Debts arise when you spend more than you can afford. Furthermore, debts grow by itself: they come with an interest rate. Debts do not have to be a problem, as long as they are temporary, and as long as you have the means to pay them back. Because this is the number 1 characteristic of debts: they need to be paid back, one day or another. If you can’t pay them back at the moment when you have to, this…
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In my work as a freelance IT consultant I work for companies or institutions that are not IT companies themselves. Mostly they are consultancy firms or research institutes. Knowledge intensive organizations, I call them myself. Digitization process in organizations So did I work for a consultancy firm in renewable energy. Their business is acquiring knowledge regarding solar energy, wind energy, energy savings, energy systems and use this knowledge to help their clients implementing energy saving measures or renewable energy systems….
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Computers in the year 2015 are not much different from the first computers built in the seventies. Many will disagree on this with me, but let me refine myself: I think computers have not fundamentally changed. Sure, they’re faster, have more capacity and they’re much better connected to each other than they were before. They also have become much cheaper, what makes them much more available, and therefore, the amount of applications of the computer has exploded. However, there’s one…
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Working in IT means working with specialists. The IT world is one with a large amount of specializations (technical, methodological, business-wise), that is still growing every day. The same can be said of many other lines of business and it is even true for non-business area’s like science: it’s a scientist’s job to know a lot about very little. Apparently, the world needs specialists. I would even take it one step further: specialization is probably inherent to economic activity. Every…
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In previous posts, I explained why software development is complicated and susceptible to errors. Subsequently, I tried to find out out why especially large governmental IT projects fail. In this article, I point my arrows towards the clients of IT. It’s my opinion that a lot of problems in IT projects start at the client side. Clients are usually very passionate about their own business (not being IT), have all kinds of ideas about how IT should support their business,…
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Quite frequently, articles appear in the Dutch press about problematic ICT projects of Dutch governmental bodies. Budgets that get seriously out of hand, time schedules that are exceeded by years, products that do not meet expectations. Recent examples of projects that can be characterized as very problematic are the SPEER project for the Dutch ministry of Defense (estimates of expenses on this project go as high as 1 billion euros, the project should be finished in 2009, is still going…
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Software projects are often problematic. They take a long time, are expensive, need a lot of maintenance, tend to have bugs in it, and quite often the final result does not work according to the original expectations: intuitive to work with, without any failures or bugs, and fast. The elements of software are small and many Software consists of lines of code. A software package like Microsoft Office contains millions and millions of lines of code. Not all of…
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Most of my clients, when discussing software development, they justify themselves by telling me that they don’t understand much about it. I always respond that, in order for their software development projects to be successful, they have to understand some basic concepts at least. However, they’re usually not very motivated to learn about software development. “Not my piece of cake”, “I just want to use the software, not understand it”, “Too complicated for me”, or even “It doesn’t interest me”….
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Being a modest person, I don’t like to be in the spotlights very much. I’m not too fond of presentations, sketches at wedding parties or karaoke. At birthday parties (if I go at all), I don’t feel the need to tell the most amazing story you’ve ever heard, or the funniest joke you can imagine. I guess, well no, I’m quite sure, I’m more an observer than a performer. Nothing wrong with that, I’d say, the world needs performers as…
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