Technology and Business

There are many parallels between what we think of as the programming world and the business world. The other day at our weekly status meeting we discussed a troubleshooting and debugging problem that had arisen during the week.  We were surprised to find that a developer, when working his way through a problem, had not saved copies of the outputs from each of the test runs. Although the developer was able to determine the current state of the program he could not easily determine the results of the previous paths traveled. For all but the simplest of problems not having complete records can be a severe handicap. Having not reviewed complete output the developer had limited his field of vision to the single issue he was attacking and was missing the impact of his modifications on other sections of the output.

Business managers can suffer from similar omissions. Not having meaningful measurements and accurately noting the conditions that gave rise to those results can make business navigation more difficult. And not reviewing, from time to time, the procedures being used by those responsible for daily tasks can result in ineffective habits that can impede the organization.