_technoist_

technology and futures -- Michael Harries + friends

Brian Arthur's redomaining as a way to think about "cloud"? Same task - new toolkit. Review to come.

 

"Innovations in history may often be improvements in a given technology - a better way to architect domes, a more efficient steam engine. But the significant ones are new domainings. They are the expressing of a given purpose in a different set of components, as when the provision of power changed from being exprssed in waterwheel technology to being expressed in steam technology."

Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology, 2009

 

If you seek the underlying patterns as I do, this is a fascinating meditation, theory, or indeed philosophy of technology. Stay tuned for an in depth review.

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Enterprise architecture as strategy - a bridge between IT and business. Relevant?

via amazon.com

Ross, Weill and Robertson take a top down, strategic view of the enterprise architecture space. I like this broad scope and extremely practical view of how successful enterprises implement and view IT. In short the book brings IT to the center of defining and building the enterprise execution system with extreme care over where agility should be sought and where a capability should be locked into place.

This is NOT a book about technology. Rather it seeks to use MBA language to build a common ground between the business and technology.

Ross, Weill and Robertson define four basic types of operating model - Coordination, Unification, Diversification, and Replication. From a Citrix point of view each of these has implications for how a Citrix Delivery Center brings value.

My question --- does anyone care about this stuff (EA as Strategy) beyond the Enterprise Architecture crowd?

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The Brain That Changes Itself - tour of brain plasticity research - I see implications for how new technologies change us.

via normandoidge.com

More to come when I post my CeBIT talk from a couple of weeks ago (the future of the mobile internet)

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Don't Make Me Think! -- the best book on usability I've come across for a long time.

via amazon.com

Not just for web apps.
"Don't make me think" is most appropriate for (1) occasional/rare use apps and webpages (2) frequent use 'utility' style software. There's also a good argument that the same principles should be kept in mind for all applications. Good, useful, quick read.

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