| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Sun 01 Jun 2003 HollywoodCategory : Commentary/hollywood.txt I was just updating a friend about what I'm doing (This guy's interesting. He's been up at Chengdu since April, last year, building a web design and 3D graphics business. He's also interesting because he's written a book - a novel, actually, and quite a good one, too. I think he's written something that should be made into a film. But that'll be another topic). But for now, I was just explaining to him why I think maybe the current model for doing IT projects doesn't work. I'm thinking that the process used by Hollywood (seriously!) could be a better model - the client hires a reputable producer, who will determine the requirements, hire the talents - coder, designer, tester - and they come together for a few months, and deliver the system, and the client gets the source code (because they're all going to use Open Source tools). When the client wants to build something more, they can form another project (could be a wholly different team next time) and it gets done. And the whole thing works by reputation. Mess up, and it'll be hard to get invited to join another project. (It works the other way, too. An inept project lead will soon lose an ability to attract talents.) For this to work, you've got to have an eco-system, and a grapevine, and lots of contacts. That's why tools like phpbb2 could become the great enabler. It faciltates discussion, contacts, collaboration, and provides some privacy in terms of its ability to set up different levels of access. I let a couple of projects pass by last year because I grew too tired of the old way. If they ever come round again, I'll try this other route. I tried to visualise how this would work a few years ago when I was reading William Goldman's "Adventures in the Screen Trade". Certainly, I believe that writing software is not a factory job. There's a lot of creativity and inspiration needed that you can't legislate for. Talented programmers are as temperamental as any artist. And it'll get more combustible as you add graphics designers and writers to the mix, especially for web-based work. Just this morning I was reading this in "The Creative Economy": "As a process for turning ideas into business, and as sustainable economics, Hollywood can teach some useful lessons... In recent years, the ordinary economy has begun to see the benefits of Hollywood's ways of working... " |
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