The last few inches...

Chad Dickerson — a guy my boss thinks looks a lot like me! — writes an excellent article in InfoWorld that — to those of us who work in IT — summarily describes our dilemma in excruciating detail. Here's an excerpt:

"...An ignored piece of paper sitting on a fax machine had undone an otherwise sophisticated process: I had accessed a site in a datacenter across the country, searched hundreds of hotels in seconds, entered a credit card that was authorized via a web of global financial systems — and after the thousands of miles, the critical last three feet between the fax machine and the local hotel’s system was an abyss that could not be crossed."

You really should read this article because it points out the fact that no matter what we do with redundant power supplies, enterprise databases, CRM powerhouses, incremental backups, secure connections, and all that other stuff -- the final few inches (along with the human in charge of getting the job done) ultimately are the deciding factors in IT. We can spend our whole lives writing great code, but the person who actually USES that code will be the arbiter of whether it was, in fact, great code. Chad's story articulated exactly what I've thought for many years.

And at the bottom, where it says "Chad Dickerson is CTO of Infoworld" is no longer correct ... he's leaving to work at Yahoo! We'll miss articles like this, Chad!