I’m just back from Rome, where I did some work for Getronics, and spoke with the great CIO’s of Chevron (Lynn Chou), Booz-Allen-Hamilton (Frank Smith), and DSM (Jo van den Hanenberg).

I spoke about the 3 laws of IT (see http://www.qhuba.com for more info), and sat in on a days’ workshop.

As it was in Rome, I took the opportunity of spending an extra day there with my wife, and we took in the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of Rome. Really enjoyable stay.

It’s a little worrying from other aspects though. It made me think. Again.

In the light falling through the circular hole in the top of the pantheon, I came to a realisation. We’re fixing the wrong problem. The fact that it’s a problem is part of the reason we’re trying to fix it.

Here, let me try the thought-train on you:

We always go to look for the biggest or most expensive problem we can find, and then try to solve it, to see what problems we as IT vendors (or CIO’s) can do for our customers.

Shouldn’t we be spending more time on areas where there are no problems?

Think about it. we go through our lives for 90% of the time with little or no problems.

And still, we’re trying to optimise the last 10%? That just doesn’t make sense. Isn’t it time to stop and take a really good look at the 90% that isn’t obviously causing a problem, and see what we can do there?

Like fashion, food, good music; there’s plenty out there, but time and again we’re made happy by the fact that there’s more where it came from. We buy better mobile phones even though we can’t articulate what’s wrong with our old ones.

So here’s the challenge: Now go out and fix what’s not broken. We might just land up surprising ourselves and our customers.

Pauwl Lunow