Why are we so ideological?

Hi...

still I am a fan of audio books. Right now I am listening to some articles of a German magazine called 'Brand eins'. The main topic of this issue is prejudices.

The interesting part is that - at least in my opinion - prejudices are very valuable to our every day live. We all have to do decisions very frequently and do not have the time nor power to rethink every thing. So you simply reproduce what worked last time or what you feel will work out.

We all know the drawback of prejudices: It is hard to overcome them once they settled. So we all learned that one of the main fundamently new things the age of enlightenment was the idea to challenge the easy explanations and to drill deeper. Only nature is the measurement etc. etc. (ask me I studied physics ;-)

The interesting line now is that there is a direct link from prejudices and some easy explanation of things to ideologies. It cost the author of the audio-book some time to get there and I wont repeat this all here but it made sense for me. Ideology...Their basic principles are easy and not discussable somehow (at least for those who believe in it). And they tend to be absolut, no discussion...

What really freaked me was the idea how this all fits to IT. IT seems to be the perfect place for ideology. Don't we had the paradigm of EAI some time ago. There was no discussion allowed, this was it. All those not on board simply didn't understand the brightness. OK, it's gone. Now we are in the age of SOA. No discussion, this is it. Even better than all we had before. Ups, stop, the star is bluring, a new star is born, Web 2.0.

To be precise: All those (and the thousands I didn't mention) have their right to live. Their niche where they will survive. But the one thing I learned is that there is no one thing. There are patterns which can be combined in the one or the other way. Now as much as you can of them and use what is good for you.

This rises the interesting question: What is good for me? In science the only measurement is nature. What could that be in IT?

It is so easy and we all tend to forget that once a while: In the end it is the secretary in front of the machine, the young guy with player in his hand or the grand-father trying to open an email with the pictures of his grand-children. It is the end user. Some might call him customer. I don't like that because a customer can also be a corporation or a city or any other large construct. Sometimes we have to convince the customer to do something different, to invest into the people within the machinery. It is the human being for whom in the very end we all work. They don't care about SOA and they shouldn't. And we should only if it helps to get closer to the goal of providing the right environment for people to work and live in. I think I am ideological here...

CU

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