Responsibility

Yesterday was spent, yet again, in a welter of reading. It's so different to be on the recommending side of things. To be able to read up on products, widen my horizons, be the one investigating and evaluating.

The welter continues today -- I've got a pile of brochures, print and online to look through, more data to process, adding to the matrix of information that is stewing now, somewhere in my professional sub-conscious.

The only thing I wonder about, is whether or not I'll actually get to build anything, if we go with any of the products that I'm investigating. So many of them are oriented toward getting work for the professional services departments of the various software companies. Not that this is surprising in the slightest: lesson learned at SuSE -- professional services/business solutions, are where the money is.

Still, it's vaguely disconcerting as a web designer to feel as if you are in some way redundant. All of the systems separate content from delivery, leaving control of templating in the hands of the web designer. Yet once the design is set up, it doesn't need all that much maintenance. At least, not theoretically.

The idea of being a code baby sitter doesn't appeal to me at all of course. Another lesson learned from SuSE. Babysitting HTML is boring.

This part though, the evaluations, talking to vendors, trying to navigate a course between sales spiel and concrete information that is useful to the company -- now that's fun. Spass ... as I recall, from those marketing summit meetings in Germany in January ... having fun while you work, makes work both more rewarding for the employee and yields better results for the employer. That's the theory anyway.

Back to the grindstone: I need to find out more about a piece of software called OpenMarket.