I've worked for organizations where IT moves too fast (and thus wastes money and alienates customers) and others where IT moves too slow (and thus the customers go around IT as much as possible). I've also worked in places where IT does both, often in the same day.

This week, I have the pleasure of sitting in all-day meetings related to a series of IT infrastructure projects we are pursuing. The folks in charge of coordinating this effort brought in a vendor to lead a brief engagement designed to help IT project teams and key business stakeholders better understand how to proceed with these key projects. This is a noble goal, and it's one I support. However, I fear that the engagement was put together too quickly and with almost no deliberation. It's just my opinion, of course, and I'm sure that this engagement will have some value. I, for one, want to make sure that we obtain that value even though the process has been a bit hasty. But will it have equal value to the dollar amount on the contract? That I don't know.

To be fair, I'm certain that we're moving quickly in this effort because we've been far too slow with similar efforts in the past. But, it seems as though the pendulum has swung the other direction. So here is the underlying question: How does IT get things done, without moving too fast or too slow? Here are a couple of my thoughts off the top of my head:

1) Empower people in the right places - IT doesn't need to poke it's nose into all areas of the business just because something smells like technology. The question is, what information technologies do we need to be involved in?

2) Respect the Business and Keep them Informed - IT managers like to talk about getting users in the room, then they go and demand they be present without respect for the ever-crushing workload which they have to deal with. If you need to move fast, and you need your customer, it's your responsibility to move mountains for them, not ask that they do so for you. 

3) Remember who you are working for - An extension to number 2. Sometimes is looks like IT is the tail wagging the organizational dog, as if our business units exist to use our technologies. If IT feels the need to get things done fast, then I would imagine that there is a good business reason for doing so (there had better be). If that's the case, its our responsibility to help the business understand how moving fast is our best bet for meeting that need. When we help the business understand that, they get in our corner and help us move as a partner, not someone we feel the need to drag along.

 What else am I missing here? Quite a bit, I'm sure, so additional thoughts would be appreciated.

Saw this post from Brady Forest on O'Reilly Radar, which points to the official announcement on the AWS blog. This may not mean as much to many of you who have been using S3 for a while now, but it's big news for a guy like me because I know better than to bring technologies like S3, EC2 and Mechanical Turk into any serious internal conversation unless I can say "yes" to that SLA question. Looks like AWS is getting ready for prime time. And why not? Most of us have been expecting this for a while now.

I will echo Arthur's request for more to the SLA, specifically for stats on uptime and availability. I think that all services should provide information like this to be as clear as possible in letting you know what you are getting by consuming said service (and our internal guidelines say as much), but this kind of information is especially vital with services in the cloud. I'm confident that they'll get there, but in the meantime, I'll echo that feature request.

On another note, why the heck is O'Reilly charging $149 for a glorified whitepaper on developing applications for Facebook? I use Facebook. I like Facebook. I think there is something to be said about developing applications for it... in certain situations. But could we just take a moment to breathe here before they hype train carries us all away?

• SOA: Sometimes it IS about the technology - Both Nick's post and Andrew McAfee's original are worth a read and right on. I think the pearl of wisdom is for all of us to stop advocating one extreme or the other ("x is about technology" vs "x is not") all the time and start using wisdom, common sense and a willingness to either talk about technology (when the situation calls for it, as Nick describes when one must know which "... goals are realistically achievable given current technology trends") or leave technology out of the discussion (when the situation calls for us to convey to the business that we truly get their business need and aren't simply looking for a way to implement the cool new technology).
• Why Microsoft Should Not Support SCA - Bottom line as I read this: Microsoft doesn't benefit and neither does anyone else. It makes sense, but David certainly makes SCA seem like less of a "big deal" standard than others want us to believe. Not sure what I think yet, but  I would highly recommend David's Introducing SCA article. It's a good read and provides a good overview of some big technology movements outside of the Microsoft world.

• Green Datacenter Initiative - The idea of "Green IT" is becoming a bigger and bigger deal as more organizations realize that Global Warming is not a joke (it never was) and that the measure corporate ethics and responsibility will increasingly include the impact of their IT organization on the environment. As Simon says, the measurement technology isn't there yet, but why not start grassroots with your own PC. Downloaded the LocalCooling app Simon links to and get an idea of how little things we all do as individuals does have an impact.

• Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries - Kudos Microsoft. No question that this is a good move.
• TED 2007 - The seemingly impossible is possible (Video) - Hans Roslings uses some of the best information visualization I have ever seen (Google must agree, because they bought his Gapminder tool) to deliver a great 20 minute presentation about how our cut and dry segmentation of the world into developed and developing countries is wrong and that we have the means and ability to eliminate poverty in our lifetimes. It's well worth 20 minutes.

• Is Twitter Useless, Asinine, or The Crocs of The Web? I love the comparison of Twitter to Crocs and think it's true: There are those that find Twitter pointless (my wife) and those that can't understand why people can't see the simple elegance of power of it (myself). But more than the ability for me to know where my friends are going for dinner, Twitter is a paradigm for multi-channel information sharing and that can be quite powerful for organizations as well as individuals.

• Learning from Bill Gates & Steve Jobs - Steve Jobs' amazing presentation skills isn't news to anyone, but I like this post largely because of the side-by-side depiction of a Bill Gates slide deck and a Steve Jobs slide deck. It makes a strong point...

• Office Live Workspace revealed: a free 250MB "SharePoint Lite" for everyone - This isn't the Google killer since it's not an "online" version of the classic office applications. What it is is the slow-moving-and-customer-ignorant-IT-organization killer, which is a great thing as far as I'm concerned.

• Sharepoint is not a good development platform / SharePoint is a good development platform for applications / SharePoint is an Awesome Dev App Platform - One of our SA's said early on in his experience with MOSS 2007 application development that "MOSS takes the rapid out of Rapid Application Development," which I think is true in the OOB development experience. Since then, however, we have been able to experiment with varying ways to develop apps in MOSS and have started to see areas where we can create value and assist in speed by abstracting out some of the complexity. That being said, Visual Studio needs to catch up and help make that development experience richer. As Andrew Connell said, that's a knock on tooling and the development environment, not the platform itself.

• MOSS Faceted Search (CodePlex) - If you're using or plan to use MOSS and you want your users to get the most value out of Search, I would recommend taking a serious look at faceted search.

All MOSS Links today... some days are just like that I suppose. :)