On Wed, 2004-07-14 at 01:35, Calle Hedberg wrote: > Wayne, > > > I have seen far too many systems over-specified and operating practices > > overly elaborate not based on any functional evidence, but based purely > > on theoretical considerations allowing no compromises to be made. > > Theoretical considerations, taste, personal experiences, prejudice - far too > many IS developers in this world are not very good at CULTIVATING > information systems. I'm using the term cultivating as in a sliding scale > from "building" via "developing" to "cultivating", with "building" being the > traditional software engineering approach and "cultivating" being the long > term nurturing and "organic" growth of health info systems in a real-world > "jungle" of organisational/cultural/political contexts.
Agree that the organisational IT milieu (or in many cases, IT miasma) needs to be taken into account... > Developers also tend to get attached to their own tools and designs more > firmly than many other professions - secretaries don't get emotionally > attached to their filing cabinets the same way many developers are attached > to a specific DBMS.... ;-) ...but on the other hand, the DBMS is a critical part of any system, and I have seen many tears before bedtime, amongst the secretaries as well as the developers, and everyone else too, when the DBMS doesn't work as it is supposed and data is lost or corrupted. Much rarer now than in the bad old days of file-based databases (dBase, MS-Access etc), but it still happens. So yes, developers and system cultivators do form close, personal relationships with DBMSes which have stood the test of time. > Could be a male bonding thing, of course... I'll take a fast, reliable DBMS running on a big 4-way SMP server with oodles of 15k rpm RAIDed SCSI discs over a red Ferrari any day. Brrrmm, brrmmm. -- Tim C PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0
