Data and meta-data

Data - A letter of recommendation

Mr. Most Hated, can always be found
hard at work in his cubicle. He works independently, without
wasting company time talking to colleagues. He never
thinks twice about assisting fellow employees, and he always
finishes given assignments on time. Often he takes extended
measures to complete his work, sometimes skipping
coffee breaks. He is a dedicated individual who has absolutely no
vanity in spite of his high accomplishments and profound
knowledge in his field. I firmly believe that he can be
classed as a high-caliber employee, the type which cannot be
dispensed with. Consequently, I duly recommend that he be
promoted to executive management, and a proposal will be
sent away as soon as possible.

Meta data

Kindly read every other line

Consumer IT and Archimedes

The rise of consumer IT means, everyone now is acquinted with various hardware and software artifacts. Many people have network routers at home, can create a small home office network all by themsalves. Make various applications on different computer work together. They can make applications share resources like printer, fax and scanners. They share data like photos and music across their own network and indeed over internet. They collaborate with their friends and family using voice and non-voice channels.

Some of these people are decision makers in corporate world. When they compare the ease with which they themsalves can make this happen, to their experience with enterprise IT, they get a rude shock. Some of them then start suspecting enterprise IT organisation of ineptitude and incompetance.

But they are wrong. As was Archemedes. Archemedes had famously said "Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth!". We now know, how wrong he was. For according to the "golden rule" of mechanics, the mechanical advantage derived will always be accompanied by a loss in displacement, or, in other words, in time. Even if Archimedes had been able to push the lever with a speed of 0.34 km/sec the speed of sound, he would have lifted the earth by one centimeter only after 93,264,094,069,895.84265 years. [More details can be found here.]

The question is of 'scale' and complexity introduced because of scale. One cannot project consumer IT experience onto enterprise IT on a linear scale. The non-architected approach that works in consumer IT scenario will not give same results. Moreover home networks and applications never grow beyond a certain threshold, they are changed more often without any worries of backward compatibility, ground up rebuild of whole application set is possible and indeed practiced. The enterprise IT behaves differently on these counts on account of scale, complexity and requirements from users. 

Archemedes anecdote tells us follies of projecting experiences from small scale to large scale. So, please, don't ever say "I can do it myself, with stuff from 'PC World'."