Of ivory towers and boundary spanners

Abstract

We all live in a yellow submarine…
When I go to work in the morning, in the office building that hosts our BPM research group, on the
way up to our level I come by this big breakout room that hosts a number of computer scientists,
working away at the next generation software algorithms and iPad applications (I assume). I have
never actually been in that room, but every now and then the door is left ajar for a while and I can
spot couches, lots (I mean, lots!) of monitors, the odd scientist, a number of Lara Croft posters,
and the usual room equipment you’d probably expect from computer scientists (and, no, it’s not
like that evil Dennis guy from the Jurassic Park movie, buried in chips, coke, and flickering code
screens… It’s also not like the command room from the Nebuchadnezzar, Neo’s hovercraft in the
Matrix movies, although I still strongly believe these green lines of code make a good
screensaver).