it quickly blows out of proportion.
The excel sheet example is already "in production" in that I have several people around the world using it - and pretty successfully (the VBA is in an Access file executed in citrix).
The thing is, this set of data is a "flavour du jour" of the VPs I make reports for - they want to see this data showing up in their reports "now", but in a year they're not going to care about it. This is is the kind of thing we have to roll-out fast and careful integration into other systems is really not that critical. It won't be around long enough to matter to other systems.
That's not to say this data isn't important - it is, for the problems the business is facing right now. But it's the kind of thing that has to happen pretty quickly.
It's vital to be able to do an SAP implementation correctly, since your business will stop running if you do it wrong. However at the other end of the spectrum, there needs to be an ability to handle the quick and dirty projects that can yield a business edge.
I like to use a construction metaphor. To build a skyscraper, you need to bring in many architects, engineers, and many other experts to build it correctly. You have to because if you don't, a lot of people will probably die if there's a catastrophic failure like a fire or earthquake. This is like an SAP implementation.
At the other end are people like me who just need a storage shed, with maybe an outlet and light. Sure, you'll want to use good design principles, but it just doesn't have to be done to the level of perfection that a skyscraper needs. Even if it fails catastrophically, at most the shed burns down and I lose whatever was in it. This is like the solutions I need to roll-out - if the hard drive crashes, my reports stop working, but nobody else is really impacted.
One notch further down is tarp set up as a sun-screen for a 3 day event. You just need some poles, wires, and a tarp. Even if the wind knocks it down, you just put it back up again.
IT organizations need to be able to do handle both ends of the spectrum in an appropriate and budget-sensitive way. And this isn't just me being a whiny business user. As long as the IT depts of our competitors are broken in the same way, we're okay. But as soon as one of them figures it out, we'll be at a real business disadvantage.
I think the real sweet spot would be where the IT department is able and willing to work those various levels competently. But even more, by providing common sets of tools and guidance for groups that need to roll their own. Something like, "If you need to store data, use a SQL Server. Here's how you request an instance, and here's how to request 40 to 80 hours of consultation to get it set up in a sane way."... "If you need a lightweight application, we'll support using _________ or _______; and here's how you get developers who can do that."
If you can get those kinds of processes working, what you end up with is actually a nice project pipeline. If a quick-and-dirty tool gets built and becomes useful, you now have a working prototype to serve as the foundation for building a bigger tool if it's needed. And because the initial developers were using a common set of tools and design principles, it will hopefully be easier to transition to a more "formal" tool.
This is kind of my fantasy of how IT could be an integral part of the business.
I know that if you walk down any hallway at our corporation, you'll find business users all over the place who are extracting data from one report system, then spending hours looking up details in SAP and adding information to the report by hand. There should be a way for someone in IT to spend part of a day with them figuring out another report the