“Computers are useless. All they can give you are answers.”

– Pablo Picasso

Attribution: I picked this up in an article from Tony Long on Wired News.  I didn’t love the writing and disagree with most of the writers opnions, but I will give credit where it is due.

Dion Hinchcliffe has been writing some interesting stuff about web 2.0 in the enterprise. His latest post is a bit of a rant against Wikipedia, but push on and it is worth the read. Lately I have been pondering the impact of things like SOA and
mashups in the enterprise context, blending in the web dialtone discussion that is happening on the O’Reilly Radar.

Putting on my prediction hat, I would say on the back-end of the information architecture web 2.0 will have an impact similiar to that of Linux. That is, it will displace some really expensive, customized solutions, free up resources for real innovation, and push everyone forward about 10 years at no cost. You see, the really interesting thing that web 2.0 applications do for the enterprise is to dramatically reduce costs for existing processes. For next-generation tools like Basecamp you don’t need hardware, software, drivers, or an administrator. You need an intern and a scripting language. As a long-time ETL guy, I have to say that is huge. It strips away all the barnacles of the information architecture, leaving only the actual work that needs to be done.

I understand that there are new methods and processes that are waiting to be born using AJAX and mashups and the like. I don’t doubt that many of these can have a dramatic impact on the enterprise. However, when someone is going to sit down with the CFO and try to arrange funding for a big project, this isn’t going to be all that impressive. I take an Ecclesiastical view of these things and think that there truly is nothing new under the sun.

That being said, Web 2.0 has a great upside with very little risk or up-front cost. If your organization isn’t exploring this phenomenon it should be.

The ongoing debate about the planetary status of Pluto is a really great example of how the standards-making process really works. Like most debates, everyone involved is supposed to be rational, thinking adults. The most rational, thinking people on earth: scientists.

The debate is to keep Pluto classified as a planet or not. And, to be honest, I can’t think of a single good reason why we should or should not change the planet. On one hand, logically it looks like it probably shouldn’t be a planet, as the criteria used to classify it as one is no longer unique and is causing some inconsistencies. On the other hand, this would contradict everything that most adults have been taught, probably causing an uproar among some key constituency of some political party (personally, I am waiting for someone to ask, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?“)

This planetary debate is highly charged, personal, emotional, contradictory at times, and ended with a solution that defies logic and mollifies more than it satisfies. Of course, this reminds me of the times I have been sitting in a room trying to decide on standard ways to do or classify things. For the most part, this has been as a technologist (around data, ETL and architecture), but also as a member of a business and as a leader in a non-profit organization.

There are several lessons I have learned about setting (and breaking) standards over the years. While I wrote about this in an earlier article about standardization and conformity, I thought I would try to distill things down into a few truths about standards. Here they are:

1. Standards are good if they save time, effort, money, or increase safety or happiness. Any other reason is just a justification for the exercise of power.
2. Standards are set by people, not by logic, reason, money, or faith. Anyone who says differently is in denial or trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
3. If there is more than one standard way of doing things, there is no standard way of doing things.
4. Standard is not inherently better than non-standard. However, things may be more comfortable for some people to understand if they believe there is a standard.
5. Not making the decision to have a standard is still an active decision on standardization, with very real personal, organizational, and financial implications.
6. Standards are not good if they don’t work for the people who have to follow them every day. Over the long term, people won’t follow standards that don’t work for them.
7. Mistakes will be made and good standards will take this into consideration.
8. Someone will find an exception and want to to it differently, usually for a good reason. Handling this creatively and gracefully will be your greatest challenge.

At some point, every organization gets to a point where they can see if they just did things in a standard way. Normally, this is just after everything has completely changed or gone to hell, a group has burned themselves out one too many times, or the ball has been dropped in a large, preventable, but hard to predict way. This is a very interesting time, but also very dangerous one. There is momentum for change, but just doing things differently isn’t the same as doing things better.

Just remember, take your time and think about things carefully.  It will all work itself out.

So, you are the one who designs/implements/troubleshoots your organization’s architecture.

One simple question for you:  Are you Glinda the Good Witch or Mordac the Preventer of Information Services?

Of course, of course, we are all kind, just fair, optimistic, and benevolent.  Your designs are wise, well informed, future-minded yet pragmatic case studies on how things should be done.  You personally enable a technological response to a rapidly changing global environment and the organization would fall apart without you.
Now, would your customers agree with this assessment?  How about the users of your latest and greatest creation?  Do you think that it is just other organizations that have people who are frustrated with how IT works?

Ponder this a bit, and think of how Pogo summed it up.  Food for thought.

Hah.  So I made a comment on Rough Type (definitely an “A-List” blog) about how it is only natural “A-List” blogs control a lot of the flow of people to blogs.  Also, I put a grovel in at the end for people to come and look at my pitiful little site on a rather dense technical subject.

Of course, this single link has generated more traffic than I have seen in about 3 months of blogging.  Enough traffic to make me reconsider the my comment and to perhaps start grovelling to Nick (and others) for more of attention.  I feel pretty, and I want to keep it this way.
::sigh::