Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

Section II: The Strange Business of Software 93
the entire field of knowledge changing radically every five years. We're getting
information overload."
"Come now, Phil, it is just that you are an old fart, who can't keep up any
more. You should be growing roses and knitting antimacassars, thinking about
nice comfy chairs and joining the bowling club."
"There may be some truth in what you say … but I don't think anyone is
keeping up. Nobody likes to admit it. It is like owning up to having pitifully
inadequate secondary sexual characteristics, or the brainpower of a two-toed
sloth. We all like to keep up the myth of our mental adequacy, but it is a myth.
It took man 100,000 years just to progress from the first stone tools to
discovering how to make metal objects – and in evolutionary terms, we are
complete strangers to the computer keyboard! It is a tall order for us to
suddenly become the priests of the mystical power of Information Technology.
It would be all right if we were developing extra brain-lobes to keep up with the
galloping complexity, but, if anything, our brains have shrunk slightly since
civilization began."
I warmed to the subject. "The huge breakthroughs in Information
Technology were breakthroughs because they were simple, and they reflected
the way that business was already being conducted. When the relational
database was introduced, people found that it was uncannily like the existing
ledgers, and the systems put in place by the nineteenth century logistical
experts after the Crimean war, and refined ever since. The Spreadsheet is
simply an accountancy summary table, and could be recognised and
comprehended by any accounting clerk from the time of the Industrial
Revolution."
"SQL was a staggering advance, because it was so simple. The clever and
difficult stuff happened under the bonnet. For one, you told the system what
you wanted but not how to go about doing it; for another, you didn't have to
keep a huge number of details in your head. It was just the same with Email or
the Internet; dead simple, and easy to understand. The real skill of technology is
to keep it conceptually simple. So what have you been doing for the last fifteen
years, Bill, but adding complexity to a system whose chief virtue was its
simplicity? It requires no thought to create a tower of Babel, a vast beast
riddled with Rampant Featuritis; just effort."
We fell into a gloomy silence for a while, before I continued.
"Whatever anyone asks for in SQL Server is put in, until there are eight
different ways to export a query to a file, four ways of extracting data from a
spreadsheet, and a Byzantine intricacy in the handling of XML – which, by the
way, started out as a dead simple way of representing small databases, before it