Rise
Up! Contractors of the World Unite. What we want is liberty. The liberty to design
systems and write programs. We
must throw off the shackles of the office.
Are the systems that you write the best for the job or are they a hotch
potch of computer programs held together with string and chewing gum?
The
'office' only wants us to sit on our bums and occupy chairs. They only want your time, all of your time;
all of your life. Surely you have better
things to do with your life than allow some boss to dictate how you will spend
your life.
Well?
Is any of that lot true? Do they want
the solutions you can provide; or do they just want you to show up on time, sit
at the terminal, and generally just look like a 'productive unit'. Do you really get to design, program and
implement systems that are going to improve the working life of the user.
No!
What you get to handle is just another tack on phase to another system. A system that's creaking. That doesn't do what the user wants. A system that appears to have a life of it's own. It isn't
controlled or managed; it just exists; and mops up resources and manpower.
Back
before the dawn of computers, businesses did everything manually. People were employed to write out delivery
notes, invoices and statement, write up the company's books and make government
statistical returns. Millions of clerks
performed these tasks. 'Office
Procedures' were the 'programs' of yesteryear.
They were just as convoluted and wasteful of resources. Bottlenecks occurred in the manual processes.
With
the coming of the computer these bottlenecks could be solved. Payroll, Accounting, Purchase, Sales systems
were developed to solve a particular problem in a particular company. Lyons Tea Shops developed wonderfully
sophisticated Sales Accounting systems to deal with millions of sales of tea
and cakes and buns. House builders
developed purchasing systems to cope with the thousands of purchases from
hundreds of suppliers. They had no need
of a sales accounting system. Each
individual house sold for thousands of pounds.
They could cope with sales manually.
So
each business developed it's own systems and programs,
each special to it's own situation.
Traders with identical business needs went their own separate ways. For example, the several Gas boards and
Electricity boards and local authority rating systems each diverge one from
another. Your might expect that charging
customers for Gas consumption that would be subtly different from Electricity
consumption, but that the system developed by one gas board area would be
suitable for a different area, but NO! nothing was the
same. Millions were spent developing
different systems to perform identical functions. Such is the waste that goes into our
enterprise philosophy.
We
have such a massive set of programs running today that it requires nearly all
our resources just to keep up with the changes that are forced upon us by way
of upgrades to machines and to the utilities.
Getting new applications into production is a dying art. We need to go back to basics.
Each
enterprise should ask itself. What is
the purpose of our existence. Nearly all of them will come up with the
answer, 'IT'S TO MAKE MONEY'. So why don't the computer systems they
install reflect this conclusion.
Take
insurance companies for instance; They have a fixation
with their product. They organise
themselves around 'insurance contracts'.
An insurance contract is no more than a promise, to pay money upon a certain event
happening, in exchange for the receipt of some money. (On average they pay out less than they get
in, otherwise they would go broke.) What
is common to this whole process is money:
the insurance contract is almost irrelevant. Hardly any of the policyholders read it. And when it comes to the crunch the words of
the policy are not definitive. What
counts is what the insurance company meant; and only the person who drafted the
policy knows that, and he's dead.
Money;
or more precisely it's movement into and out of the
companies bank accounts is the cornerstone.
It follows that a system is required to pursue payments that are owing
to the company. For example; to activate
direct debits that have failed.
Naturally
the arrival or departure of money is going to depend upon some insurance or
business related factor. Thus the
office will need details of the nature of the transaction, but the top level of
any conceptual database structure will need to be THE MONEY.
Just
as the above is a fairly radical view of the business organisation, I have
further issue about which I feel there should be a revolution, and it is this; Designers and
programmers don't always need to be physically present in the office to do the
work of designing systems and writing programs.
I will admit that system designers need to talk with the users and be
aware of the machine and software environment.
But since so much of this contact is by phone in any event, it seems
unnecessary to have user and designer in the same building.
I'm
suggesting that they work from home; or as a interim
alternative, work from a 'Local Office' convenient to the designer's home. I am not advocating that the designer and
user never meet face to face. On the
contrary, I would suggest a periodic formal meeting would be less likely to
dissolve into a casual chat about the project so far. A crisp and business-like meeting would be
the order of the day.
Consider
some of the advantages for the employer.
Reduced office cost. Reduced
costs for the subsidised restaurant.
Reduced car parking costs.
And
what about the gigantic saving for the poor old employee: No waste of his life driving to and from work
each day. Not to mention the monetary
savings.
Consider
the benefit for the State. Millions
could be saved by a reduction in road and rail traffic. And what about the
accidents. Only today there was a
fifty car pile up with two dead in the early morning fog. What a waste of life. What a waste of mending the cars. Do you remember having your car
repaired? Tell the insurance company;
fill in some forms, arrange for the car to be repaired, moan at the garage
because the job's not done correctly; Fill in some more forms, eventually
settle for a bent wreck. And then fill
in yet another form. It's a shocking
waste of your time.
It's
a shocking waste of your life.
Why
don't the several departments of the state get together? If they didn't spend the money on telecommunications,
the employers could be persuaded to allow employees to work over telephone
lines, and then we wouldn't use so much petrol and then we could export more
and have even more money not to spend on the roads. There must be better ways of spending the
taxes we all pay.
It's
a bit like the computer systems. Each
department is insular, they don't know what the others
are doing. And the people at the top
clearly are not co-ordinating them.
So
next time your boss says he wants a little amendment to a system, tell him:
There is a
