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HIGH TECHNOLOGY AND COMMON SENSE By Royal Van Horn Illustration © 1998 by Mario Noche

THE MORE I work with all types of high technology, the more I depend on common sense. People keep getting me to help them with their technology problems, but I rarely use any high-tech know-how, and I frequently rely on good old-fashioned horse sense. Axioms handed down to me as a child keep popping into my head, and I seem to be depending on them more every day: "You can't see the forest for the trees." "Don't be penny wise and pound foolish." "We all have our jobs to do." "You're not finished until the paperwork is done."

When most people find themselves in the middle of a complicated situation, they tend to get lost deep in the forest. (Axiom: "You can't see the forest for the trees.") When I am asked to work in such situations, I try to get as far back from the problem as possible.

Recently, I was asked to help a school district get a complicated distributed wide-area network made up of more than 60 Microsoft NT servers to function well. After several days of study, I found that, by and large, the network functioned properly and that most mission-critical files were backed up somewhere. But I am not sure anyone knew where! Certainly no one had a list of just where the back-up files were located. (Axiom: "You're not finished until the paperwork is done.")

The mission-critical hardware was backed up, too, but the mission-critical person wasn't. The entire operation depended on a single person who had become ill. This little oversight ended up costing the district a sinful amount of money. If you have to hire someone new tomorrow to keep your network going, good luck! I hope you have deep pockets. I used to have an axiom of my own: "If you can't teach somebody to run it, don't install it." I have since modified it to be "If you can't teach two people to run it, don't install it." If you depend on a system, back up both the hardware and the people who run the hardware.

Another recent example of being lost in a forest concerns the vice president of a high-tech start-up company. He asked me to help the company develop an infrastructure that would allow the company to function "virtually." That is, the company would have engineering and corporate expertise locally and in other parts of the world. When I spoke with him, he told me he was interested in equipping all members of the company with Palm Pilots so they could keep notes of meetings and other things and not be burdened with paper. He didn't have a workable IT (information technology) plan, and I am not sure what the corporate secretaries were doing, but I guess it wasn't taking or transcribing notes! I suggested purchasing a tape recorder and developing an IT plan. (Axiom: "We all have our jobs to do.")

Just a few months ago, I got an interesting e-mail from a physician who was a medical school professor. The doc said that his med school would soon be installing a computerized automated medical chart system. The plan was that the doctors in training would sit at computer terminals located throughout the hospital and enter the information they needed to add to a patient's medical chart.

As it happens, I have a neighbor who runs a home medical transcription business. Local doctors carry pocket tape recorders with them as they make their rounds and dictate information as they walk from room to room. At the end of the day, the doctors hand their tapes to someone at the hospital who digitizes the audio and e-mails the resulting computer files to my neighbor. My neighbor, who can type 120 words a minute, simply puts on her headphones, plays the digital audio file, and adds the new information to the appropriate chart. After explaining how well this system works, I asked the professor/doctor how many of his docs could type 120 words a minute. I think he was a little taken aback. (Axiom: "We all have our jobs to do." This leads me to a another axiom of mine: "The first law of intelligent computing is to get someone else to do your computing if you can.")

I grew up in a small town in Nebraska. We bought groceries from George's butcher shop. My mother always bought round steak, but George ran it through the tenderizer twice for her, so it was always very tender. We didn't know the people who worked at Safeway, and they didn't know us, so obviously we didn't do business with Safeway. We bought gas from and had our car serviced by Art, the owner/operator of the local "service station." Redman's was our shoe store, and if a pair of shoes didn't wear well or feel right, we simply took them back and were politely given a new pair. Mr. Redman made sure that the shoes always fit. I guess times were simpler then. (One thing was certain, and it makes another good axiom: "Depend on people and not products.")

Now this might not seem like it has much to do with technology, but it does. Looking over the server inventory of a local school district (not the one I wrote about above), I noticed that eight of its libraries had their automated circulation systems running on Dell 4400 servers. Dell 4400s are enterprise-class servers with about five to 10 times more power than it takes to run even the largest library. As it turns out, the district had little servers doing big jobs and big servers doing little jobs. I think the staff is going to move servers around and attend to this problem, but the district also needs to buy a few new servers. The district really needs a local vendor, like Mr. Redman, to make sure the servers are the right size! (Axiom: "Depend on people, not products.") Dell happens to be a mail-order computer firm, so there's no Mr. Redman to be found there. Incidentally, servers are "multi-tasking," so they can do more than one thing at a time. I wonder what else the district could get these giant library servers to do.

