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That's why they hire consultants and we have spouses: so someone can tell us what we want. :-) In the 1980sCE (CALS Era), we called it an "Automated Information System" or AIS for short. It divided the world into an Enterprise Database (everyone can access it: the shared data) and Workgroup dbs (functional areas). It all looked very spiffy on paper. Of course, tech at the time wasn't up to it, but it generated a lot of papers. Now we know that any decent relational database with modules that can be turned on and off depending on the group privileges works pretty much like that. We can always add tables but renormalizing after the fact is very painful. So just change the terminology, nod and say, "yes we do AIS" so the consultant will appear as if they really do have a new vision when in fact, the same system will ship, the implementation personnel will configure it for local conditions, and everyone will be happy. A lot depends on the axis from custom one-off work to shrinkwrap. len -----Original Message----- From: Al Snell [mailto:alaric@a...] On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, Mike Champion wrote: > approach makes the most sense. For example, even if your are much happier > in general visualising a system and doing lots of initial design, you will probably > be more effective doing it the "try it simple and see" way if you are stuck on > a project with rapidly changing requirements, diverse data sources, and > no authority to make people "do the right thing." Ooh, there's that too. I try to make my intial design as modular and extensible as possible to counter this kind of stuff (and later development benefits from this too), but there's always some design change that needs to be made later down the line, definitely. Bloody clients. Never know what they want...
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