Don Park, having looked at the IBM Jazz video has mixed feelings I can relate to. He suggests that it’s too cold and disconnected from it’s namesake. Park also raises some signficant questions and concerns:

Where is the life in engineering? What will engineering be like if it’s measured only in metrics and graphs?

… we can feel like less than a person and more like a switch waiting to fire in time. But then maybe there is no room for us in the machinery of global economy.

Jazz Thoughts

I’d sum up his thoughts by saying IBM Jazz “ain’t got that swing”. The good news is that by making the association with Jazz, IBM is pointing themselves and the broader market in the right direction.

The answers to Park’s questions about engineering lie in Rhythmeering which shifts the focus from isolated, machine-driven metrics to collaborative people-centered harmonies. The machine metrics are good to the degree they serve human objectives but when people begin to serve the interests of machines, perhaps it’s time to revisit the messages of movies such as The Matrix and The Terminator. Information systems and the human organizations they are intended to support can benefit greatly from jazz paradigm but you can’t really swing unless everybody is participating - not just developers IBM’s Jazz is for. However, in order for that to happen, developers first need to start getting into the collaborative mindset IBM’s Jazz points to. As they do so the programming tools and user interfaces will have to become more flexible and accessible. GVScript will soon show the way for programming and when it can be connected to user interfaces such as those seen in Rhythmeering In Motion and Touching The Meshverse, we’ll see organizations “swingin to the digital times”.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Business, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.