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Keep up the good work.
Your comments are right on the mark - I would dare to venture you had to resist writing a book on this topic.
Good fortunes to you,
At least with "PRIDE", you may not always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. (Apologies to Mick Jagger.)
The ideal candidate for an IT manager will have understanding of both the technical end of the development process as well as the business reasons why such a process should be undertaken. A lot of the time, the development of an application is done on an ad hoc basis. The funny thing is, the planning required to make a good foundation for a business application is not onerous; it just requires clear thinking about the nature of the information that is being queried.
I have found in my (admittedly much shorter than your) experience that a lot of the problem lies in managers who haven't clearly thought through what it is that they need to be able to find out from their IT resources. A lot of managers look at the whole "IT thang" as a "black art" that they do not want to know about. There is a serious problem in that most managers want the plate brought to them with the food already cut up, and aren't willing to take the time to learn the fundamentals of how their IT systems work so they can tell their programmers how they want it cut up. When one abdicates a choice, a choice will be made. IT managers have been abdicating their choices to their programmers for many years now, and the choices that they've necessarily been making often haven't been the right one from a managerial perspective.
Just a couple of comments to add after reading the SOUND OFF section:
eCS: The eCS is supposed to go GA (General Availability) by the end of March. Seems most of the work the past couple of months has been to improve the installation program. This should be a welcome change from the IBM installer.
As a side note I don't understand why anyone would want to bother with Software Choice when eCS costs the same as SC and has many more features to boot.
IBM: IBM has never claimed to be interested in the home or small business user. For support, we always had to go to the user community. That seems to me to be the better option anyway since we tend to be more honest about the flaws in OS/2 and there is a much larger pool of ideas and options to make OS/2 work. Take advantage of the various user groups.
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