Hello world!
An apt title indeed for my blogging debut.
As Dylan told us all some 40 years ago, “The times they are a-changin” Difficult as it may be to believe, this has never been more true in business and information technology (IT). But like Dylan’s Mr. Jones, I’m not yet sure I have a firm handle on the nature of the changes upon us, so I’ll be using this blog over the next little while to try to figure them out. This way, maybe some others can pipe in and help to clear some of the confusion I will no doubt be espousing.
The change I see has a definite pattern, and it’s appearing on many levels: Political, economic, social, technological. Being a bit of a “technolog” myself, I first caught sight of it when I stumbled on agile methodologies. These approaches to software engineering turn conventional wisdom on its ear, advocating an incremental, progressive approach to design and development, which flies in the face of the admonition that it costs ten times as much to fix a problem discovered during implementation than in up-front analysis.
But this is only the tip of an iceberg. The other obvious, and much more prominent, manifestation of change in technology is open source. The idea of sharing knowledge and ownership of source code as a way of developing reliable, high quality and high performing software is again so radical that it’s taken me years to even begin to understand what motivates this movement. I’m still not sure I get it, but I’m beginning to see some glimmers of light which I’ll try to articulate over the next while.
What’s perhaps most interesting about both these technological movements – agile and open source – is their sociological component. They are not so much about the technology (although there is a definite correlation between the rise of these movements and the technological developments of objects and the internet) as the way in which technology is conceived, implemented and delivered. They are about open, trusting, networks as opposed to closely guarded secrets as the engines to drive the economy. This is the concept I find to be profoundly interesting. It’s also why debates surrounding these topics devolve very quickly into heated ideological arguments where much more is at stake than the technological and procedural choices I make in my next software development project.
