Work Ruling Thoughts!

IT is interesting that the work we do, seems to influence the way we think and respond to any situation at hand. Our mind seems to apply the same patterns of thinking for every situation, as that which we apply most in our day to day lives. For example consider an IT organization full of people who create different pieces of software solutions. Consider an example case, where the problem is to devise a way to address new work items; and each of these teams solve the problem in different ways.

The team that builds middleware components structure their portal to accept a new request, the moment the request comes in, it's sent into a queue. The request is prioritized based on the requestor's priority code. Then it is sent to different downstream queues each belonging to individual subgroups that need to address smaller pieces of work; to meet the final requirement in the end. Well, this is only correct that a middleware team would devise their strategy like this, isn't this what the MQ and JMS way of working is all about? The software we write, rules the way we think!

The capacity and performance team on the other hand, spent a lot of time optizimizing their internal processes, automating a lot of stuff, writing fantastic engines to trend forward, estimate how much new work is likely to come in and proactively plan to meet requirements even before they presented themselves! Increasing throughput, reducing response times, taking the knee of the curve to the right, bla bla bla ... the work we do, rules the way we implement our processes?!

The database team devised a way by which requestors would raise their request on a service management portal, and seek tons of approvals, each approver doubly skeptical than the previous one about whether the approval should be given or not , each approver asking lots of questions to the poor requestor, they left it to the requestor to co-ordinate the approvals, before the request got scheduled for implementation. When it finally was scheduled it went through successfully at the promised time and date. Wow, isn't that how databases work these days? Business Logic lies with the application tier (isn't it the application tier that raises the request to the database :-)) , it's left to the application & middleware tier to consider various pros and cons & co-ordinate among themselves before issuing a command for execution to the database! Again, the code we write, rules the way we think?

Quite Interesting Eh?!!!