The Blog of Burgher Jon

This may sound a tad bit egotistical, but I consider myself a bit of an armchair intellectual.  I thoroughly enjoy nearly-academic conversation about a wide variety of topics (especially technology and business).  The problem is that being a full-time intellectual holds absolutely zero appeal to me.  I love the fruits of productive labor too much to spend much time idling through intellectual thoughts.  Sure, I spend a lot of time researching technology and business when it relates to an investment hypothesis or a current project/company, but I’m not an academic; I can’t justify the time to do appropriate research on my every whim.

Take, for example, the post I made yesterday on waste in enterprise IT.  It involved a chart that showed the progress of IT over the past 40 odd years and the competency level of IT organizations over the same span.  I made that chart in 15 minutes in PowerPoint.  I shudder to imagine the amount of research involved to validate the assumptions made in that 15 minutes; developing methods to quantify the rate of growth of IT capabilities and IT organizational competency, applying those methods to various intervals over the last 40 years, creating a method for quantifying waste in enterprise IT, validating the hypothesis that waste is directly correlated to the difference between the two curves.  If you’re a doctoral candidate looking for a good thesis, feel free to take that one for a spin.  I’d love to read the results, I just can’t justify doing the research myself or even funding it.  While that post has the potential to underpin an investment thesis (namely shorting incompetent IT vendors and/or going long on companies that  are taking advantage of the closing gap), I long ago stopped investing in enterprise IT*.  I suppose the hypothesis is somewhat related to my current project, but not enough to make it worth the effort to validate.

Without blogging, the theory would have been discussed with a couple of colleagues and friends and forgotten on the whiteboard in my office.  With blogging, I was able to share it with the rest of the world without doing the research necessary for it to stand up as an academic paper or even industry magazine article.  I was even able to validate it informally, by seeing what other industry participants that read the blog think of it (one industry analyst informed me of this related editorial that she had written).  It’s this category of communication that thoroughly invigorates myself and other armchair intellectuals.

*For the record, I did this because the level of waste makes it difficult to guess who will succeed and who will fail.  It frequently has more to do with the Rolodex of the sales people, then the actual usefulness of the vendor’s products/services.