Sydney was too short a visit.  I'm usually in such a hurry to get home once I've finished speaking in a city, but Sydney was one of those towns I wish I'd had the time to get to know a little better.  For one thing, it was quite lovely.  At least the downtown, harbor section of town.  Pretty new, from what I could gather.  Lots of nicely architected, modern structures, reminiscent of Singapore in cleanliness, a little like San Francisco in climate, a monorail not unlike Disney Land and echoes of the British Founders in most cultural expressions (i.e.: traffic protocol, English language, etc.).  But the Botany Bay heritage colors Sydney's heritage, giving it a bit of a rebelliousness that is palatable.  I liked it.  And the exchange rate made it seem rather reasonable.

One of the questions asked on the immigration form coming into Australia is, "Have you ever been convicted of a criminal offense?"  I pointed this out to the audience when I spoke and then said that I wondered if it was a requirement for citizenship there.  They laughed.  It was a well humored crowd.  And one most receptive to the implications of Java and Jini in an internetworked world.

On the way home from Australia I stopped in San Francisco for a couple of days to take care of some business and attend an All Hands meeting at Sun.  I met with some folks at JavaWorld, to discuss some possible future articles for their fine publication, and with a producer at ZDtv, to discuss an idea I had for a television show for their station.  And since we've just had our annual re-org at Sun, I thought it would be a good idea to meet some of the new people in the new organization of which I am now a member.  I've been at Sun over 5 years now -- and it seems to me that we do actually re-organize the company about once a year.

When I was still rather new to Sun and came to the realization that the company was actually going through re-organization processes annually, I was a little shocked.  I mean, sure, the computer industry is fast paced.  But annual re-orgs?  Geez, most companies I'd worked for prior to Sun took the better part of  year just to get used to the new organization.  It seemed like such a waste to me.

Since I've been with Sun a while now, I've come to see the annual re-org as a very wise management strategy.  In fact, maybe a semi-annual re-org would be even more effective.  It forces a "do the right thing" mentality in employees (as well as management) that might fall victim to parochial in-fighting otherwise.  There's no time to build an empire.  There's no time to get into turf wars.  There's no time for prolonged periods of organizational self-examination and therapy.  And if you don't like the current organization, just wait a year.  One this is quite certain:  it will change.  Just as the market, the industry, the competition and the customer changes very quickly, so must the company that would be successful in playing the game.  Change, as the saying goes, is the only constant.  Organizations must reflect that reality.

So....about the time we get the org charts done, it's time for a new one.  I think it's time for a new tool  -- a (Java based, of course) dynamic organization structuring tool.  One that will not just display visual representations of an organization, but one that will actually produce the organization based on programmable criteria and resource (i.e.: human beings within the organization) characteristics.

Imagine a larger organization made up of individuals, each of whom have definable and measurable skills, constraints and desires.  Now imagine a database of objects, each object in the database representing one of those individuals.  In addition to name, rank and serial number, the exposed properties of each object would be things like skill(s) and level of achievement, constraints (e.g..: "can't work nights", or "doesn't work well with large teams"), and desires (e.g..: "would like to learn a new programming language").    At the beginning of the re-org season, managers could go through whatever process managers go through in order to divide up the responsibility pie (I think it's called "politics"), and once charters are loosely established, an intelligent (i.e.: computer program) analysis of company resources as represented in the database of resource objects could very quickly produce prototype organizations that not only distribute resources optimally, satisfying employees in the process, but also allow for managers to tweak the criteria again and again,  and in a matter of minutes produce a new org chart with measurable organizational implications.  A tighter marriage of technology and organizational structure could allow for such a dynamic organization that the concept of "re-org" is moot -- the organization is constantly re-organizing itself, to meet the demands of the current moment.

Anyway....I've been home a couple of days now.  I have a film I'm looking forward to shooting in August (rehearsals later this month), and back to school late August as well.  I have a few weeks of relatively light duty -- I'll do some writing and a little studying and even take a few days off -- vacation and missed holidays.  So far my travel calendar for the fall has a few dates filled in -- but I don't think it will be nearly as heavy a travel season as these past three or four months have been.  We'll see.  All I know is, it's great to be home with no serious travel on the horizon.  Though I'm quite sure, in about a week, the wanderlust will kick in again.  And I may have to go somewhere, out of habit of nothing else.  :)

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A few weeks ago, I mentioned that it was too bad we hadn't figured out how we might teleport from one place to another, musing that perhaps digital teleportation would be an appropriate form of transportation.  Since then a friend of mine wrote to point out that a couple of years back an international group of six scientists got together to work out some of the stickier issues and assert that quantum teleportation is indeed a realistic possibility.  So, as it is with so many Star Trek scientific phenomenon, it may simply be a question of time.  Or is that space-time?  :)