From Where I Sit: Best Practices

By Larry Eiss

When I was a very small boy I had a little wooden workbench. It came with a hammer and screwdriver, a couple of wooden screws and pegs, and a few other things. One important lesson that toy taught me was that you can't put a square peg in a round hole. I bought the plastic equivalent for my grandson last month and he quickly learned a similar lesson.

One day my mother, who was a Tupperware dealer for a time, came home with a plastic ball that had openings in a variety of shapes and some pieces that fit into the ball when they were introduced through the appropriately-shaped hole. From this toy I learned that star-shaped objects do not fit into triangular holes. I learned, in fact, that only triangle-shaped objects of the correct size fit into such holes.

As we wound our way (over the river and through the woods, as the lyrics go) to Grandma's house, we would drive past a place where a fellow made wooden rowboats. One year I convinced my dad to let me buy one with some money I had saved up.

There was never a happier boy than I was the day I first put that boat in the Seneca River. I jumped in and rowed around for quite a while.

An interesting trait of rowboats is that you sit facing backwards in them (unless you have one with odd-looking articulated oars), so you never really get to see exactly where you are going. This bothered me, so I tried pushing the oars to get the boat to go in the direction I was facing.

That did not work well at all. Steering was exceedingly difficult; the transom was pushing a lot more water than the bow would; and I was using my triceps and abs, which are much less effective than my biceps and back.

From this I learned that specialized tools are made to be used in specialized ways.

People often compliment my handwriting because it is very legible. It wasn't always this way. When I went to school they taught us cursive writing and once they had we were no longer allowed to print.

My cursive was atrocious and even I had difficulty deciphering it. Since I didn't have the intellect to become a doctor, I decided that something had to be done. As providence would have it, a friend of mine took drafting in high-school shop class. I noticed how perfectly clear each character in his writing was and decided that printing in capital letters was for me.

It took me a while, but I finally made the change, and now anyone can read what I pen. From this I learned that sometimes it is necessary to break away from the demands of others and simply do what works.

It's much the same with software solutions. It gets under my skin a little when I hear large enterprises say that they are shoehorning WebFOCUS into an infrastructure ill-designed for the purpose. IT policies are important and they protect enterprises from catastrophic problems. Even so, to require compliance with policies designed for other purposes without regard for their impact on important enterprise BI solutions seems unnecessarily rigid.

Often when we talk face to face with the decision makers in these organizations we discover that they are willing to be more flexible once they understand the reasons for the request to change. In other cases, we find that there are important reasons why they have been unwilling to deviate from the prescribed regulations. Even in these situations, however, we can nearly always work together to construct a plan that meets IT needs while significantly improving the performance, reliability, and supportability of the WebFOCUS environment.

At best, cramming square pegs into round holes makes the resulting joint weak. At worst the two objects may not fit together at all. WebFOCUS is a highly specialized tool and it works best when used as designed. Since it has tremendous flexibility built in it's rare that it won't fit, but when someone's telling you it's best to write in illegible cursive instead of doing what works, from where I sit it's time to raise questions.