My approach to preventing IT insignificance begins with firing the good programmers, since they're saddled with low-value work to begin with. In order to see what that means, let's look at the three phases of an IT organization's collapse to irrelevance. Then we'll see why some specific reorganization steps can …

Here are some useful quotes:

• Andrew’s first law of career spotting: Accountants are people who, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use [A spreadsheet]”. Now they have two problems.
• [A spreadsheet] is a great prototyping tool, just don’t let it anywhere near your production …

First, I wrote a book on Programming with Python. It was back in the Python 2.0 days (2001 or thereabouts.) I used AppleWorks, and it was fun. Write all you want, put in formulae, code samples, everything. A few style sheets to give it a reasonable look and I …

We have a spectrum of interesting needs, and a corresponding spectrum of solutions. Here's one dimension: the structured-ness view.

1. Highly structured data.
2. Semi-structured data, or the "mixed content model". We can further subdivide this into content which is "naturally" hierarchical, and a good fit for XML, and data which is …

If we look at a spreadsheet as a document we can develop a parser that locates the user-supplied information in that document. Like any language, we'll have to treat some elements of the spreadsheet as pure syntax, little more than punctuation. In the case of embedded formulas, these are elaborate …

See "When a Column is Not a Column " for a rant on failed attempts to scale spreadsheets up into relational databases. Bottom Line: A spreadsheet column is rarely an RDBMS column. Often the SS column's label is a key value, just like the SS row's label, and the cell's value …

In one form, the question is "How do we handle the [X] transaction in the warehouse?" Another form of the question is "What do we do when [Y] changes?" The third form is less clear, but essentially the same: "How do we maintain [Z] in the warehouse?"

All of these …

Yes, it's an omission and, yes, it's a mistake. I should have said something along the lines of "risk is an uninteresting complication" or "risk is just a euphemism for bad management."

Why is risk uninteresting?

First, the seeds (Chad Fowler's "The Big Rewrite ", and CodeCraft, "To Rewrite or not …

In "It's Strategic -- but it's not -- but it was -- now it's a burden ", I rambled about the situation I encounter on a regular basis. Here's a Haiku that captures the situation.

Please Replace It

It's heavily customized,

We can't install an upgrade,

We don't dare touch it.

The maintenance costs …

First, I'm a pack-rat; I worry about deleting something valuable. Specifically, I worry about orphaned files because the application software is no longer supported or the media is obsolete.

For example, my resume is a Hypercard stack. Really. Hypercard is an OS 9 application, and future OS X's won't support …