To be smart: that's it?

I've attended a speech of Ivar Jacobson for the first time. He was at the Innovate 2010, an event organized by IBM on the theme of the Ration product suite. The title of the speech was "Filling the gap from IT and the Business". The title was really facinating for me since I'm struggling with this issue since a while. I was interested also because the usual phrase "aligning IT" was not used, and for sure it was done on purpose.

The destruens part was routed about the fact that IT and Business shall not play the role of customer-supplier, the entire 60 minutes was spent by Professor Jacobson in stating that to reduce the gap it's essentuali to:

• be smart
• apply practises
• involve the business

Is it all that? I was really disappointed of this low value statement about IT and Business. It's really underestimating the difficulty of addressing this problem. With smart people and with best of breed practises it's easy to address any problem, even out of IT. It's like saying that in order to do good builtings it's essential to have a smart project, apply good building practises and involve the client. I was expecting more from the Professor who invented the Use Cases. In addition he was repeating rather frequently, with false modesty, that he invented the Use Case and he did not realize how much this'd have spread the IT and influence the way me do software.

Ivar has it's own company now, and this was pointed out pretty clearly during the speech. It's was crear that he was selling himself and this compamy of smart people with good practises. My partecipation at the this speech had no return of investment.

But the devil is in the details. Is it enought to be smart, act smart and applies the best practises? But we need to ask ourself what those best practises are and how to recognize smartness? Often smart people are recognized by the result they provide and this does not assume there is a underlyng method, in IT we have to identify the patter for repeatibility. In addition people comes and go, and a team changes. There is the need to factor out those aspects whatever they are, identify the method, abstract the recurring features and create values from them in order to be able to repeat them.

It is almost useless to act smart if it takes decades so obtain this ability: there is too mucht time to wait and the cost of these professionals would be very expensive, as probably the people working in the Ivar jacobson Company are.