James Gardner has some good advice for graduates joining organisations and facing the old hierarchy: Walking with Dinosaurs.
..have a look at your IT organisation and especially at your development processes. I bet you’ll find they’re gummed up with gates, and procedures, and evaluations and reviews. Everything takes ages, and the mantras will be “reuse” and “architecture” and “governance”. These are the hallmarks of the dinosaur.
Yep, and not just in IT, either.
Why do I say that? Because they are mechanisms for controlling rampant spread of technology solutions in an age when doing big systems was expensive. It is still expensive, but only because of the artifacts that have been left behind when things actually were expensive. It is our control artifacts that are now making us expensive, not the problems we are asked to solve.
I’d only add that I don’t think the young have a monopoly on disruption. A lot of old hands understand perfectly well how to disrupt a system when it suits them.
