David McCoy

I have been “dealing” with a stunning social networking site. I say “dealing” in that it keeps “crapping out,” throwing off Java errors, stack errors, database write errors, net connection errors, etc. The site says, “Sorry… we are down” way too often. Sometimes, it just eats your post. Other times, it acts like a wayward 3-year-old, wearing roller skates and carrying a box of fine dinnerware. In other words, the system is totally unstable.

Now, do I care? Not really! This is not a banking system playing with my account balance. It is not a medical records systems saying, “You’ve got cancer!… Wait… No…it’s a hang nail.” It’s not an on-line order entry system about to accidentally ship 1000 Barbie dolls to my house. Roy Schulte and I used to joke about that kind of process debacle, in those exact terms. No.. It’s not important. It’s just me, posting, “LOL! That was funny!” This system is not life-or-death.

This is the difference between Enterprise Class computing and Global Class computing. My buddy Daryl Plummer loves to talk about this. If you have not read his research on same, you really should. Bottom line: In the enterprise, we know you and we know you have expectations for quality of service. We also control you. Outside the enterprise…. we’ll, we don’t really know you and we certainly don’t control you. We also know that you will tolerate crappy performance in exchange for something important to you: access, information, collaboration, social interaction, etc.  Now, we don’t want to deliver crappy performance… but… well… stuff happens, eh? You Global Class participants will forgive us… you always do…

Global Class vs. Enterprise Class – A major design issue in 2009 and likely in 2020. Go figure.

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Category: Business Process Management (BPM) Technowishing     Tags:

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