My favorite UK TV producer once had to sell his house in Wimbledon and move to an apartment in Central London just to get his two adult sons to finally leave home. Now something similar seems to be happening in American IT. Some people are calling it age discrimination. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the strategy is clear: IT is urbanizing — moving to city centers where the labor force is perceived as being younger and more agile.
The poster child for this tactic is McDonald’s, based for 47 years in Oak Brook, Illinois, but just this summer moved to a new Intergalactic HQ downtown in […]
Back in April I wrote a six-part series of columns on troubles at IBM that was read by more than three million people. Months later I’m still getting ripples of response to those columns, which I followed with a couple updates. There is a very high level of pain in these responses that tells me I should do a better job of explaining the dynamics of the underlying issues not only for IBM but for IT in general in the USA. It comes down to class warfare.
A friend of mine has been in an epic struggle with his mortgage processor and his experience tells us a lot about the state of IT. It started in October of last year when my friend met with his loan processor (Bank of America) to inquire about a loan modification. The loan is actually owned by Freddie Mac. He turned-in all the required paperwork and followed up with an income statement when requested two weeks later. The meeting took many hours mainly because all of the original documents were imaged and put into his electronic file. In late December he was told that his modification was completed, given a new mortgage payment and told to […]