Monday Madness

I just spent the better part of three hours doing two things:

-- looking at a customer system that was using a lot of resources (much more than normal)
-- trying to make my computer connect to a local printer

The first was our usual dogpile, where everyone who thinks they know what is going on offers an opinion, usually without telling anyone except the person they're talking to. While getting lots of opinions is a good thing, having some method of evaluating and working through them would be tasty. We don't do that. Instead, Everybody Tries Something, and then we're surprised by the results -- sometimes pleasantly, sometimes not. This morning, the result appears to be that the customer made some changes, neglecting to mention it to us (which they don't have to do) or to their own people (which they really ought to do), and we, in turn, didn't know to tell the people making the changes that we were having problems (because we didn't know who these people were, what they had done, or indeed that they had done anything at all).

The topic of information flow, as demonstrated here, is one that has intrigued me for some time -- how do you know who knows what, how do you alert the right people, how do you keep from alerting the whole world when thats not needed, how do you document your findings, doing so in a way that the information is later retrievable. That segues into the parallel questions of how information flows, and how do you 'tag' information, so that the information conduit knows who should know. Unfortunately, it also means that people who should know are sometimes prevented from knowing by others who think that those others 'really don't need to know' -- and sometimes, they're right, but usually not. There is an old phrase that I like -- 'Information Just Wants To Be Free' -- which isn't always applicable, but is always a good starting point, corporate security standards notwithstanding.

The second was particularly delicious because this was a problem that I had had about two weeks ago and resolved after pulling information from someone who knew it and wasn't particularly disposed to tell me. It took me about twenty five minutes to remember that this guy had sent me an email that included a file to reconnect the printers, and once I ran that, they were hey presto magically there again. Until, of course, the next time. I do so love not having a support group for this kind of thing (to which the official answer is: hey, you got it fixed, didn't you? Whats the big deal?)