Hello from Mars (Oracle, SF)

Somehow that Latvian Eurovision (?) song seems appropriate. When you look at the statistics of use of IT among Latvian priavte business (officially, 13 percent according to the Latvian Information Technology and Telecommunications Association/LITTA, probably about twice that), then all the talk here about information driven enterprise and the grid-enabled adaptive enterprise seems that either we here in San Francisco, or Latvia are on Mars. All of this presumes a profound degree of IT penetration of entire enterprises in all of their functions (I saw how, on a business intelligence dashboard, you could drill down from a divisional level summary expense report to a record of a single expense approval made just a few days ago). This is not the case in Latvia except for some big companies. At the same time, I found myself telling people at some journalist cocktail party how advanced Latvian IT skills and services were in companies such as Dati, Exigen, IT Alise, Lattelekom, how stuff like GREID (the secret, in part, of Exigen's success). It's kind of a paradox. Gotta run now...