第二帖比较难写

今天没有多时间, 所以只有提供一个链接就好了。

是关于写博客的《用户友好》卡通 :
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070111&mode=classic

从今天开始我写中文

我刚决定了继续写博客。
还有从今天开始只有用中文发帖。

希望我的网友们都欣赏。
因为我的汉语水平比较低，所以写的字，语法等等大概都是大错特错。
请抱歉。

Are Information Systems boring?

Recently after a conference colleagues and I were poking fun at how all those participants (including us) claimed that subjects such as "Help Desk processes according to ITIL", "Alignement of IT support organizations", or "taxonomies for financial IT services" were "highly fascinating" or at least "extremly interesting".

I pondered for a while about a possible implication of this: Are Information Systems boring?

Of course you find the cold glitter of efficiency on the surface of all organizational subjects, but is that really enough to carry over deeply felt facination? Compared to lets say sending robots to Titan, climbing into the intestines of dark mysterious caves, digging up relicts of ancient times, or reconstructing the life of species vanished from earth eons ago?
To put it even more brutally: Are IS really just as "interesting" as traditional financial accounting? If this was the case, could you really ever candidly convey positive emotions towards them in IS education?

Well, I came up with the following positive intermediate answer: Information Systems are not boring.

When I reflect my own development there have been several points at which Information Technology aroused the same deep emotions in me as the robots on other planets might have: That tickling feeling that IT is once again opening new and beforehand unimagined doors - with some unspoken revolutionary force resonating with it. This has been the case when I tinkered the first time with a PC (an Apple-IIin 1980), when I discovered the unbounded possibilities of the WWW, and (at some lower degree) at occations like learning about the product Hypercard, the power of object-orientation, ubiquitous computing, SOA, ...

I am strongly convinced that IS education really should always show the link to such enabling events, and IS research should be all about harvesting them - stepping through those doors. The organizational issues are just means to that end. Sounds corny? Maybe it is. Better corny than boring.

China and Information Systems: Culture vs. Chaos

During my trip to Beijing I had an interesting discussion with a Chinese collegue concerning ERP software in China (and IS in general). He claimed the unsatisfactory success of ERP packages in China is rooted in a different understanding of management in China:
According to him management is considered an art in China rather than a science as it is in the west. In consequence it is less standardized, less rule-based, and less data driven. He contrasted this with Germany which he saw as a natural origin of large ERP packages.

After reflecting this I became somewhat sceptical about the root-cause-relationships in this theory. I suspect that the notion of management as an art is not the origin of discrepancis but rather one of their natural results: In an unstable business environment, balancing on a brittle legal ground, and embedded in person-dependent social networks where loyality is not oriented towards ideas and organizations but towards friends and family, management needs to become art.

But what are the consequences of all this besides software design? Lack of standardization also means a lack of efficiency. Where you cannot standardize and harvest data you have no possibility to reap the fruits of economies of scale, professionalization, and optimization-loops. This is not a quesiton of software - the applipicability of standard software is rather an indicator of weak cost-efficiency. This again goes in line with my scepticism of the actual state of the economy in the booming mainland.

Just a dim suscpicion, though, not a fact-based theory.

Goals...

Welcome everybody!
The motivation for this blog is to collect, exchange, and refine raw ideas and thoughts on my main occupations. It is conceived to be rather topical - I will refrain from sharing information on my boring private live, unqualified political comments or gossip here.

Concerning the contents it will probably be

• 60% Information Systems (including Education of IS),
• 30% Chinese and China, and
• 10% other.

Those subjects do not fit perfectly - not yet. I am still working on mending them together...

The tone is supposed to neutral.

As I have some friends out there who are not in command of the German language I will try to keep the language English (despite the fact that it is not my mother tongue and I am by no means perfect...).

And for now I just wish to encourage everybody to provide creative input: 加油...