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Today, I Am Complaining Like It Is 1999

by Anu

So here we are at the 2008 NICSA Technology Summit and there's a message that hasn't changed. For me, it's the same message I remember hearing when I worked in IT at a major investment bank.

We can't connect all the systems with disparate data and make sense of it all. Wow, flashback. I thought that the pervasive network, XML, middleware, business intelligence - weren't all these going to connect different data systems? Ten years later and we're still having sessions and 2-hour lunch conversations about this?

But then it struck me: IT professionals will always complain about these things. Why? Job Security. We need to change the paradigm by asking important business questions and looking to IT for reproducible methods to answer those questions periodically.

I asked an important one of many attendees, receiving mostly blank looks: Can you tell me, of the advisors that logged in to your Web site last month, did any drop a ticket for a previously unheld fund?