I had about four topics that I could have written about today, but I decided on this one for no real reason. The other topics I considered were as follows:

• email and how we abuse it and don’t use the phone (too old school for some) or instant messaging (too new school for some)
• the concept of context
• meetings…when is there time to actually DO something?

Maybe I’ll tackle these later this week. I’m not sure about how profound a topic this will be, but I thought I would journal it anyhow.

The notion of eating one’s own dog food is not a new concept. The question is, what if you don’t actually make the dog food? If you don’t actually build or manufacture something yourself, is it your dog food?

Someone approached me about this today. I won’t get into the subject specifically, but his point was that we as a company do not have any dog food to speak of. Things like Microsoft SharePoint or the concept of a Service Oriented Architecture are not things that we can claim we created. I agree with that but what I tried to explain and failed to get through to him is that our experiences and methods that we use to implement such things are our own and with that said, we should absolutely eat our own dog food.

I even went so far as to say that we create new dog food everyday and that as a consulting firm, when we stop gaining new experiences and taking those experiences and incorporating them into our implementation methodologies, we will cease to exist. That won’t happen.