I’ve spent the latter half of this week at the Q Center in St. Charles, Illinois, participating in “Immersion Week,” an intense series of peer-led deep dive classes in Sun Microsystems products and technology. Besides the valuable technical knowledge I gained, I appreciated the opportunity to meet face-to-face with people I rarely see.

One of the most productive sessions I attended was an unscripted gathering of several members of the Architecture and Enablement services group to which I belong – a bunch of really smart people with deep knowledge of and experience with the Sun software products. But with that deep knowledge comes equally deep passion for their work. After some fairly benign discussion, one guy brought up the chronic reality that Sun has too many disjointed repositories of technical content that are difficult to use. How’s that for some dirty laundry? He talked on and on about how time-consuming it was to find what he needed to support his work and how we really needed a coherent strategy for capturing project artifacts and other re-usable IP for later access. Several others in the group chimed with similar thoughts.

But we know that deep passion will yield progress if focused productively. I challenged the person who started the discussion to join with another in the group who had similar feelings, together with a couple of others not in attendance we knew were thinking about the issue, to create an ad-hoc group focused on solving the problem for a small subset of our product line – to create a prototype solution that could provide a pattern for what we really need. They took the challenge. I have full confidence they will succeed.

Passion + Action = Progress.

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