When electrons and synapses collide...

Today's short blog posting, as I rev this back up, comes courtesy of some work that I've been involved in to try to compare three systems on a cost basis, breaking out the information into capital expenditures versus ongoing costs. While this is simple in theory, at the risk of sounding like a certain Southern politician, it depends on what you mean by capital expense.

All kidding aside, as many systems as there are in the IT universe, there are at least twice that many pricing schemes. There are price breaks, groupings for discounts, educational discounts, etc., none of which are thoroughly explained, and none of which are exactly alike. There are even different styles of licensing - most notably by the seat, and concurrent uses - with ratios that must be understood and taken into account when comparing systems. An example of this type of math is that power users for a certain system that utilizes seats should be purchased in a 3:1 ratio for concurrent uses, but in a 4:1 ratio for casual users (assuming that 'casual' is definable).

Complicating the matter was information from one of the vendors that read roughly like a Chilton's manual, re-written by a team of a lawyer and doublespeak specialist, and published in the original Latvian. No guidance was given as to how to interpret it, and requests for additional information led to faxed copies of the same gibberish, so we could see what confusion looks like in less-intelligible characters. Remember, this is for a technology purchase, and technology is supposed to simplify or improve something, or someone.

After pounding through spreadsheet after spreadsheet, trying to come to terms with the mess, we were confronted by a dilemna. We were trying to analyze a technological upgrade using technological tools in the 'new' style of working, where you use the screen for all, and with all the technology involved, it was failing.

For the solution, we re-wired the work. At a point of desperation, we took out sheets of paper and did something akin to a tabletop exercise, in which we basically installed the system from the ground up, one piece at a time. Suddenly the unclear clarified itself, and within a little while, the solution to the problem was found.

The point of all this is that we took the parallel work and turned it into serial work, at which time the solution jumped out at us. The labor savings we were trying to gain in the spreadsheet were blocking the outcomes we needed. There is nothing wrong with technology, and certainly nothing wrong with trying to use tools to automate or simplify what needs to be easier to do. We do need to remember, though, the for every electronic tool we use, there is an analog (manual, if you wish) version, likely functioning slightly differently, which may work better for a particular problem.

As we progress into the future, we need to remember the intellectual and physical nuts and bolts that form the platform upon which we base our technology. Sometimes you have to use brute force to arrive at what you need, and if we forget how to do that, we wind up spinning our wheels.