Organizations and technology

A collection of things I have written about organizations and technology.

Organizations

Command and control

Excerpt: A complete monoculture is inherently unhygenic; it is vulnerable to a single threat, it’s a single point of failure. The usual biodiversity of an organization exists because we tend to allow a little duplication here and there, some variations from the standard, multiple standards.

The article above came from a comment by Sigurd Rinde after I linked to his excellent post "You know something is wrong..."

You know something is wrong...

Excerpt: I agree with a far higher proportion of Sig’s assertions in this list than I do with the Cluetrain Manifesto’s 95 theses. Both lists contain good ideas and numbnuts ones. I guess Sig’s strategy in limiting himself to 18 statements means his chances of success are higher than the scattergun approach of the Cluetrain authors.

Vendor lock-in, part 1

Excerpt: Attempting to lock your customers into your service by making it difficult for them to switch just shows that you are afraid of the competition.

Vendor lock-in, part 2

Excerpt: The killer feature in Excel 4.0 was that it allowed the user to switch back to the Lotus 123 easily - it could write Lotus-format spreadsheets. This meant that the isolated Excel fans in an organisation could now use their favourite tool but still communicate with colleagues who used Lotus 123.

Technology

Open document formats

Excerpt: Microsoft are investing in a converter that will allow their customers to read and write documents in the OpenOffice format. This is a good thing. It means if I choose to save my documents in OpenOffice format then I have a choice of two office suites to open them in

Some simple logic

Excerpt: There is considerable risk of a severely damaging attack. What is perplexing me is the unwillingness of any corporation I know to do something about this.

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