“What does Bob want?” – an amusing lesson about figuring out what actually matters to the business

2

Damon Edwards / January 8th, 2008

This is a great episode of Redmonk’s People Over Process podcast:
http://redmonk.com/cote/2007/11/02/open-source-in-it-management-with-john-willis-redmonk-radio-44/

For anyone interested in systems management or automating operations this one is not to be missed. The interview is with John Willis (master independent Tivoli consultant) on the state of the enterprise systems management world.

The most impressive part is John’s retelling of his conference favorite “What does Bob want?” story. This modern business fable (based on a true story) really should strike a nerve in anyone who has been involved in systems management implementations. We’ve all heard terms like “business and IT alignment”.. but how often does it really happen? What may seem like a success to the guys in the trenches will seem like a letdown (at best) or failure (at worst) to the business leader who signed the check.

Or as the interviewer, Coté from Redmonk, puts it:
This is about “understanding what it is that the company wants to accomplish with the software, not just making the software do what it does”