Brave For Free

I am sure all of you must have experienced this. A team of smart driven people get together in a room, all focused on a project and eager to progress. Two months of meetings later, the project is still drifting along, not quite getting to closure. Have you wondered why this happens? Why seemingly smart people with the best of intentions slip on the banana peel just as they are about to raise the curtain? My theory is that one (or god help us, more) of the following syndromes is in play. 1.  The HYTO or "Have you thought of..." syndrome. This is when, after a decision to act has been finalised, someone pipes up with "but have you thought about ". This of course leads to discussion about whether that has really been thought about, often causing action to be deferred till the thinking about is done. Of course, the next meeting to close has another "have you thought of..." moment and the cycle continues. With each round, the HYTO concerns get increasingly mo

Sunanda recently lost some photos that she'd clicked on her holiday, and I asked what I thought was the obvious: "where did you back them up"? A freezing glare followed. "Why", she asked me "should I have to back it up?". Putting my foot firmly in my mouth, I persisted "its dumb to not back up! Technology 101!!". "Pretty stupid technology, if you ask me" she said, marching out of the room. This exchange got me thinking. In all my life as a technology manager (not to mention high priest of family photographs), backup has been are core mantra, but also a colossal the pain in the neck. The process takes too long, is never as current as you want and is invariably missing for the very day that your most important data was being written. Storage did indeed seem more than a bit stupid if so much time and effort was required to protect it from losing data. Technology should be smart enough to do invisibly what is essentially a core