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"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
> Walter, as much as I respect you, this is like saying all rifles should be
> handmade: in other words, no interchangeable parts.
Surprisingly, perhaps, that is what I am saying. I am in the midst of writing a
long and tiresome defense of my non-2PC, internetwork-native transaction model.
I have been forced to realize that current distinctions between 'front office'
and 'back office' are grounded entirely in what was automated when, and how.
The assembly-line workers, the processors of batch jobs, the makers of, as you
say, "interchangeable parts" have been discriminated against as 'not craftsmen'
from the moment their product was no longer handmade. The current hierarchy
supposes that they are good at production but incapable of directing it, or of
creating new products or finding new markets for what they do produce. Those
'skilled' tasks are left to the craftsmen of the front office, whose every
product is indeed handmade. Though utterly pervasive, this concept is of course
unrelieved horse puckey.
More than a century after the early time-and-motion studies, technology has
finally given us the tool to make every knowledge worker, at least, once again
a highly specialized craftsman. The realization of that tool is in the
worldwide internetwork. If every processing node, a partnership of man and
machine on that internetwork, is designed to perform a specialized, perhaps
unique task, those nodes cannot use "interchangeable parts" because the
tradeoffs needed to reach a common denominator mean that those parts are not
sufficiently specialized to provide each worker with exactly what is required
to do a particular job in the most expert way. Interoperable parts, perhaps
ironically, specially requires parts too specialized to be interchangeable. We
rely on the internetwork topology and on the REST paradigm to make the
specialized output of every process at least potentially accessible to every
interested subsequent process. However, the output of a specialized process is
necessarily in a form very particular to the expertise which created it and
which it embodies, in part, through that specialized form. this means that a
process which is interested in the output of another process must first
instantiate what it requires from the specialized form in which it finds it
into the specialized form in which it can use it. These are indeed handmade
parts, retooled for each new use by craftsmen expert in that particular
function. Not interchangeability, but interoperability.
Respectfully,
Walter Perry
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