The frontier

Ecris le 2 octobre 2005
Dans la catégorie Uncategorized |

My favorite recurring ?big theory? is that information management systems are very particular animals compared to scientific or industrial systems. Their main purpose is to automate into a machine some processes which are by nature ?human? process. Computer languages are often by nature quite from the scientific field. It is all by about manipulating numbers and characters with big precision and it is admitted sometimes that to be a good computer scientist, you need to have a good scientific background. However, we all know persons who are not scientists and who turn out to be very good computer experts, maybe better than scientific one. For instance, we know that persons who did philosophical studies can become very good computer specialists.So, we have on one end human processes and we want to automate some of them into a machine on the other end. I think that designing and constructing information management system is all about this task of selecting some human processes and put them into a computer system. They are now two questions:

Which processes should I automate?
How should I automate them?

The second question is all about software design, and a lot of energy has been spent on this topic since computer exists. We know for instance that the Object Orientation approach is a very good one to help this design, and its implementation into code.The first one is more complex. It asks actually where we should put the frontier between human processes and computer processes. Peter Williams has a very good example of this dilemma. I strongly encourage reading Peter?s post to better understand what kind of problem I am trying to address here.We often encounter situation where the implicit goal is to put as much as possible into computer. It is considered as a progress when computers are taking more and more tasks which were done by humans. Most enterprises seek this goal and call this quest ?improving the return on investment?. I am not so sure that this is a good quest. For sure, humans feel better of not doing some tasks, which in turn should be left to our computers, but some tasks should be left to humans. This frontier between human processes and computer is not easy to design, and it is also moving. The study of its nature and the understanding of how it should move is a very interesting topic that I am currently trying to explore.

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