Making IT Happen

In the past week I have seen a number of tech stories about something to do with still and moving images and how they are obtained, managed, changed and stored. One example was a strange Japanese shadow lamp , which uses cameras to record the activities of a friend in their home, and then projects this as shadows inside a lamp in your home. Another is a clever bit of software that reviews your photos, and suggests replacements for things you don't want in them, be it a jutting roof or an ex-boyfriend. I also saw a project called Spellbinder which matches images and locations (although I have read the text three times and still can't figure out exactly what it does).

Point is that more and more technologies appear to resolve around images. In some ways it seems like we are grappling towards a set of rules and techniques for managing and using this data that will eventually parallel concepts such as the relational database. This seems likely to have a huge impact on any business that uses images in some way. It's certainly got me thinking about ours.

Sometimes it seems that success is the elephant in the room of the IT industry.
An IT director once told me that the IT industry should take collective responsibility for some of the “high-profile IT project failures”. He went on to say that these failures have forever tainted CEOs against IT.

I beg to differ. I don’t think my CEO really cares about someone else’s projects, as long as we deliver his. And, while I am happy to keep the sackcloth and ashes on hand for my own foul-ups, should I really be expected to wear them for someone else’s?

Mind you, if I should, then I should also be able to wear the finery of the IT industry’s successes. So here’s my list of the seven wonders of the IT world. (And, forgive me, although I am sure Eniac was wonderful, I have focused on the past 10 years.)

See extended entry!