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December 02, 2003

Eyeballing Steers

Floyd gives us something to think about with regard to programmer productivity in the enterprise computing space. I tend to be on his side.

Way back in highschool, I was told by my geometry teacher that the Four Color Problem had been solved. He was at once dismayed and astounded that it had been done with a computer and it wasn't an 'elegant' solution. But he, like most of the math community rather grudgingly accepted that some problems just may not have elegant solutions. Such problems, while not beyond human curiosity will require dilligence beyond human capacity. Thus was the domain of computers.

I happen to believe that the problem of software programmer productivity isn't really a problem in the traditional sense of something that can have an elegant solution, but in the same sense as the Four Color Problem cannot be solved by one single and elegant line of reasoning. Peter Drucker famously said that business management has only just begun to be studied. This rather stopped the endless questions about 'which method is best' but not the effusive praise.
Business computing is what I call a 'significantly bitty problem'. It can only be solved empirically by going down each twisty alleyway. Managerial Computing (Keen, Zuboff) has only just begun to be studied.

The problem with business, just as the problem with business computing, is deceptively simple. Generate profits. Of course there are virtually infinite ways to do so. Tools that assist businesses in their aims are rightly daunting not simply because the underlying technology shifts from time to time, but because the goals and methods of business are constantly changing.

The purpose of managerial computing is to serve the purposes of management which is actually a bit more complex than the purposes of investment brokers. Whereas the data for investors vis a vis Bloomberg-type systems and models is hard, such a great deal of analysis has not been done in every sector as regards the soft tangibles which could be effective measures of business performance. It's easy to read a momentum chart for a stock which has daily prices and make predictions. It's not so easy to eyeball a herd of yearling steers and guess the price of beef. Eyeballing steers is where much of the early science of business management is: still analog. So there is a great deal of evolution before the world of enterprise managerial computing has identified the methods to assist in the majority of enterprises.

Simply because Siebel has made billions selling CRM software to all the telemarketing companies you hate, doesn't mean the state of enterprise software has significantly advanced. One of the lessons we should have learned from the dot com implosion was that there are indeed thousands of business plans and models that do lend themselves easily to digitization. But only a few of those are actually profitable. Yet there are millions and millions of others that still exist, untouched by that revolution and its software tools and methodologies.

Let us also not forget how long it took for GM to understand and then implement supply chain strategies. Decades. Such management philosophies, still not wholly explored, certainly not ubiquitously applicable across industries, will in time generate reliable and generally accepted performance metrics. Whatever state the software tools industry is in with regard to its management of programmer resource allocation, language choices and distribution of compute power, there will always be an unelegant alley to travel. That is the space between what business conditions provide, what managers see and what systems can be built efficiently to aid in supporting that vision.

This is not a technology problem.

Posted by mbowen at December 2, 2003 09:16 AM

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Posted by: LeftCoastConservative at December 2, 2003 12:03 PM