CTO Articles
Published in IT World
May 16, 2006
If computers can do it, why can't we?
This article is best classified as an exasperated rant. A cathartic outburst resulting from two days spent in an assault course known as "traveling in a car through the city of Dublin, Ireland in 2006".
Dublin, for the lucky readers who have not experienced it, has Galaxy-grade traffic problems. Hours rather than minutes to travel a handful of miles is not at all unusual these days. Over the boom years known as the "Celtic Tiger", Dublin has become a fabulously active city, dripping in commercial activity, teeming with cosmopolitan life, all housed within a 300 square mile parking lot.
The good news (and I'm clutching at straws in calling it that) is that sitting in endless traffic gives me plenty of time to think. The bad news is that all I ever seem to think about in these situations is the traffic.
"Why is it", I asked myself, "that computers can talk to each other and work together without moving location whereas we humans mostly insist on traveling in order to talk to each other and work together?"
The main answer is that distance is largely irrelevant when it comes to computers talking to each other. The beasts are so stupid that even putting them side by side does not make it easier to get them to talk to each other.
With humans of course, exactly the opposite is true. Humans are smart and the quality of inter-human interaction in problem solving, in coordination, in knowledge transfer etc. can go up dramatically with face-to-face communication.
The undoubted advantages of face-to-face communication do not - on their own - necessitate the constant co-location of team mates of course. Many people - software developers being good examples - spend a goodly portion of their day in solitary head-down mode. Phone, e-mail, instant messaging, Blogs and WIKIs and so on have greatly reduced the need to hold meetings just to find out what is going on. Does it make sense to co-locate umpteen people just to facilitate the small percentage of time in which they will need to be co-located for face-to-face meetings?
Clearly, it depends on the industry and it depends on the specific goals of the team. Perhaps software developers are just a special case? Even if software development is special in this respect, it is a not insignificant part of the commercial activity in most cities. Dublin is no exception. To cut to the chase: why do Dublin-based software developers spend so much time stuck in traffic?
Think of each car as a packet of information traveling on the Internet. When the Internet has congestion problems what does she do? (The Internet is a "she" right?) She cleverly splits the load on bottlenecks by routing traffic elsewhere. The routing is "alive" in the sense that she can change it quickly so that bottlenecks that arise can be dealt with dynamically. The Internet balances itself dynamically.
Back in the physical world - albeit a fictional one - how would this work for meetings? Geeks work away independently or in small groups most of the time. When face-to-face meetings are required, they are arranged in "Meetels" - like motels but full of meeting rooms, that can be rented by the hour. Meetels are scattered all over big cities with the highest density existing in the commuter belt and co-located with the travel hubs such as airports and train stations. Given a list of attendees and their locations, third party scheduling service provider arrange meeting locations to minimize the travel of all attendees taking into account all current traffic-related data.
Back in the real world, I have another hour to go in the current traffic jam. Heading for a meeting that will not take more than 30 minutes and that could have been held anywhere with basic meeting room and IT facilities.
Grrrrrr.