@cote and @littleidea

just jawing about how pivotal @pivotal is and stuff and then this:

There’s software that deploys software. There’s a contract between that deployment and the actual deployed software, and that’s maintained in a way that is both constraining and liberating.

I think one way to frame that which is easy for people to understand, at least in our circle is, yeah, you only have 140 characters, but you could do a lot with 140 characters. The constraints give you more than the …

Coté:
Exactly. Yeah, it’s almost like we have a gluttony problem in IT, where if you put stuff in front of us, or give us options, we’ll eat it, sort of my eating method style. Any food you put in front of me, I’ll eat. To some extent, it’s nice to have constraints if you have that disorder.

Andrew Schafer:
To some extent, that’s the betrayal of enterprise software. The last few decades of enterprise software, it’s been this war over who could have the feature matrix, and people are often buying software that they don’t think about systemically. A lot of times, they don’t have any experience with the technology, and they’re not going to be the ones to use it, because of the way the selling happens through executive channels.

As a consequence, for the longest time, pre-GitHub, pre-Twitter, pre-free flow of information, a lot of software was just sold on whoever could cram the most features into a presentation and show it to the executives.

As an employee of a frequent consumer of <bombast>Enterprise Software</bombast>, I can’t agree with this enough, and the bizarre thing is that even though you can hold up the examples of how Gartner is talking about doing things better, and the business world is coming around, etc., the self-awareness isn’t at a point where they say “I said I wanted a managed service like SaaS and you showed me a managed service like IaaS, my staff said that isn’t what I asked for, then you presented me with a bill which I promptly paid. That’s not a workflow that will give us the results we want!” and start changing.

Listening to @snowded talk about the taxi fare workaround and then saying that behavior is justifiable in the right circumstances lined up the Cynefin Framework to me in a way I hadn’t quite engaged with yet. If you are interested in talks around managing complexity, systems thinking, lean theory, and haven’t yet, do give the recent @foodfightshow discussion a listen.