Tuesday, April 6, 2004

Not all trips to India are blessed by Krishna: A case study of outsourcing gone awry. [Salon] While development models and standards may help in factoring large projects among several organizations (user organization, in-house project managers, offshore development), higher-level managers seriously overestimate how far factoring can go, and how much it may cost. Software is often so interwoven with business and other social processes that factoring is as likely to succeed as decoupling successfully the frontal cortex from the rest of the nervous system. Much of modern computer science still accepts implicitly some form of mind-body (code-activity) dualism, while in fact information technology is increasingly inseparable from its human, material, and social context, making managerially mandated factoring a 21st-century version of brains-in-vats. 8:31:44 PM