Alialogica is the merge of two Latin words, “alia” and “logica”, meaning “another logic”, another way of thinking.
After years of experience in the IT sector, we have seen that too many things don’t work in the right way. And we do believe that a different approach is possible, indeed mandatory.
An approach where human beings are at the center of all the processes: analysis, design, development, testing, training, maintenance and feedback processing.
We do believe in a holistic vision that is able to look at a problem in its complexity and entirety with the explicit goal to find out the best possible solution (at least for the time being).
The misconception we meet everyday
You may say “That’s old stuff, already heard”. Maybe.
But, still today, there are people around not having a clear idea of what is the complexity behind effective IT systems and services. Everyone is focused on his/her own little patch of earth, aiming to maximize the benefits in the immediate and they don’t even care about considering if this approach is ethical or not and the consequences it has in the mid/long term.
Too often, we meet:
- customers looking for the quick-and-dirty and most economic solution, no matter the quality of the result
- short-sighted analysts, sticking only to what their clients asked, not even trying to figure out what they actually need
- developers forced to jump from one project to another, adopting the dirtiest tricks to get things done in the shortest possible time
- graphic designers aimed only at producing pleasant interfaces, paying no attention to the User Experience
- software engineers devoted to implement elegant solutions and patterns, never keeping an eye to performance issues
- et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…
For very different reasons this approach leads to a sick IT ecosystem where the most evident result is the lack of trust among people.
This is not ethical
In our vision all this stuff is not ethical.
This is not ethical because these bad habits always lead to one conclusion: no respect for persons, no matter who the persons are.
- The customer, that is cheated by the software firm and gets convinced that IT is only an expensive and useless game where he is forced to waste a lot of money and time
- The junior developer, that is “sold” like a senior and abandoned to his/her fate and forced to work around the clock, often with disappointing results
- The final user, suffering a bad experience because no one spent not even one minute to figure out in which way “that new wonderful feature” would have been used
- The software architect who is “suggested” to design a solution leading to expensive e recurring maintenance activities
And we could continue with a long list of non-ethical situations that we refuse to accept as “normal” and part of the IT ecosystem. Also because, in the end, all these “cheatings” lead to the same result: project failures, with non negligible waste of money, resources, time, and trust. And these situations generate a very bad impact on human beings: a customer loses a market opportunity, a software house loses one or more important clients, a team leader loses a valuable programmer that feels exploited and demoted, a software engineer feels depressed because non-optimal solutions are preferred to the best ones… And so on.
In such a world, everyone loses.
There are never time and money to do things well.
But there are always time and money to do things twice.
A consultant
And so, what?
We would like to contribute to changing things.
In our vision, ethical IT means that we try to make people (whatever their role) to cooperate by sharing competences, knowledge, and skills.
Education is the most precious tool that we have to create culture: we aim to make people understand, by proving it with the facts, that a multidisciplinary approach to IT projects (where many skills and competences complement each other) is the most effective one and always leads to awesome results. At least in our humble opinion (and experience).
Maybe it’s not the cheapest one, in the short term. But the cheapest and the most effective for sure, in the mid-long term.
And when we say “education” we’re not referring to training courses as much as rather to knowledge sharing that is always happening when a “good listener” meets a “good explainer”.
Yes, I know what you are thinking and you’re right: it’s a two-way street.
You can be the best and most ethical IT guy in the world but you always need a counterpart that is open-minded and smart enough to understand the value (in terms of knowledge and solutions) that you are bringing to him/her. You can’t do it all by yourself: you always need other people who share your beliefs and vision, whether they are your customers or your colleagues or your boss.
One of the goals of this blog is exactly to share some experience to help you identify the best counterpart and how to empower it (if it’s a good one) or how to mitigate the risks (if it’s a bad one). An ethical world is a world where cooperation supersedes and nullifies competition.
What you’ll find in this blog
This is not another tech blog: there are plenty of them.
In this blog we’ll try to share our experiences as far as the construction of a better IT management system is concerned. What does it mean?
Well, it’s simpler to explain it by example than by word.
In the posts of this blog you’ll find – for example – some stories about how to effectively design a complex IT system, but also about how to manage your collaborators to build a strong and effective team, rather than how to make your systems resilient to day-by-day maintenance.
It will be a mixture of IT stuff and soft skills for IT project management.
Always keeping in mind that human beings come first.
So, if you’re one who does believe what we believe, read the articles, spread the voice (by linking and re-sharing the posts) and contact us. We are glad to share other stories, as well.
Don’t expect to see a new post everyday, not even every week: we write in our spare time.
And writing is a time consuming activity, especially if you want to do it well. So, as soon as we have any new stuff, we will release it.
That’s all, folks. Happy reading!