Now lots of people out there -- you know who you are -- are plugging the power cords of expensive computers and servers into $7.98 power strips. I guess if you imagine you have electrical surge suppression, maybe you do. I use $50 surge suppressors that warrant the equipment plugged into them for up to $10,000, no questions asked. (Newer schools don't even need surge suppressors since the electrical outlets are surge suppressed at the wiring panel.) I also buy the highest-quality network cables, diskettes, zip discs, back-up tape cartridges, and so on. Honestly, I once observed a technician at my university go through three cheap Ethernet patch cords before he found one that worked. The problem is, if a cheap cable fails, it can take hours to isolate the problem unless you have some killer diagnostic software installed on the network and every cable is labeled properly. (Axiom: "Don't be penny wise and pound foolish.")

I should point out that the paperwork axiom also applies to computer and network documentation. Currently, I have a local school district's main (and only) network technician mad as hell at me. None of the district's servers had any documentation, and the technician's boss is a friend of mine. To help my friend out, I sat down at my word processor and typed out a one-page form with blanks for all the things anyone should know about a server. I sent the form to my friend, who promptly made several dozen copies, handed the copies to the technician, and told him to do nothing until he had completed one form for every server -- over 50 of them. My friend told me that his technician is still grumbling about that Mac-lover Van Horn who is making him do all this unnecessary paperwork on his PC servers.

Another friend of mine recently came up with an insightful axiom: "I have a 2-year-old driving my Ferrari." This friend was lamenting the fact that he was just handed the responsibility for managing a very complicated distributed management information database. The database was running on a good number of Microsoft NT SQL servers at more than 15 sites -- clearly he had a Ferrari of a system. The trouble was that he had a hardware technician-turned-database-administrator in charge of everything. I need to point out that trained and experienced database administrators (DBAs) generally go to the highest bidder. If you ever need to hire one on a temporary basis, it will probably cost from $800 to $2,000 a day.

Unfortunately, the "2-year-old driving a Ferrari" axiom says a lot about the plight of school districts and schools that have or will soon install a lot of high-tech hardware and software. The rigid salary schedules and relatively low wages of school districts make it difficult for them to compete for the kind of advanced technical expertise that it takes to design, implement, and manage complicated high-tech systems. Imagine how much fun it would be to try and persuade a school board that they need to pay a DBA more money than they pay a principal or even a superintendent! Finding, attracting, and keeping really talented high-tech help is a growing problem for everyone, but it is a particularly thorny problem for school districts and universities. (The only real solution I see is summed up in another axiom: "Train, train, train, and, when you are done, train some more." I promise, no more axioms!)

Of course, when you get down to it, "Everything is hooked to everything else." (Oops, another axiom.) By that I mean that you probably won't be able to get on-site training, so you'll have to send people someplace -- maybe a few hundred miles away -- to get the training they need. What's more, some of that training will take a solid month. The best advice I can offer is to start now and don't stop. I have been told that, at General Electric, 25% of the personnel budget goes to training and employee development. I wonder what the figure is for your local school district.

Some years ago I wrote a column titled "The Future Is a Complicated Place." I guess I was right. If I get around to updating that old column, I will probably title it "The Future Is a Multiple Variable Problem with Conflicting Goals."

Late-Breaking News About the Internet

Edison Media Research recently released "Internet Study V: Startling New Insights About the Internet and Streaming" (http://www.edisonresearch.com/internet5sum.htm). Here are just a few of the study's more significant findings.

In August 1998 the proportion of Americans with Internet access at home or at work was 31%. By August 2000, the figure had jumped to 52%. Americans with Internet access estimate that they spend about one hour per day online.

Good news: the so-called digital divide between African Americans, Hispanics, and whites is narrowing. From August 1998 to August 2000, African American Internet access jumped from 22% to 43%, and Hispanic access jumped from 15% to 35%.

Edison has identified an avid subgroup of Internet users whom the researchers have dubbed "streamies." Streamies are Internet users who either watch video webcasts or listen to audio webcasts. According to Edison, streamies are highly interactive and involved with the Internet, they buy a lot online, and they spend a lot of money doing so. Thus streamies are a highly valued consumer group. A large number of streamies are in the 12- to 24-year-old age range. According to Edison, "Every point made in this study about Internet usage is much more dramatic among 12- to 24-year-olds."

The Edison study also concludes that traditional media -- radio and television -- need to take Internet radio and MP3 audio seriously. "Radio has 80 years of brand equity with American consumers. However, in only two short years Internet-only channels have reached nearly as many listeners online as radio stations that webcast. . . . The next year or 18 months will define who becomes 'first in mind' for Internet audio among consumers." In other words, the Internet is now without a doubt a "mass medium."

It is obvious that the Internet is swiftly and surely changing the culture as we know it. I wonder how educators will respond. I encourage you to read and ponder the Edison study.

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Last updated 8 January 2001
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