Welcome to Painting the Future-Now Get Lost

Aero News informs us this day that no matter how great everything looks, it's always raining somewhere and as everyone in aerospace should know, BOHICA* is the only constant.

This particular cloudburst belongs to the Boeing IT department which chose to announce that 149 senior information technology people are going to lose their jobs to an outsourcing company.

Of course, what we always see in these things is business Newspeak that would make George Orwell proud. Back in my day it was 'downsizing', 'RIFFs', 'rightsizing'[, 'retooling' and my favorite, 'reengineering'. Now we're 'painting the future'.

It's all the same thing. Some poor bastard is going to lose his job. That's the reality.

In this particular case Boeing trotted out a talking head (Cathy Rudolph-could she really be da Festung's Barbara Kracht on special assignment?) to say that they're always looking at different ways to do IT work but they don't have any overall plan for outsourcing.

A memo from Boeing's VP Radha Radhakrishnan remarked that the CNO Leadership Team was working for four months to "Paint the Future" of the organization and outsourcing could yield significant savings.

Nice paint job there, Radha. Let's hope you get a taste of the brush and soon.

*BOHICA is an acronym used in the aerospace industry that stands for Bend Over-Here It Comes Again.