Your information technology is important, more important every day, and in the interests of preserving your investments and protecting your interests, here are the top 5 reasons why your organization should not hire this man.

1. He is a notorious Internet hippie.

2. He knows far too much.

3. He doesn't represent any name-brand vendor.

4. He thinks way too much.

5. He has a family

Now before you poof all that and head out to put your money down in his direction, before you risk your IT dollars on contracting his company to come anywhere near your computing plans, grant me a moment of your time and allow me to explain ...

1. This man is a notorious Internet hippie.

Definately the biggest strike against Mr. Murphy, this man has a long and intractable history giving away access to information ... and for free. He releases all his work under the viral GPL, talks corporate ICT directors into sharing their code just because it is the right thing to do and it cuts costs so dramatically. And he leaves free tutorials and free code on his websites, contributes back every free-software change you cause him to write, volunteers for free-software orgs and has even served on boards with the express intent of assuring free and open access to information technology by everyone. Give him $40, he's likely to spend $30 of it on more R&D, pushing the envelope farther and farther, and then turning right around and instead of patenting the thing like any sensible person, he tosses it into the creative commons and goes looking for something new to do, fully intending to give that away too.

He's got contageous business ethics and the enthusiasm to spread them about, and it just ain't american. Ok, maybe it is in a sort of 1776 or summer-of-love 1969 sense, but sure it ain't modern-american. It's downright medieval.

And all he knows is unix, with decided leanings to those free hacker playground unix-like operating systems; the man has never used a GUI JDE, has never even seen Visual Basic code up close, he doesn't even own a proper Windows computer and has never opened an Outlook client in his whole life.

He even still reads USENET ... in Emacs!

This man doesn't even have a title. He's not a "Knowledge Engineer" or an "Information Architect" or even a "Disruptive Change Consultant", he's not a dedicated "Interaction Design Engineer" or "Systems Architect" or even an "Internet Strategy Consultant". This guy is all over the map, this and that, a stack of old hats a mile high; if anything he's a generalist with hooks as much in psychology, tensegrity structural design and old-time alt.country roots folk world music. The reality of Gary is that he is just Gary, the sum collection of experiences, ideas, and their associations.

Such wanton disregard for propriety, orthodoxy and tight-lip closed-door security is not to be trusted. Unless you want to end up owning your infrastructure code along with 20 other companies who have the identical itch to scratch, unless you want to lose that control of having someone clearly to blame instead of bearing your own responsibilities for the code your company uses, keep this man off your network at all costs.

2. This man knows far too much.

He's been around (see item #3). He was there when the first copies of PC-Talk were being slipped between BBS sites undermining the Crosstalk monopoly, he was there when the Canadian banks first moved to structured programming, he's seen stacks of feasibility reports and lived long enough to see the implimentations in industries as diverse as arts and entertainment to financial, industrial and even military enterprises. Show him a bad design, and he'll not only see through it (see item #4) but he has also probably seen the same thing tried before and will go on and on about the many points of failure in it.

Take even a simple and straight-forward project like a basic content management system with cryptic 200-character URLs and a cockpit welcome page and he'll start pulling out usability studies, human factors data, and worst of all, first-hand personal experience to shoot it all full of holes, and then turn around and start laying out a new solution path that doesn't even go near those holes.

Like a Forrest Gump, he's been in too many places to be trusted. Telerobotic, ISDN switches, 4GL compilers, art exhibits, new media portals, freenets and free isps, WiFi and P2P, collaborative and social software, control devices, vector graphics, data transforms, web forms, REST and RPC, grid computing, signal processing, document systems, expert systems, neural systems and sports software. It just isn't natural.

And then there's all those standards, open standards, the worst kind. Try to do something simple by the most direct path and he has a thousand reasons why you are better off co-operating with the Internet community instead of just going your own independent way. There's XML standards and XHTML standards, stylesheet standards, coding standards, testing standards, portlet standards, protocol standards ... there's just no end to it.

Keep the peace with your ICT architects: Ignorance really is bliss, and when it's folly to be wise, stay well away from this guy.

3. This man doesn't represent anyone but himself.

Think about that. No loyalty to any institution, no solid base of gucci-shoed lawyers to sue, no faceless fall-back teams of clone replacements if he's hit by a bus half way through redeploying your most critical assets.

All you get is him, him is what you get, and he doesn't even own a suit. Not from this century, anyway.

This guy shows up at your door with home-printed business cards and a stapled stack of monochrome LaTeX laserprint reports, and every penny you give him goes straight into his wife's pocket. And he's still working for the same two-employee company 22 years later, and that company is no bigger today than it was back in the early 80's. Preposterous.

Everyone who is tied to anyone who's anyone knows that if a problem is a nail, it calls for a hammer, and if the problem is a screw, you just take the brand name hammer and hit the thing harder.

Here comes this guy looking at every problem like it might call for some new kind of quark-glue ...

4. This man thinks way too much.

You just have to ask google to see this guy polyglotted all over the map, never asking for advice unless he's in a bind, full of new ways, new ideas, new perspectives and the occasional back reference to tarot cards or astrophysics as if everything might actually be related in some strange way.

Everyone knows that IT is only about IT. There's no need to pull in anthropology data on what is a simple task of frustrating the desk clerk, and the last person you'd want on staff is some know-it-all who thinks you might cut your costs and losses by making some fundamental paradigm switch.

Brewer's Retail didn't listen to him about switching their assembler code to structured C, and for the sake of your sanity and standing pat on your tried and nearly wishfully true, you shouldn't listen either.

5. This man has a family

Say no more! Who would even dare think of hiring some guy who would rather really be staying home with the kindergarden kids because "they are such learning tornados"? Not a chance. You want someone who behaves in a staid and true adult way, focussed, completely focussed and only on what the shareholders think they want, not a care for what is good for them, what is good for their families, or what might be good for families two generations from now.

Besides, family-type people have far too much skin in the game to stay loose and go with the directed flow, too much need to get things done right, and they are far too eager to get things done quickly without recalls and repairs because they have a t-ball game to attend on Saturday and can't go on call for the weekend.

Stick with the singles who only need the fridge, the fuss-ball table and the occasional pub night.

Warning: Do not call this man

This is important: Do not call this man, do not send him email and do not let him anywhere near your ICT plans.

Face it. You have problems enough fighting endless virus attacks, coping with escalating license and development costs, absorbing work-losses from blue screens and the cognitive friction from wading through the molasses of bad interaction designs that ooze past ever stakeholder in your whole IT ecology.

Far better to stay with the devil you know: The last thing you need right now is for someone this different from the norm to charge in on your plans and change everything.