ravencallscrows | Jul. 8th, 2005

Today, the company for which i work was supposed to be featured on a television show called The View, so the appropriate group was sponsoring a viewing of the segment and brought coffee and donuts- and they decided to do this down in the technology area where the television is- which happens to be one of the smallest offices in the place since it was displaced from its usual home by the CEO's presence in town for the month. Seeing forty or so people cramming into this area was amusing enough, but was enough to ensure that i didn't stick around to watch the segment- especially seeing yet another flock heading down the hall.

Being somewhat groggy at the time, i grabbed a donut and a cup of coffee and headed back to my desk. I'm only on really rare occasions a coffee drinker- on an empty (or near-empty) stomach, it tends to eat my innards up, and is something less than pleasant, and, well, i like coffee-flavoured coffee, so i drink it black (which makes the acid issue worse).

Think, for a minute, about why most people drink coffee- for the caffeine, to get them going. Oddly enough, after a cup, i found myself inexplicably sleepy. Well, time for the company picnic, which i may or may not attend for more than an hour.

Well, the picnic wasn't much of one. I think i've identified one of the main cultural problems with the corporate structure- technology is so removed from the focus of the rest of the organization that we're a fiefdom of our very own. At the gathering- which wasn't much of what i think of as a picnic- marketing people gravitated together, supplier relations did likewise, as did exclusive product- and tech was tech. If there's going to be real collaboration between business and technology, the way to do it is going to be to create technology-centric groups within each business department. It'd suck for the technical people, but with us segregated in our own little tech ghetto, it's going to be the exception where tech people and business people really understand each other, and realistically, that's probably what needs to happen for effective technical implementations of business solutions.