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When SOEs encourage a responsibility-avoiding fantasy...

From The Economist an article dealing with general fragmentation of technology in financial firms, and the issue of people needing to use ad hoc desktop applications comes up: a manager says 'The big task of management is to manage down the number of spreadsheets'.

An SOE comedy of errors - PortableApps as a guerilla SOE

After yesterday's blog on SOEs (The problem with Standard Operating Environments), a friend told me about 'her' adventures, working at a multinational manufacturing company. She is a technical sales engineer, so her job involves very large drawings, and she is...

The problem with Standard Operating Environments - Actually, how do you know your SOE is up to scratch and anywhere near optimal for the users?

The technical challenge becomes, how can we have an SOE today that will allows us to adopt an alternative SOE in a couple of years time? In economic terms, there is an opportunity cost in adopting any particular SOE: the cost of not being able to move to an alternative technology in the future. The emphasis on a standards-based procurement and SOE policy seems key in this. But so does a larger vision that factors in the opportunity costs of not being able to take advantage of objective architectural and technical advances (some of which may turn out to be fads too!), and does not just use license fees and help-desk costs as the bottom line.