I don’t always agree with everything “Paul Murphy” (it’s a pseudonym) says, but he’s often thought provoking. This weekend he examines “The CIO role in the Unix enterprise”:

From a long term perspective CIO stability and willingness to do as little as possible are the critical managerial success factors because the system as a whole is very much like Unix itself: something that works until brought down by an idiot with root access -or in the organizational context, a senior executive with hiring control over the CIO role.

This author is really hostile to IBM, but his ideal “UNIX enterprise” is a lot closer to how Data Processing was run when I started here than to the “DP shop” he’s always railing against. I think this is another example of how the people who make the decisions have a more significant effect than the technology chosen to implement those decisions.

p.s. The server that hosts this blog is scheduled to be down for maintenance tomorrow morning, Tuesday, September 21 9:00 – 11:00 p.m.