Solutions

I'm always surprised when solutions are way more complex than I thought they'd be. Even when I knew that they couldn't possibly be simple, I'm surprised when I find just how complex they are. And thats just the top level.

In this case, I was just looking at a series of documents put out by my company outlining how they intend to deliver services. That last phrase is deceptively misleading, because it means every service that we sell, deliver, or cause to occur, on any kind of hardware platform that we support, in any kind of customer environment, running any software, anywhere in the world. And just because one customer looks totally like another doesn't mean that the final answer to that statement is going to be the same, or even close. That's the goal, but you know what they say about goals: thats where you aren't, yet.

The company is going through some major changes in pursuit of a standard answer to that question, though. In this company, we like standards. Standard answers can be leveraged (yo, Jack ! Pull out standard solution 32-Q!), we know how to do them, we know that they work. This is all goodness, but its all very difficult to do. Plus, no one really likes being the recipient of a Standard Solution, because we're all unique, dammit.... just like everyone else. In practice, we probably aren't all that unique, and the Standard Solution would work just fine, but we don't like being reminded of it.

So we've got this Standard Architecture that is trying to outline all of this as a coherent methodology that can be used anywhere. And I got (along with ten thousand other people) an email saying how terribly important it was that we understand this approach; here's a web page that talks about it. The page has a nice big chart with five single word descriptions -- what's being sold, how is it being sold, by whom is it being implemented, and so on -- and then each of those clicks-through to a hyperdense chart that expands upon that one concept. For example, the one I'm looking at breaks out the 'whats being sold' into three major categories, which break out into ten sub-categories, which have about seventy or so detail categories -- and thats just this one section.

How in the world can anyone keep track of something of that complexity? My thought is, they must just use a rule of thumb - don't drill down past the second chart, and make sure that the second level chart is never contradicted by anything beneath it. Because otherwise, how the heck would you know all of whats important?

I really do like thinking about this kind of thing, but I have to say that looking at this makes me think that maybe I'm not as smart as I think.