IT is not an exact science

Perls of wisdom in a sea of site mismanagement [source: Jeffrey Veen]:

One simple theme runs through much of the commentary about website management over the past five years - all the complications should be automated away. The goal of this approach is a single platform that controls websites, their content and applications, and that works like Microsoft Excel. You open it when you want to do something, close it when you're finished, and never worry about it. [...]

And since the late 1990s, software entrepreneur after software entrepreneur has pursued this goal. For a long time, analytical firms such as Forrester, Jupiter and Gartner predicted the dream of painless site management was just around the corner. [...]

The great surprise of the past five years of content management is that, despite all the hundreds of systems, no clear winners have emerged. Instead, there's a growing dissatisfaction with the ongoing technical burden that such systems impose.

As if I needed more reality-checking, I managed to browse around those other articles today:

• Role Fragmentation, Divide and Conquer - Why IT Administrators Have Become All-Powerful Demi-Gods
• Bad Manager Personalities
• Processes and the Bad Manager
• IT Support Department to Hire Rottweilers as Technicians
• Stop the Press: Software Delivered on Schedule!
• Obsolete Documents (and what to do about them)

I learned that IT is not an exact science a long time ago. Let's say it helps to be reminded once in a while.