Stories by: Michael Hugos

Whatever happens next, IT is going to be right down the middle of it in a big way. Not traditional, monolithic, accounting system type IT, but real-time, agile, pay-as-you-go-go-go IT. The future belongs to the agile.

Banks and other financial organizations have certainly been agile these last seven or eight years as they maximized the number of mortgages they sold. Now we're learning that agility also implies we better be able to cope with how fast things happen. As we the people all participated in the first great real estate boom of the 21st century, banks responded and gave us what we asked for (whether it made any sense or not).

The IT profession is at a turning point. One group of IT practitioners already knows what needs to be done - but the traditionalists call it radical. And the traditionalists continue to apply the same old ways of doing things that result in the same old horrendously expensive multi-year projects that produce systems barely better than what was there before, if they even work at all.

In the design of computer systems, all our efforts, our analysis, our long hours are all directed to one end. That end is to discover a design with a quality called “elegant simplicity”.

I will gladly send you money; just give me the service I want when I want it. My website is registered at Yahoo but hosted on a different server so the redirecting to get to that server goes through Yahoo. Two weeks ago the redirecting stopped working; the address www.MichaelHugos.com now goes to the sign on page for Yahoo Small Business instead (but, if you type only MichaelHugos.com, then it does redirect correctly, but how many people would think to do that?). So, basically, people (as in customers and prospects) can't find me, and I look pretty bush league because my website appears to be down for so long.

There are a hundred little adjustments you can make every day, every moment as you drive and the result will be to increase your gas mileage by 20 per cent or 40 per cent or more. We don't need to wait helplessly until somebody invents a car that gets 100 miles per gallon (or 300 kilometers per liter). Agility and resourcefulness is all about starting where we are and working with what we've got to move toward our goal.

I had to reboot my house this morning. The recessed lighting units in the kitchen and dining rooms weren't working; clicking the on-off switches and sliding the dimmer buttons didn't produce any effect. And I noticed that the cable TV control unit had relapsed into a state called "Setup" and I couldn't get all the channels. So I decided to just flip the main breaker switch and turn off power to the whole house and then bring everything back up again.

A once well known company has gone through three different names and made their products worth less and less by a misplaced emphasis on cost cutting. I'm talking about a company that rents tuxedos. When I need a tuxedo, I rent one even though I wind up paying a third to a half of the purchase price each time. I do this because I see myself as just a regular guy and therefore not someone who needs to own a tuxedo (although I've been renting a tux at least twice a year for a while now).

There's been a lot of discussion about women in business based on concepts of fairness, ethics, civic-minded virtue, and various other do-gooder notions. But the obvious question remains (even though it isn't polite to ask); are women owned businesses really any better or any different from men owned businesses? And should we have set-asides and quotas to encourage growth of women owned companies? Aren't we past that already?

I got an email from a Ph.D. student at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. He said the professor he was working with on his doctoral dissertation was a leading expert in supply chain management in Iran and they were interested in translating my book, Essentials of Supply Chain Management, 2nd Edition into Persian (Farsi).

"Open your eyes, Pilot. A new world is here."