Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

If I'm going to make a serious effort to improve my writing, and maintain something of a regular cadence, then I should attempt to blog every work day. I don't want to make yet another resolution on some calendar boundary condition that only returns "true" for a few days. I'm going to make a concerted effort to write with the clockwork regularity of gulping my daily Dunkin Donuts allowance: that means something every work day. One of the deciding factors is a need to be more transparent about what I'm trying to drive in Global Systems Engineering, and how that relates to our customers, our markets and the industries in which Sun has a presence. There's no better way to get that transparency than to essentially open up the daily diary.

Today's plan: I'm writing this 39,000 feet over France (listening to Genesis Live Over Europe, which just struck me as coincidental) on my way to Berlin to meet with the systems engineering management of our entire European region. We're about to get into the thick of kick-off season, where each country or group of countries hosts a meeting that's one part strategy setting and one part celebration. I try to convey my messages to as broad a cross-section of our management team as I can, allowing them to translate into local language, local emphasis and local culture. My themes this year: how we are going to grow into the space created by the "big trends" in computing infrastructure, how we are going to fuel that growth through cross-field organization teamwork, and how we equip those teams with stronger technical skills and communities in which to share, grow and highlight the applications of those skills. Customers, Competencies, Communities. That's FY09 in a GSE nutshell, to borrow a phrase from Tim O'Reilly.