Evolution of IT – Stage 1 – The Developer

I failed to write the book (actually two) which I planned to do as mentioned in an old blog post. It almost killed my blogging, because I put my writing energy into the book, but never really managed to get something to paper (or leanpub to be more precise). In fact it pretty much felt like Gerhard Polts “Der Gedanke”. If you are interested a link to a audio file on youtube (in german).
 

 

 

So instead of continue to failing with the book I plan to write more blog posts again and I will use some of the thoughts I had for the book in a series of posts. I will try to share my mental model (inspired by Tom Graves and his great and interesting post “How do you think?”). My conclusion is total different than his, but that is something I reserve for another post. You might have read about my thoughts behind GLUE, and this is what I will try to re-explain in a total different way. My working title for the moment is Evolution of IT and I will start with Stage 1 – The Developer.

 

Unce upon a time a person was facing a a truly challenging problem. This person had an idea how to overcome the problem, an idea which was most likely based on collision of other ideas, as Steven Johnson puts it so great in his book Where Good Ideas Come From. To solve the challenge this person developed a solution and was therefore the first Developer of a new tribe.

As I have put in an old post of mine, this is the only value adding activity of IT (the new tribe) and therefore it is brilliant that the developer is all alone and can therefore contribute with 100% of his time to value adding activities. The other good news is that there is plenty of new tribes founded all over the place. Many of them are rooted in so called shadow IT or based on hairball architecture. As I have put in an older post of mine hail the hairball architecture, because there innovation is born. (There is of course also quite some negative aspects in hairball architecture (e.g. the loss of transparency and the wasteful approach to resources), but I will come to that aspect in later posts of this series.

In my next post I will write about the first contact between the Developer and another person from another tribe and how that has changed the life of the developer.