The vision for the Agility Alliance

[Agility Alliance Network]

Connecting technology gurus and business masterminds to make things better

[Rolando Hernandez]

... to make things better
or
...to make sytems better ?

[Johan Lindberg]

In my organization. I'm trying to ban the word 'system'. The problem is that 'system' is an outdated concept. The word has too much meaning that is caught up with the way we used to do things and the problems inherent to that. We're currently trying to move everything into an SOA approach so I'm trying to focus on business capacities and what actually constitutes our processes instead of the IT component my colleagues think they need to solve their day to day activities.

So, if you ask me, ... to make things better is the way to go ;-)

[James Owen]

Banning the word, "system" ?? Why not ban the word "is" or "paradigm" or others. Every word has a use. Simply banning a word won't cause the misuse of another word being used in its place. When "System" becomes an outdated concept, then may God help us! When there is no "System" or "Method" to your madness then the result is "Chaos". Why not ban that word as well?

Sorry for the "rant" but banning words is like banning books. If it's good, it will stay regardless of the ban. If it's bad, it will refuse to leave regardless of the ban.

And this is why I don't join groups of "technical business" personnel. The phrase alone is an oxymoron. :-)

SDG
jco

[Rolando Hernandez]

Welcome aboard James!

I'm pretty sure that Johan probably means system in the sense of monolithic hard-coded legacy spaghetti-code computer programs.

I doubt he means banning the solar system, nervous system, global financial system... well actually there is talk of banning that and starting from scratch.

"Connecting technology gurus and business masterminds to make things better" sounds good to me.

I welcome your suggestions to make it (the slogan) better!

[Greg Barton]

Actually, Jim, it can be useful for people to ban the word "is"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

:)

[Johan Lindberg]

Hi James,

Banning the word, "system" ?? Why not ban the word "is" or "paradigm" or others. Every word has a use. Simply banning a word won't cause the misuse of another word being used in its place. When "System" becomes an outdated concept, then may God help us! When there is no "System" or "Method" to your madness then the result is "Chaos". Why not ban that word as well?

True. I guess what I should have written was:

In my organziation. When trying to describe the to-be situation and in discussions with our (non-technical) stakeholders, I'm trying to ban the word 'system'. My point being that from a business perspective a stakeholder shouldn't care about the implementation of the process that s/he wants to have IT-support for.

So, when it comes to the slogan I feel that using the term 'system' would exclude a LOT of current on-going technical efforts. Somehow implying that the discussions here does not apply unless you're building a system. I had hoped that the context was enough to narrow the scope of interpretations. But, apparently not.

[Agility Alliance Network]

Greg,

I thought you guys were kidding, but after checking out the rules of E-Prime (English-Prime; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime I think you're on to something.

I never heard of E-Prime rules before, but at first glance it seems to me that banning these words* during knowledge acquisition sessions could be a good technique to use when interviewing experts.

" By eliminating most uses of the passive voice, E-Prime compels the writer to explicitly acknowledge the agent of a sentence, possibly making the written text easier to read and understand... Using E-Prime makes it harder for a writer or reader to confuse statements of opinion with statements of fact... "

* all forms of the verb to be: be, is, am, are, was, were, been and being, and also their contractions

Greg Barton said:

Actually, Jim, it can be useful for people to ban the word "is"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

:)