Recently George Thomas from Christian World News reported on a story about Christians being persecuted in the Indian state of Orissa by none other than Hindu radicals. I was saddened by the report. I ask you to join me in praying for our brothers and sisters facing persecution in that region of the world. Click on the map to the left to locate Orissa.
With all the news about Muslim radicals persecuting Christians and people of other faiths, it never crossed my mind that Hindus would persecute people of other faiths. I considered their faith and even the nation of India to be a peaceful nation. As a result, I found this story to be an eye-opener. 
Out of respect, I do realize not every Hindu is like these radicals. I love India and its people and one day hope to visit the country. I feel that at some point in our history we have had Christian radicals; individuals who would go around trying to convert people by force. I definitely would have to do more research to learn more truth about that. I love history! 
Back to the news story, I like what one of the residents said, “I am praying that through this devastation, people will experience the love of Jesus.” Amen to that! Fellow Christians, please pray for the people of India and its government. Pray that God will be merciful to these Hindu radicals and that they get the opportunity to see the extent of God’s love for them,
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,
that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16, NIV
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Even though I had it in mind to watch the State of the Union Address last night, I completely forgot about it. Instead I kept working through the presidential address. Sorry Bushy, I didn’t mean to. 
Look at it this way, I was helping solve problems with the economy by working.
No, but seriously. For those who missed President Bush’s last State of the Union Address, Michael F. Haverluck from CBN News was kind enough to provide us with a brief summary. If you prefer, the full transcript and video are available from the White House website. I’ll make it a point to watch the video sometime before Friday. 
For over two weeks I’ve been reading and reviewing issue tracking systems, in particular open source [1], PHP scripts [2]. Unfortunately there aren’t many options. Finally, I am going to commit to Eventum [3], even though I’m skeptical about their future software development. I am skeptical mainly because MySQL was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems.
To me it is one of those things I’m making a choice on because I have to (my company needs an issue tracking system), but I’m looking at the long-term picture and it is very blurry. I would at least be relieved if they had an active community around the product, a community that included developers, testers, and end-users. Forums would be good because I’m not geeky enough or have ever been attracted to mailing lists. I guess that’s the challenge with most open-source software, the uncertain future of it. The worst story I have experienced was when activeCollab suddenly changed from open to closed source, distancing small shops and open source fans. I am wary of the open source software that hangs around beta versions for more than a year and projects that include only one developer.
Regardless, I love and support open source software, and will continue to do so in the weeks ahead. I hope that, should development on Eventum end, Sun will give it to the community to further develop via Sourceforge or Google Code.
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When a problem occurs ask: How do you think we can fix the problem so it won’t happen again?
God’s love is his unselfish giving of himself to us to bring about good and blessing in our lives in spite of the fact that we are unlovely and that we do not deserve it.
God loves us unconditionally - without conditions the way you are.
I want to receive God’s love in my life.
I took the opportunity to check out a few CIO Executive Council Outlook videos the other day and ran across a very interesting “conversation” with Mary Hall Gregg, CIO of Quest Diagnostics. What I found most interesting was how the use of language helped change an IT culture. Today I wanted to share some of this language with you.
The idea is to stop using the old IT language and use the new business language. From what I understand the CIO Executive Council put this together for the beneficial use of all businesses and their IT organizations. Check it out:
| IT Language |
Business Language |
| Internal customer |
Business partner |
| External customers |
Customers |
| IT governance |
Investment planning |
| IT and the business |
IT in business, business technology |
| CIO’s business peers |
CIO and other business leaders |
| Internal SLAs |
Quality goals, excellence standards |
| IT project (or priority) |
Business project (or priority) |
| Functionality enhancement |
Business process change |
| Resources |
People |
I really liked the example of changing the language used to describe internal customers to business partners. Mary Hall Gregg made a great point when she explained the conscious decision her organization made to never use the word customer to refer to colleagues (the people inside the organization) and instead refer to them as as business partners.
Our colleagues — they are our business partners and together we are trying to drive growth for the company, and IT is a tool and a technology to drive growth. Our customers are the people that we serve, so patients are our customers and the patients are first in everything that we do. Physicians are our customers, health plans are our customers, employers are our customers. The people who use our services, who pay the bills — those are our customers. The employees of Quest Diagnostics, they’re either our business partners or, in some cases we refer to them as users, if they are using a service of IT, but we don’t allow anyone in IT to talk about our partners as being customers because it changes the dialogue and it sets a different expectation. If you think you’re my customer, you’re less willing to engage in a dialogue about how we can improve things and work together and collaborate. You just expect that I’m going to deliver a service, and when I don’t get it right, you don’t want to engage in a discussion about how we improve and move forward, so the use of the word partner versus customer I think is very essential for a company and an IT organization, that is about the growth of the company.
Language is important in the corporate culture. Every business and industry defines its culture by their use of language. I have worked for some of the best companies in their industries and each had their own language for industry-specific terms and for general terms, like employees. In my businesses I call employees team members and partners and consider all divisions to be groups, in order to discourage silos and invisible walls and to promote collaboration and a sense of family - an association of people who share common beliefs or activities. I am amazed at how powerful language is.
Kudos to the CIO Executive Council for their fine work on the Outlook series. It was very educational to watch the videos and read the transcripts. I cannot wait to put this information to good use. How about you?
Big shout out to Matt and the Automattic team for their contribution to the open source software community, for making the Internet a better place, for the innovations brought to us (WordPress, Akismet, and more), and for their latest round of funding. May Act II of the Automattic story be a complete success. Cheers!
I’m back to writing at the official place where you can read all my blah-blah-blah, the JCruz Presents Blog. This week I’ve got plenty of useful information to share with my readers, from the latest projects, to briefly looking at the value of language, and of course the Cruz Personal Index.
I’m hoping to write off this blog in 2008 as resourceful, informative, personal, and inspiring! I ask my fellow readers to help me stay accountable to that goal by sharing your comments at the end of every article. You don’t even need a free account to write in your quick comments. Make them count!
So, do I have any New Year’s resolutions? No, personally, the new year starts on my birthday. I set goals around my birthday and review them a few weeks right before that time the following year. I know resolutions have their place in our lives. At the very least they indicate the hope that dwells in us to do and be something better in the NEW year. It is almost like starting over with a clean slate.
If you have New Year’s resolutions I hope you have not broken them yet. Oh please don’t tell me you did! Keep aspiring to be the best person you can be, in the name of Jesus, for his glory. Amen!
Recently George Thomas from Christian World News reported on a story about Christians being persecuted in the Indian state of Orissa by none other than Hindu radicals. I was saddened by the report. I ask you to join me in praying for our brothers and sisters facing persecution in that region of the world. Click on the map to the left to locate Orissa.