Flat3D

Technology makes life more difficult…

Doesn’t it sometimes feel that technology makes life more difficult?  I know all you guys reading this (as if anyone is reading this guff!) are fairly technologically literate and capable, so this kind of thought doesn’t cross your mind too often, but it always does at some stage, right?

It usually begins with something that seems fairly straightforward or simple, something that shouldn’t be a problem at all!  Things go smoothly at first, but after a short while something appears that was unexpected, soemthing isn’t formatted quite correctly and to get any further you will need to spend hours reformatting it, maybe the data isn’t as complete as you thought and you will need to spend a while typing in or copying and pasting the rest into the file, or there might be a step in the process that you didn’t foresee and seemingly no easy way to overcome it…  But you have come this far!  Surely to go back and do all this by hand would be much more labour than to overcome the obstacle and get it done right?  So you plough on, and as time wears on and the text on your ctrl key is worn back to unreadable from all the copying and pasting it begins to look like the manual option might have been quicker, but surely there isn’t long to go now?!

This is the kind of thing that crops up all the time in IT work, particularly in software work that is heavy in data processing.  In my last job we often took feeds from various places and attempted to automate them to make life easier (well in this case actually just to make the project possible!).  Of course if you have the right tools and so on, you can overcome the obstacles and, to quote someone else, “anything is possible!”

But the issue is made even more frustrating as you realise why it occurs and what it means.  If (suitable) data is already in a digital format, it is sheer lunacy to have to do manual work in order for it to be acceptable in another location.  The whole point of digitising data is to increase its accessibility, portability and usefulness and this too often is forgotten as people make an application that produces data or transfers it.  Perhaps the developers didn’t use standard formats designed for transferring data such as XML, CSV etc for textual data, common image formats or whatever is suitable for the data in question.  This is less of a problem now thanks to the web and forced portability of data.  The real killer comes in lack of consistency, when data is being transferred in a common format, or even a well specified uncommon format, but all of a sudden something changes and data is coming across in a slightly different format.  Of course this results in lost data, mistransmission, etc, but it also makes attempting to process the data automatically a real headache, and it is inevitably down to poor design and implementation of the original system.

So I’ve warbled on and no one is going to be reading now, even if they were the last time I checked!  But the next time you find yourself thinking “technology makes things so much more complicated” ask yourself if it is the technology that makes it difficult or the design of the system.

(This post was inspired by my attempts to get my supporters addresses from the automated email sent to me and into my pc’s address book.  Surely someone might have thought about the format that the addresses are provided in and thought that commas alone might not be the most useful separator…)