Spot on. In fact, I would assume the less trivial the knowledge, the more scrutiny applied by Wikipedia users and the more reliable the information. For example, who really cares about how accurate Wikipedia is regarding the science of farting? For that bit o' trivial knowledge I go to kizworld: http://www.kidzworld.com/article/473-the-science-of-farting.
Couldn't have said it better and I'm on the flip-side of your coin. I was systems engineer doing middleware development but I was mediocre at best and eventually became bored and in a funk. I discovered, by accident, that I was a very good project manager. I took some idiot boss (or maybe he was a genius) pushing me into management to discover this.
I've been in IT for 18 years: worked for small (35 people) and large corporations (95K) and large (80K) and small (5K) government agencies. The Dilbert factors haven't gotten worse in 18 years, just well lampooned by Scott Adams and others. What I know, without a doubt, is that the Dilbert factor increases with the size of the organization, and I think that's true for any organization. If you are dying from too much Dilbert in your company then it's time to downsize.
What do you expect? Mossberg is the same guy who just wrote an article in Smart Money predicting the internet will become a massive grid and everything will be plugged into it - very original thinking. Thankfully, it appears to be his last article for the magazine.
FTA - "The Starbucks programmers probably think that having more control over the search is powerful and cool," he wrote. "But in reality it's a useless and annoying distraction. Nobody goes around asking, 'Is there a Starbucks within five miles? How about 10? 15?"True, I'm looking for the nearest Starbucks with 50 or 100 feet...and incredibly I've got more than one choice;-)
Spoken like someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. I've implemented disk encryption at a federal agency and for the past 7 months and we have yet to format or reinstall an image. All the products being evaluated offer password reset/assistance features and key escrow for recovery purposes; and we know they work because, yes, people forget passwords or delete key files.
"When a competitive free market group of companies goes after work, they have to balance their profit versus their ability versus the good use of their time. If you bid a job and win it, there's no going back and asking for more."
Most of these projects are bid and won within a competitive environment and they are worked on by commercial entities doing firm-fixed-price bids with a broad statement of objectives (e.g vendor describes proposed solution, government doesn't dictate the solution.) Obviously this doesn't mitigate the possibility of failure. Many, many IT projects fail (commercial or government run). In fact many analyst, such as the Standish Group, make a nice living on reporting all the IT project failures that occur each year.
I think the real reason you see government at the top of the list is because only governments have the need to take on massive IT projects and these projects often have a very massive and diverse stakeholder base. Don't think that bureaucracy, inefficiency, and monopolies are the sole domain of governments, there's plenty of that in private sector too.
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Spot on. In fact, I would assume the less trivial the knowledge, the more scrutiny applied by Wikipedia users and the more reliable the information. For example, who really cares about how accurate Wikipedia is regarding the science of farting? For that bit o' trivial knowledge I go to kizworld: http://www.kidzworld.com/article/473-the-science-of-farting.
Start using Critical Chain Project Management and many of the issues plaguing today's IT projects become a thing of the past.
Couldn't have said it better and I'm on the flip-side of your coin. I was systems engineer doing middleware development but I was mediocre at best and eventually became bored and in a funk. I discovered, by accident, that I was a very good project manager. I took some idiot boss (or maybe he was a genius) pushing me into management to discover this.
I've been in IT for 18 years: worked for small (35 people) and large corporations (95K) and large (80K) and small (5K) government agencies. The Dilbert factors haven't gotten worse in 18 years, just well lampooned by Scott Adams and others. What I know, without a doubt, is that the Dilbert factor increases with the size of the organization, and I think that's true for any organization. If you are dying from too much Dilbert in your company then it's time to downsize.
What do you expect? Mossberg is the same guy who just wrote an article in Smart Money predicting the internet will become a massive grid and everything will be plugged into it - very original thinking. Thankfully, it appears to be his last article for the magazine.
FTA - "The Starbucks programmers probably think that having more control over the search is powerful and cool," he wrote. "But in reality it's a useless and annoying distraction. Nobody goes around asking, 'Is there a Starbucks within five miles? How about 10? 15?" True, I'm looking for the nearest Starbucks with 50 or 100 feet...and incredibly I've got more than one choice ;-)
Spoken like someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. I've implemented disk encryption at a federal agency and for the past 7 months and we have yet to format or reinstall an image. All the products being evaluated offer password reset/assistance features and key escrow for recovery purposes; and we know they work because, yes, people forget passwords or delete key files.
Most of these projects are bid and won within a competitive environment and they are worked on by commercial entities doing firm-fixed-price bids with a broad statement of objectives (e.g vendor describes proposed solution, government doesn't dictate the solution.) Obviously this doesn't mitigate the possibility of failure. Many, many IT projects fail (commercial or government run). In fact many analyst, such as the Standish Group, make a nice living on reporting all the IT project failures that occur each year.
I think the real reason you see government at the top of the list is because only governments have the need to take on massive IT projects and these projects often have a very massive and diverse stakeholder base. Don't think that bureaucracy, inefficiency, and monopolies are the sole domain of governments, there's plenty of that in private sector too.