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people-oriented green shoots

Everywhere are signs of growing awareness of the importance of people in IT. Just like the economic green shoots, in 2009 we see people-oriented green shoots too.

I'm adding links as I find them to articles with a people orientation. The common thread, the thing to pick up from them, is that they all talk as if this was a revelation or at least something novel, a new angle on IT. "Oh wow! People matter too!"

The time is ripe for He Tangata

The Honest Measure of My Worth

Those words keep sticking in my head from a Jethro Tull song: "That's the Honest Measure of My Worth". What is?

  1. How do we measure people so they accept the measure as a fair assessment?
  2. How to measure so that the measurement itself does not distort behaviour?
  3. How much "measurement" of people can be done with objective numbers? Are we such complex creatures that an honest measure can only be done by subjective assessemnt by fellow humans? Is that why we have juries?

A message to those who resist change

I wrote this on my IT Skeptic blog in response to someone ranting about ITIL

ITIL is a bureaucratic regime enforced on skilled IT people by non-IT management to shift the perceived sway of power and force IT to 'support' the business. It is not a set of rules, merely a framework of guidelines, aka a pile of shyte. And look who came up with it! Lordy lordy.

I said

Second workshop

Everyone enjoyed the first workshop and many said they'd like to discuss the issues again. The immediate objective of the first workshop was to helop me prepare a presentation on He Tangata for the itSMFnz 2009 National Conference. So I called us together again and presented it to the group. Not so many came this time, but I got great feedback and we enjoyed sharing ideas again. Thankyou Tracy and Harvey and Steve

here is the presentation:

The start of the journey

At the beginning, I sat in a powhiri, a Maori ceremony of welcome, for an ISO conference on IT Governance which just happened to be in Wellington, New Zealand, because my friend Alison Holt is the chair of that particular standards committee.

One of the conference attendees, Mike Taitoko, got up and introduced his tangata whenua - his tribe, his place, his people, which helps define who he is - in Maori, and gave us a Maori proverb.

He aha te mea nui o te ao
What is the most important thing in the world?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata

What He Tangata is about

He aha te mea nui o te ao
What is the most important thing in the world?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata
It is the people, it is the people, it is the people
Maori proverb

Once in every few careers, a soup of ideas and influences warms in the bowl of that career before being struck by a bolt of inspiration that ignites the germ of a new idea. In even fewer occasions that germ grows and survives and crawls out of the soup as a book that brings a fresh new idea back to the industry that spawned it.

Welcome to He Tangata

This website is now a static archive, preserved for reference only: many functions won't work.

Everything is held together with sticky tape and number-8 wire. But we are on a journey already, a journey that will bring us to an idea and a book and hopefully a lively website, all about He Tangata.

He Tangata is about putting people first in IT. Not technology or process. If we put people first we can achieve efficency and effectiveness. We can transform our processes and improve our technology and leverage our partners. More projects will succeed and more will stay succcessful without backsliding over time. If we put people first.

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