ESB/BES/SOA/I think my head exploded

I’m attending a workshop on campus architecture and middleware planning. Back in the day, when I thought my job was about systems and services and not about meetings and synergies, I thought this workshop would help me understand how to rebuild our local environment to take advantage of new developments in enterprise applications. HAHAHAHAH. I so much do not understand what they’re talking about it’s scary. I have some staff here, but they’re being awfully quiet too.

However, I seem to fake comprehension well, because today they asked me to lead a “lightning” round tomorrow. Actually, I suspect they know I understand nothing, but they’re a bunch of techies and I’m the only CTO. So, I think tomorrow they really want me to repeat back to them what I think I understood so they can figure out just how hard it’s going to be for them to deliver their message when they return home. It’s like I’m my own focus group. And the message they’re going to hear tomorrow will be, um, yeah, good luck cuz you lost me at hello.

3 Responses to “ESB/BES/SOA/I think my head exploded”

  1. Kyle said:

    Jun 20, 08 at 4:05 am

    I have a bunch of days like this too. We’re replacing our SAN infrastructure this summer, and when we started the vendor selection process, I basically knew what SAN stood for and not much else. “Faking it” has really become about absorbing enough to become conversant in any given technology. As CTO/CIO there is simply too much to know for you to know it all. The staff is there to have deep, specific knowledge. We need to have broader, shallow knowledge to understand the intersection points.

    Oh, and so we can leverage our synergies. ‘-)

  2. admin said:

    Jun 20, 08 at 7:38 pm

    We just went through a big SAN project. EMC vs. Compellent. After much tearing of the hair and beating of the chest, we went for boring old EMC. Which is fine.

  3. Kyle said:

    Jun 21, 08 at 2:38 am

    We had an EMC, and our battle was EMC v. NetApp. We went with the NetApp. Our systems guys are totally stoked. Me? just seems like a boring big bunch of disks. But hey, they’re happy, and we can finally increase student quotas to 500mb. I’m hoping next cycle that there will be a cloud option (maybe from Google) that will allow me to simply forgo the SAN all together…


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