Unicorn Pony Rainbows are REAL!

I'm partial to unicorn burgers myself, though My Little Pony salami sounds pretty darn good too!

Why do we even fight these battles? Well, the answer is right there in the cartoon: limited resources. We're trying to do too much with too little.

I'm not a fan of this.

I got my bachelor's degree in natural resources management (truf!), and that major was all about 'managing' 'resources' - if you can imagine that. One of the first tenets they drilled into your head was that resources are limited, and unlimited use of resources inevitably leads to their depletion.

We do the same thing in higher education that the timber barons did to forests, only we don't end up with massive clear cuts; we end up with people and systems overtaxed and spread too thin. We end up with units with conflicting goals and needs completing for the same resources (whether human, financial, or technological).

Inevitably, you end up getting less done than if you had strategically limited the use of your resources because the resources you have are spread so thin and have so many demands on them that they can't be effective.

And this goes for software too. I'm the only person supporting our WCMS. Imagine if our management - in their infinite and inscrutable wisdom - decided that the WCMS would be used as a wiki and for incident management, as well as for web content management. I wouldn't be able to do any of those things effectively, regardless of how good the program was, because I would be spread too thin trying to make it all happen.

This is all Management 001A (Resource Management for Retards), but it's amazing how quickly we forget that during tight budget times. Rather than trying to do more with less, we should be trying to figure out what we can do without (My God, I'm starting to sound like a Republican. Eek!)