There aren’t usually a lot of laughs involved in resetting a password, ordering a laptop or provisioning a cloud computing environment, but perhaps that’s because Rube Goldberg never focused on those kinds of things.
In this deck from CA Technologies that was recently posted to SlideShare, the company recalls the famous cartoonist’s style of making everyday things look even more complicated than they are and imagines how he might have treated the kinds of situations in which CIOs and IT departments routinely find themselves. The takeaway message is pretty clear here: CIOs should be trying to simplify the complexity in many enterprises. CA Technologies provides tools to do this, of course, but there’s probably a lot of things IT departments could do with some of their existing products or even by reworking some of their key processes.
There’s lots of great stuff in here, particularly on slide 12, which looks at “speeding up IT” (which has the best “green IT” idea I’ve ever heard). It might not be as funny as Dilbert, but that doesn’t make it any less true. What other CIO scenarios should Rube Goldberg have depicted? Share your ideas in the comments below — or better yet, send us your own cartoons!
