Sunday, May 02, 2010

Making People Make Decisions Is Risky Business

When you're designing a system or database, you can't have ambiguity. Things either fit in the database / model or they don't. You can backlog or table things that don't make sense but you as the system engineer have to know what's going on. You have to listen to the users and customers but you can't make concessions that break the whole system. In this way you have to be somewhat forceful with people sometimes to "make them" make decisions.

How is this possible or why is this possible? I don't know. Force of will? I believe in my consulting work some people really don't like me and really don't get me; they don't know what I'm trying to do or why. They may see me as inflexible. I can understand that. But I'm building a system and it has rules. I only know what I do and not know and am not willing to integrate concepts and ideas that cloud my world view. Sorry if this is selfish, strange, or anti-social but this is the way it is.

Do you have different ideas of how to design collaborative systems? My goal, in the end, is that the systems are collaborative and software based; that Eric Veal is not a part of the system, rather a facilitator to that which is OUR system. I am just a facilitator. Good processes will make the system go, not Eric Veal.

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