Morning’s Ponders and Tool Suite Rational
Blog: Brian's Blog - Enterprise Strategy, Architecture and Management
Prior to jumping into finishing writing the technical approach for an RFP response this morning I spent a little time reflecting on the past few weeks of work. I’m a big fan of Covey’s approach to analyzing your time to gain insights and understand patterns that could help you become more productive and enjoyment. Yes I said pleased. In a day when everyone talks about work-life balance as though these are separate things, I’m wondering if I’m the only one that gets enjoyment out of my work.
Must work translate into drudgery?
That seems odd. I’m a woodworker, initially to assist my wife’s real estate projects and create items specific to what we need around the home, then it became a hobby. As I participate in other social media sites around woodworking and makers, the pattern seems the same. Then I find some others taking it a bit farther and creating businesses around their passion (e.g., Stumpy Nubs, The Wood Whisperer, etc.) It appears woodworking has gotten a resurgence in popularity. From their online appearance it seems they are have a passion for their work. May be I’m reading into what I see in their public appearances and activities, but I continually see signs of real enjoyment in their participation in the craft. Marc Spagnola, The Wood Whisperer, has a science background and he uses it daily to expose the science behind the craft, right down to using the scientific method and experimentation to discovery such. On his video blogs you see him and his wife Nicole banter back and forth. To me its clear they are enjoying not only success in their business, but the process.
Which brings me back to this morning’s musings. Do others also enjoy the process of their work like I do? As I’m about to get back to writing the technical approach, I find myself excited about the process. I really, no love, the entire process of discovering new methods and figuring out how to solve problems. This is probably why I had gravitated to Management Consulting and Information Technology.
With that bit of personal insight, like always, after I closed out work last night I when back to working on the next section of my CAD for Enterprise ™ Design Tool suite. My thoughts around this as a worthwhile endeavor is that there are plenty of technology corporations creating tools for what is the equivalent of CAM for Enterprise. This matches what happened in the physical product industries for decades, lots of industrial automation technology while Architects, Engineers, and Designers continued to use manual methods and slide rules to accomplish their work till the computer technology became mature enough to be applied. I’m seeing this as a similar pattern. Last night I did a quick inventory of the “tools” I’ve built throughout my career to aid/automate various tasks around Enterprise Design, some I.T. oriented, some financial, some business management. Then I looked at a tool I created in MS Access decades ago, B.A.S.E. ™ (Business Analysis System and Environment), it enable me to work in multiple functional domains on an engagement and reuse the information. That goal I’ve continued to work on throughout my career. A few weeks ago I had a brief exchange with my mentor regarding integrating various information domains. With his encouragement and the involvement of others in their respective fields it looks like I’m close to creating the infrastructure that would support such a tools suite.
In the meantime I continue to create various point tools that will eventually snap-in, like the B.A.S.E. ™ product I created which had a similar idea of point tool modules. This along with my question-based methodology is the goal I’ve set out to accomplish. –and yes the point tools can be used in stand-alone mode; and yes I have shared these to others over the years (some on the Office Templates Online under the brand Intellectual Arbitrage Group which appears to have been syndicated on multiple sites as free downloads).
Filed under: Engineering Software, Enterprise Architecture, Strategy, Systems Thinking, Technology Management Tagged: CAD for Enterprise 
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