[Sigia-l] AIfIA Goals 2004 Survey Results

[Listera]

"david_fiorito at Vanguard.com" wrote:

> I also dislike bureaucracy.

Bureaucracies love standards.

> Standards are about consensus and coordinated effectiveness.

I gave you the HR recruitment anecdote, whether it's Visio, UML or some
programming language per se, standards (of the tools/workflows variety) are
often shoved down your throat.

> Standardized traffic laws are the only thing that keeps the traffic moving.

Go to any underdeveloped country, drive downtown, observe horrendous traffic
chaos, head over to government library, behold all the wonderful traffic
laws in the books, scratch head.
 
> I also do not advocate the licensing of IA but I do advocate clearly
> defining what an IA is so we can all mean the same thing when we say it.

I'll say this one last time, hopefully, because it has been discussed a
thousand times here already: that definition is necessarily most elusive at
this time. Designers, writers, programmers, to cite a few, are not licensed,
yet they manage to conduct business in far larger numbers than IAs.

> Furthermore a clear definition of an IA would make it a whole lot easier
> to get big corporations to hire a few more of us.

Based on what evidence? Do corporations hire fewer designers or writers or
programmers because they are unlicensed?

> Like it or not big corporations are machines.  They are machines that require
> clearly defined parts so when a part needs to be replaced there is a clear set
> of criteria (specifications if you like) that are used to find the
> replacement.  That is reality whether or not you choose to acknowledge it.

Look, I live literally in the middle of Wall Street and for the better part
of a decade my clients have been exclusively some of the largest
corporations on the planet. So I don't think I need a lesson on corporate
reality.

As I type this, I am trying to decide whether to sign a sizeable contract to
redesign a large-scale financial project. An army of analysts, designers,
IAs and developers have already worked on it and it's a mess. These people
did not work in chaos. They had in-house processes, standards, reviews,
documentation galore. They do know what an IA is. What they didn't have and
have been actively looking for over five months is someone with a firm grasp
of all the angles, an ability/willingness to think through some tough
issues, make the necessary architectural changes, defend them, get them done
and ship the product. For that, there are no 'standards.' And they are not
willing to pay me a lot of money to implement someone else's 'best
practices', they have already tried that route.

There's no substitute for critical thinking, whether or not you choose to
acknowledge it.

----
Ziya

Simplicity leads to abundance.