8.1 INFOMET 911- JUNE 2005
Almost everyone in the IT Industry knew the late Coert Vorster. He was most probably the most networked IT Executive in South Africa. During a Springbok Rugby match at Newlands in 1999, Coert was sitting behind the CIO of Old Mutual at the time, and overheard him saying to a colleague: “It is so sad; there was this one company that could have helped me, now they are just gone! They had great people, and they could really solve problems and create solutions.” “Who are you talking about?” asked his mate. “I am talking about Infomet” he declared.
For many years this tale haunted me, says Pieter Viljoen the company’s Managing Director. Infomet was truly one of the great companies pioneering formal Information Methodologies for Business and Information System problems. It got sold to the ISG to later become the IT Solutions Division of IBM, once they returned to the Country. And yes, Infomet was gone.
in recent years, more than ever before, the need for Infomet has become so emphasized, that a return of the company, its philosophies and methodologies became inevitable.
The Infomet Development Centre is a well organized and technologically equipped Software Factory environment headed by Craig Nel, and has already proved itself with its awesome development capability and technical experts. “We believe that our model of collaboration is a fundamental requirement of how IT development will be handled in especially South Africa in future”, says Nel.
Pieter Viljoen is quite vociferous about the issues and problems that have to be addressed, and the questions he is asking are very uncomfortable:
  • Why are we dumbing down the corporate organizations?
  • Whatever happened to State-of-the-Science approaches?
  • Has management gone crazy by putting administrators in charge of complex engineering projects just because they happen to have a project management certificate?
  • What the heck are the Auditors doing in the IT space, and how did they manage to hijack the ‘engineering’ work?
  • Are the ‘obfuscated’ hyperlink kids simply a lost generation whose lack of formal and insufficient education, training and experience creating disastrous systems for business?
  • Is anyone out there modelling and documenting anything at all anymore? And if they are, can someone please explain where they got their linguistic skills, because apart from really not having a proper command of the English language, an ability to clearly formulate and communicate concepts, they also seem to string reams of meaningless jargon and spuriously fabricated terms and phrases together which rather than impresses is simply ‘warra-warra’?
  • Why are we not building the intellectual capabilities of the Business and Software Engineers? We are simply not training, mentoring and managing these resources anymore, everyone is sort of responsible to figure out their own route in the Business and IT Matrix of today.

So, Infomet is back, with the full Monty, says Lans Malherbe Business Development Director. The company is headed by a set of veterans together with of the most talented IT professionals to provide the necessary consulting, training and development services. The Infomet Methodology has been extended, and this time it really seems as if the company has its work cut out for it.
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