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ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS VI
more interworking among roles and people. Do you
think work gets done in meetings and through
management channels? Guess again. Grinter and
Herbsleb (Grinter Herbsleb 1999) argue that most of
the useful communication in an organization takes
place in the hallways. WATER COOLER is a closely
related pattern.
6.6 Face to Face Before Working
Remotely
If a project is
divided geographically,
Then: begin
the project with a
meeting of everyone
in a single place. Of
course, you want to
avoid geographically
distributed development
when you can. If you must support remote
development, invest in a travel budget so people can
meet face to face. If you think it’s too expensive,
experience indicates that you pay now—or pay later.
(The picture was taken at Camp Carson, Colorado,
and shows Colonel Wilfrid M. Nlunt, the U.S.
commanding officer shaking hands with Colonel
Denetrius Xenos, military attaché of the Greek
ambassador to the United States—a face-to-face
meeting before working remotely.)
6.7 Apprenticeship
If you have difficulty
retaining expertise, Then:
grow expertise internally
from existing employees or
even new hires. Don’t put
everyone through one big
training program. Nurture
expertise (another one of our
patterns is DOMAIN EXPER-
TISE IN ROLES).
7 TOWARDS A PATTERN
LANGUAGE
Each one of these patterns incrementally adds
structure to the organization: structure between the
organization and the customer, structure between the
organization and its developers, structure that cuts
across formal structures, structure across geographic
distance, and the establishment of a structural link to
a new hire. We can build these structures one at a
time. These patterns, and dozens like them, combine
and interact with each other in rich ways to yield an
overall structure that is more powerful than the sum
of its parts. We can put patterns together in many
different ways to achieve many different
organizational styles. Imagine patterns as being like
words in a language, and imagine a grammar that
defines legal combinations and sequences of these
words. Such a collection of patterns, together with
the rules for composing them, is called a pattern
language.
Pattern languages rise to deal with system
concerns. They can handle so called “wicked
problems” where it’s difficult to determine a proper
solution given the observed symptoms. What most
organizations do when faced with such symptoms is
to just try anything—which, in fact, is better than
doing nothing. Patterns are a more informed way of
just trying anything. They build on years of
experience, on the experience of hundreds of
organizations that have faced analogous situations in
the past.
Pattern languages build cultures. They bring
development beyond something technological to
create structures and processes at human scale. They
help restore the human dimension to software
development. We encourage organizations to use try
these patterns, to write their own organizational
patterns, and in general to use patterns to unleash
their own instincts to do what is right, humane, and
for the greater good. Many of these patterns are
common sense. In a world full of methods,
notations, and processes, common sense is so
uncommon.
8 CONCLUSION
What is the bottom line? All of this talk about beauty
and human value is fine, but it is profitability and
market position that dominate software conferences
and business plan. Any viable idea must ultimately
stoop to that level of concern. So, then: Where does
business success start?
Business success starts with business values: the
principles and value systems that an enterprise uses
to judge its success. Does success depend on
usability of the software? Or does your company
base success on sales? Can the latter be an accurate
reflection of the former? Profitability owes to much
more than to having a great product; it owes just as
much to being first to market with a product, or to an
effective sales campaign. Most markets focus on the
so-called bottom line as the measure of success.
Profit is an abstraction that has allowed businesses