High Technology and Common Sense

Abstract

THE MORE I work with all types of high technology, the more I depend on common sense. People keep getting me to help them with their technology problems, but I rarely use any high-tech know-how, and I frequently rely on good old-fashioned horse sense. Axioms handed down to me as a child keep popping into my head, and I seem to be depending on them more every day: You can't see the forest for the trees. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish. We all have our jobs to do. You're not finished until the paperwork is done. When most people find themselves in the middle of a complicated situation, they tend to get lost deep in the forest. (Axiom: You can't see the forest for the trees.) When I am asked to work in such situations, I try to get as far back from the problem as possible. Recently, I was asked to help a school district get a complicated distributed wide-area network made up of more than 60 Microsoft NT servers to function well. After several days of study, I found that, by and large, the network functioned properly and that most mission- critical files were backed up somewhere. But I am not sure anyone knew where! Certainly no one had a list of just where the back-up files were located. (Axiom: You're not finished until the paperwork is done.) mission-critical hardware was backed up, too, but the mission- critical person wasn't. entire operation depended on a single person who had become ill. This little oversight ended up costing the district a sinful amount of money. you have to hire someone new tomorrow to keep your network going, good luck! I hope you have deep pockets. I used to have an axiom of my own: If you can't teach somebody to run it, don't install it. I have since modified it to be If you can't teach two people to run it, don't install it. you depend on a system, back up both the hardware and the people who run the hardware. Another recent example of being lost in a forest concerns the vice president of a high-tech start-up company. He asked me to help the company develop an infrastructure that would allow the company to function virtually. That is, the company would have engineering and corporate expertise locally and in other parts of the world. When I spoke with him, he told me he was interested in equipping all members of the company with Palm Pilots so they could keep notes of meetings and other things and not be burdened with paper. He didn't have a workable IT (information technology) plan, and I am not sure what the corporate secretaries were doing, but I guess it wasn't taking or transcribing notes! I suggested purchasing a tape recorder and developing an IT plan. (Axiom: We all have our jobs to do.) Just a few months ago, I got an interesting e-mail from a physician who was a medical school professor. doc said that his med school would soon be installing a computerized automated medical chart system. plan was that the doctors in training would sit at computer terminals located throughout the hospital and enter the information they needed to add to a patient's medical chart. As it happens, I have a neighbor who runs a home medical transcription business. Local doctors carry pocket tape recorders with them as they make their rounds and dictate information as they walk from room to room. At the end of the day, the doctors hand their tapes to someone at the hospital who digitizes the audio and e-mails the resulting computer files to my neighbor. My neighbor, who can type 120 words a minute, simply puts on her headphones, plays the digital audio file, and adds the new information to the appropriate chart. After explaining how well this system works, I asked the professor/doctor how many of his docs could type 120 words a minute. I think he was a little taken aback. (Axiom: We all have our jobs to do. This leads me to a another axiom of mine: The first law of intelligent computing is to get someone else to do your computing if you can. …