This week we celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary – twenty five years from that smoke filled day when my fiancé became my bride and the mother of my children a few years later.
I am a happy product of the arranged marriage system. I love my wife, and (privately) am in awe and devotion of her many qualities and am constantly surprised by her love for the undeserving me. Don’t get me wrong. Our parents did not meet in secret over our cradles and arrange a wedding that was foisted upon us. Rather we met with our parents’ blessing and decided we liked each other enough to tie our lots together. And have never looked back since. She still lights up my life and there is a spring to my step and a song on my lips because she is part of my life.
But the arranged marriage is like a market. Specify someone at least six feet tall, and you have eliminated 75% of the eligible bridegrooms – the Indians of my generation though long on intellect were short of height. Specify a college degree and you have clobbered another good 30% of the remaining. Specify a degree only from a prestigious institution and you are now able to count the successful candidates on your fingers. The trick is to be open-minded enough to specify the minimum needed to make you happy without drastically slicing the size of the pool of available candidates. Be overly broad and you will wind up with someone you would not have looked at twice when you were in college.
Very quickly you learned to shape your needs – being specific enough to only make compromises you are willing to live with but being broad enough that there is anticipation of enough supply.
How true this is, in the area of defining systems requirements for a broad set of users such as we are trying to do with the e-Government initiatives from the Office of Management and Budget. How true this rings, when we are trying to define service oriented architecture and specifying services that are general enough to fit a large market but specific enough to meet their needs.
Growing up in the India of tradeoffs and personal inconveniences of the 1950s and 1960s and even the 1970s, we learnt quickly how to ride the tightrope balance between tightly defined requirements and breadth of choices.
As my last thirty years in the US have taught me, America is the land of indulgence. You can have your cake and eat it too. Our grocery stores are filled with a wall of choices. Our electronics stores offer wonderful variety from all over the world. Our ice creams come in 56 flavors (sorry Baskin Robbins). Our multiplexes offer a choice of ten movies at the same time. The Apple iTunes store offers more than a million tunes. We have more than ten car dealerships on Dealership Alley.
And so when we specify the extensive requirements for our new homes, the extreme set of accessories for our cars, boats and motorcycles, and the formal shirts, casual shirts, dress pants, casual pants, jeans, shorts, ties, tee shirts, chinos, jackets, golf shirts, suits and overcoats for the wardrobe we MUST have, we carry that to the requirements of the systems we build, and the services we specify by tightening our specifications and needs to the nth degree. Cost and tradeoffs are not usually a criteria during the formulation stage of requirements. We wait for the managers and the financial management people to wield the hatchet and then complain about the cuts that left systems dysfunctional.
Manufacturing to a mass market is cheaper and more stable for suppliers to produce to than supporting large markets of size one. Buying, and using a mass manufactured product involves accepting necessary trade-offs and living with a less than perfect fit. Buying and using a mass manufactured product means that the Jones have one too, as do the Smiths and the Richardsons.
Someday we’ll get it. Designing a SOA has a lot to do with understanding arranged marriages. Or we’ll quickly find ways to cheaply build solutions for markets of one. After all, aren’t we an entrepreneurial lot?
I am a happy product of the arranged marriage system. I love my wife, and (privately) am in awe and devotion of her many qualities and am constantly surprised by her love for the undeserving me. Don’t get me wrong. Our parents did not meet in secret over our cradles and arrange a wedding that was foisted upon us. Rather we met with our parents’ blessing and decided we liked each other enough to tie our lots together. And have never looked back since. She still lights up my life and there is a spring to my step and a song on my lips because she is part of my life.
But the arranged marriage is like a market. Specify someone at least six feet tall, and you have eliminated 75% of the eligible bridegrooms – the Indians of my generation though long on intellect were short of height. Specify a college degree and you have clobbered another good 30% of the remaining. Specify a degree only from a prestigious institution and you are now able to count the successful candidates on your fingers. The trick is to be open-minded enough to specify the minimum needed to make you happy without drastically slicing the size of the pool of available candidates. Be overly broad and you will wind up with someone you would not have looked at twice when you were in college.
Very quickly you learned to shape your needs – being specific enough to only make compromises you are willing to live with but being broad enough that there is anticipation of enough supply.
How true this is, in the area of defining systems requirements for a broad set of users such as we are trying to do with the e-Government initiatives from the Office of Management and Budget. How true this rings, when we are trying to define service oriented architecture and specifying services that are general enough to fit a large market but specific enough to meet their needs.
Growing up in the India of tradeoffs and personal inconveniences of the 1950s and 1960s and even the 1970s, we learnt quickly how to ride the tightrope balance between tightly defined requirements and breadth of choices.
As my last thirty years in the US have taught me, America is the land of indulgence. You can have your cake and eat it too. Our grocery stores are filled with a wall of choices. Our electronics stores offer wonderful variety from all over the world. Our ice creams come in 56 flavors (sorry Baskin Robbins). Our multiplexes offer a choice of ten movies at the same time. The Apple iTunes store offers more than a million tunes. We have more than ten car dealerships on Dealership Alley.
And so when we specify the extensive requirements for our new homes, the extreme set of accessories for our cars, boats and motorcycles, and the formal shirts, casual shirts, dress pants, casual pants, jeans, shorts, ties, tee shirts, chinos, jackets, golf shirts, suits and overcoats for the wardrobe we MUST have, we carry that to the requirements of the systems we build, and the services we specify by tightening our specifications and needs to the nth degree. Cost and tradeoffs are not usually a criteria during the formulation stage of requirements. We wait for the managers and the financial management people to wield the hatchet and then complain about the cuts that left systems dysfunctional.
Manufacturing to a mass market is cheaper and more stable for suppliers to produce to than supporting large markets of size one. Buying, and using a mass manufactured product involves accepting necessary trade-offs and living with a less than perfect fit. Buying and using a mass manufactured product means that the Jones have one too, as do the Smiths and the Richardsons.
Someday we’ll get it. Designing a SOA has a lot to do with understanding arranged marriages. Or we’ll quickly find ways to cheaply build solutions for markets of one. After all, aren’t we an entrepreneurial lot?
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