Goals and success

How do you make sure you goals are your own? i.e. you don't adopt someone else's goals as your own? You see someone else's success and adopt their goals as your own, you get inspired what others have accomplished and try to emulate them. Is there something wrong with this? I don't know, on the one hand I think this is a good way to stay motivated, but on the other hand, how do you ensure originality in thought and action. Anyways, this post was brought to you by the recent NPR ted post on success.  

The benefits of working for the government

I get 2 weeks off from work for the Eid holidays. I guess that makes up for the extremely long process I had to endure to get a net connection and a PC.
Despite that, not much else to report really. Hoping to be able to run the marathon in Dubai in January, need to register for it and get my training back on track. Should run for 80 minutes or so today but I need to go out and buy a new small mp3 player. 

Impossible is nothing!

When asked about his impossible tax plans Romney knocked the reporter out and then yelled in his face "IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING"

Business Architecture - Enterprise Architecture

It's a difficult to understand the entire enterprise architecture process in one go, which is surprising since we architects really like our diagrams. Both TOGAF & Zachman framework use visual depiction of information heavily to get their ideas across. But how does one go from the highest level at the business level down to the lowest level of technological implementation? Most organizations don't really ever get down to this level of follow through, after all, why would you need to see what data element in a certain database is used by what business user to accomplish what task? actually... if you think about it ... you might. Imagine an environment where you have had people writing code from before you were born, I was born in 1980, I can actually find cobol programs that were released into the production environment at that time and the amount of business sprawl present in such an organization. But that's a different topic, getting back to the main idea, you need to know who does what in your environment and why they do it, it's just like personal organization, if you always keep the same thing in the same place it's easy to remember where to find it when you need it, you are the architect of your own life.
But since you live your life, you can get away with being sloppy, imagine if different people had to live your life, how difficult would it be for them to find out what you did, why you did it and where you put things you needed? Sorta like that show "Quantum Leap", the guy jumped around different people's body's in different time periods and lived their life for a day. He often had trouble reconstructing what he needed to do. But that's science fiction, there is nothing fictional about the problem organizations face when people leave and new people come in to do their jobs. This is where enterprise architecture can work as a guide of some sort. Business architects are supposed to have diagrammatic representations of the tasks performed by different roles in an organization. These diagrams link the person to the task they perform to the software they use to the data they look at and at the highest level to the goal they want to accomplish. This is the real power of enterprise architecture, a holistic view of the organization that leaves very little to the imagination. The benefits start showing up once you have all this data accumulated and properly tagged. You can start looking at the kind of redundancies present in the organization and how to start reducing IT sprawl. This kind of pruning is not easy, once architects get involved in the day to day activities of their organization its very hard to take a step back and view the data in a holistic sense. This is where lots of architecture programs stop showing value.

Irony

Does anyone else find it ironic that people protesting the deadly soccer clashes in Egypt ended up being shot by the police leading to the 3 deaths and 1,500 injuries? Would the next protest be about the violence at protest about the violence at the protest? This could easily turn into an infinite loop of protests. I respect the people's right to protest, I really do, but I also think protesters need to be mindful of what kind of situation they are in. Violent clashes with the powers that be won't solve anything if those powers have become immune to them. As matter of fact, if they are the ones perpetuating the violence it's better to stay at home and find alternative means to voice dissent. I don't know what the alternative would be in Egypt right now, peaceful protests seems to have gone out of fashion.

Back by unpopular demand

I haven’t updated this blog in a while so here is a brief rundown of what has happened in my life since the last update.
1. Finished my MBA from Duke, met some great people and had a wonderful time learning new things.

2. Realized that an MBA in Saudi Arabia isn’t the easiest thing to market. It’s not a very liquid market, people don’t change jobs easily.

3. My sister moved houses, while helping her unpack we found a box labeled “Not spices”. It didn’t contain spices.

4. Bought DDR (dance dance revolution) for my PS3. Played it for about ½ hour and then stopped trying to “learn” how to dance using it.

5. Related to 4, I’m now sure I’m artistically impaired. Found this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html

6. Bought a Blackberry. I can now check my email from the bathroom and since I do my best thinking in there, I may post my next blog entry from there.

7. Bought a Vibram five fingers shoe, a unique running shoe that actually reduced the symptoms of my plantar fasciitis. Very counter intuitive, reduce the cushioning your wear and get better results.

8. Had a possible employer poke holes in a paper I wrote for my finance concentration. A very embarrassing situation. On the bright side, I learned more from the questions he asked me than I did from some of my finance classes.

That’s all for now.

Karl Marx ... working at a Bank

Alright, this is unusual enough to prompt me to write in the middle of my work day. There is a guy name Karl Marx who works in the same bank I work at. Heck, if I ever interviewed a guy named Karl Marx I would be asking him all kinds of questions before I hired him, plus I would keep an eagle eye on him, just in case he decides to bring down the capitalist system from with in. Alright back to work.