It didn’t go down too well when an elderly relative asked me over Christmas ‘what exactly do you do?’. After fobbing him off with the usual ’something in computers’, he was shocked to find out that I spend most of my time ‘Grabbing people’s brains and shoving them into a PC’.

This kind of blog-related-violence is normally associated with Twenty-Major (Warning , Parential Guidance required , unless you’re over 80), so before you call the police , let me explain.

Look at your hands. Unless they’re scarred and calloused (from the weekend’s DIY) the chances are that you work in the knowledge economy. You could work for a Bank , Insurance company, Legal company or be a medical professional but most of your work consists of one thing:  You push pieces of paper around that have some magical value.
Or you would push pieces of paper around if it hadn’t all been computerised in the last 10 years. Now you swap files and emails to get things done.  And you swear on a regular basis when the computer can’t find the information you’re looking for, or someone doesn’t understand the email you sent them. But the important bit, the information processing,  still remains in your brain.

Which brings us to Red-Piranha (site update in progress) and the shoving of people’s brains into a computer. While we can copy an MP3 music file (with Adam’s and Bono’s imagination in it) and send it around the world, but we can’t photocopy your brain. We don’t want all of it, just the part that gets the magical value-added work done. The bits about drinking beer and playing volleyball on the beach we’ll quite happily leave with you.

So this is what Enterprise Web 2.0 is all about : getting the computer to take a load off your brain so that you’ll have more time to spend on the beach drinking beer. Chapter 3 (draft) of our Enerprise Web book has just been put online, which shows you exactly how to do this.

If you’ve reading this blog for a while , you’ll know that I’m into Business Rules. You know, the logic (formal and informal) that are unique to each company / organisation and govern how an insurance claim gets settled , the price you pay for an airline seat, or how your order from Amazon get’s shipped. Rule Engines are a way of getting this knowledge out of people’s heads and into a computer.

Rules are a very simple idea (you just state what you know to be true), but rule engines are not. Ironically, the problem most people have is ‘this is to simple to work’. If you want to get find out more more, the ‘Down to Earth Business Rules blog’ from Artemis Alliance is a good place to start.
They also have a Squidoo Lens (a set of links to other resources) that is worth looking at.

… have a read of this instead. Ireland is probably unique in having , within the last 10 years , benefited hugely from offshoring (why do you think all the US Companies are here?), then benefited again from being about to offshore work itself.

Thanks to Bill for the link.

Check out this article. If you haven’t come across it before, TheServerside.com is a technical website where Enterprise Java people hang out.

[Link to Serverside.com]

Update: A copy of the original post can be found here.