Is ITIL Losing Importance Due To SaaS? ITIL is a set of procedures and practices of IT service management when we mistakenly believe that we don't have to worry about that in SaaS. However, ITIL has many aspects and facets that encompasses running IT in an organization. Moreover, it is not a checklist for the implementation of specific services in specific environments. For SaaS, we can just use a different toolset to follow the general ITIL guidelines.

Why is it so common for engineering teams to be mistrusted by other parts of the business?

Part of that is definitely on engineers: chasing the new shiny, over-engineering, etc.

That seems unlikely to account for all of it, though.

Business strategy alignment and the secrets of strategic planning https://en.itpedia.nl/2022/01/02/business-strategie-alignment-en-de-geheimen-van-strategische-planning/ The Business Strategy stems from a detailed strategic planning process. However, the question we want to answer in this article is whether we can execute multiple strategies side by side while they do not interfere with each other. We compare multiple strategies for business, information provision and IT and focus on Strategic planning.

Jeff Howe - Crowdsourcing and the Crisis: Collective Intelligence in the Age of Covid-19 (ACM CI’20). (n.d.). Retrieved June 25, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POPMMHyIoS0

Savage, M. (2020, May 10). A return to work is on the cards. What are the fears and legal pitfalls? The Guardian | The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/09/coronavirus-return-to-work-employment-law-logistical-nightmare

In context, these other dimensions of “online presence” in Higher Education take a special meaning. Reminds me of WPcampus. One might have thought that it was about using WordPress to enhance learning. While there are some presentations on leveraging WP as a kind of “Learning Management System”, much of it is about Higher Education as a sector for webwork (-development, -design, etc.).

This from a university which had dropped Blackboard for iTunes U.

Sign of the times? One part is about economics as the discipline of decision-making. Economists often claim that their work is about any risk/benefit analysis and isn’t purely about money. But the whole thing is still about “resources” or “exchange value”, in one way or another. So, it could be undue influence from this way of thinking. A second part is that, as this piece made clear at the onset, “education is big business”. In some ways, “education” is mostly a term for a sector or market. Schooling, Higher Education, Teaching, and Learning are all related. Corporate training may not belong to the same sector even though many of the aforementioned EdTech players bet big on this. So there’s a logic to focus on the money involved in “education”. Has little to do with learning experiences, but it’s an entrenched system.

Finally, there’s something about efficiency, regardless of effectiveness. It’s somewhat related to economics, but it’s often at a much shallower level. The kind of “your tax dollars at work” thinking which is so common in the United States. “It’s the economy, silly!”

Good thoughts on the hiring process for programmers: job descriptions, advertising, pair programming, blind evaluations, group interviews.

Bureaucratic cultures tend to discourage people from speaking candidly. Lack of candor can be a deterrent to success, before it ever reaches the level of outright lies. Lack of candor means:

• outright lies (saying something you know to be false)
• self-deception (believing what you want to believe)
• deliberate omissions of facts
• thinking one thing, but saying something different
• having an idea that may be of value, but saying nothing
• being called upon to give an honest opinion, but deciding to say what is easier, or what you think others want to hear
• obscure jargon, or meaningless platitudes that give the impression everything is going fine or great. (This is a big red flag when it appears in corporate reports.)

"Investing Between the Lines: How to Make Smarter Decisions by Decoding CEO Communications", L.J. Rittenhouse (recommended by Warren Buffet in his 2012 Shareholder Letter)

Truth-Telling: Confronting the Reality of the Lack of Candor Inside Organizations We need to build cultures where "opposing views are debated and more effective solutions and innovations are created." -- Lynn Harris