Thomas Otter

In my job I get to see a lot of enterprise applications. From all sorts of vendors. At least 95% of them suffer from what I call the donut syndrome.

(from the cc flickrstream of tinymeme. thankyou)
They have all sorts of funky controls around the edges of the screen, but middle bit, where you [...]

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(Photo from the cc stream of Steve Webel, thanks)
Andrew McAfee  recently blogged about airline queuing systems and IT. The post is well worth reading, and it got me thinking about HR systems. My blogging history is largely made up of looking for obscure metaphors and applying them to HR technology.
An old Chinese saying about [...]

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(photo via flickrstream of addedentry)
So much of our enterprise systems reporting is still locked into the rows and columns model of reporting. Yes, some vendors have oil gauge type dashboards and yapc (yet another pie chart) but I’ve only seen one or two vendors who really think hard about how to change the way data [...]

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On the 2nd and 3rd of December Gartner is running a conference for the German market at the Frankfurt Airport Sheraton.  Details here. You can flick through a funky online brochure here. 
The German IT market has its own quirks and nuances. SAP looms even larger than it does in other markets, so I expect lots [...]

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SOA is one of those things that is really tough to explain.  I’m often on the look out for new metaphors to help me explain it ways that don’t inflict too much pain and suffering on my typical HR audience. HR people normally have a high tolerance for pain, but talk to them about SOA [...]

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