Friday, April 1, 2011

Simplicity

So we need to give a list of payments to the accounts girl. The guy has a sheet that he fills in and at the end of the day hands to the accounts girl.

Now there is a better way of doing this. Set up an XL spread sheet, fill it in and at the end of the day, email it to the accounts girl. It's easy to do corrections. They are all nicely filed away on the computer  etc.

Sounds simple. However, now you need two computers, two email clients, network infrastructure, a POP 3 server, an SMTP server, on and on. How many points of failure are introduced?

Now what if the accounts girl is not close? Well maybe the computer approach is the right one. But what if the guy just faxes the sheet over?

After a few years, you ask the guy, "What is the computer used for?" "To email the excel sheets."
If something goes wrong, often the problem is "how do we email the xl sheets" not "how do we deliver the figures"
Therein lays the problem we IT engineers see all the time.
People calling in experts to solve the wrong problem.

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