Be the A-Team

The A-Team is a bad TV fiction (and an even worse film) about crack commando unit which was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. This isn't an article about which is the best absurd American 80s action drama (surely that prize goes to Automan), nor is it a peppy piece about being the best you can as part of an "A team".

It was this question from Dave Briggs, how much does your technology define what you do that made me think of the A-Team.

Technology defines everything from communication, to music, even to the make-up of towns and cities, in fact I'd go as far as since the Industrial Revolution it defines our society. Dave was focusing on how technology influences organisations though, so where do the A-Team come in?

The TV show was formulaic and one aspect of this was at some point the team would be captured and imprisoned somewhere containing a collection of varied but seemingly useless junk. Sometimes, delivering user centred digital services with a set of legacy systems can also seem like being locked in with collection of varied but seemingly useless junk.

Like Dave says, the best thing is to ditch the junk, but what if you're the A-Team and it's all you have?

Well the good news is, locked in their prison the A-Team would use their ingenuity to build something innovative using the junk they had at hand to escape and get to the resource they needed to complete the task, and being an American action series that resource was almost always guns, grenades, and other things that go bang.

Now I'm not advocating using weapons of destruction to get what you want, what I'm saying is use your ingenuity to build something innovative using the junk you have to make the case to get to the resource you actually need.

So be the A-Team; use what you have, to get to what you need.

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