My business partner, Fergus, and I were on our travels last week around the UK.
We used a couple of planes, a few trains and an automobile.
For a change, the journeys on the trains and the planes were smooth and on-time.
The car was a different matter though.
We hit a number of traffic jams that delayed us quite a bit. The worst was on a motorway near Leeds where we sat without moving for well over an hour. A truck had over-turned and stopped the flow of traffic.
During our fifth game of “I Spy” we got a call from The Pebble, and explained our situation.
“You know what? That reminds me of our discussion the other day about network routing”, he said.
“The motorway is just like a cable and you are sitting there like little packets of data when a server goes down.”
I could tell he was taking a little pleasure in our predicament.
“Well, networks don’t quite work like that...”, I began to reply. Mercifully, another call came to my rescue before I had to go into the intricacies of communication protocols between hosts.
Eventually we got going again and during the next couple of days met a few companies, each working in different industrial sectors. A regular topic in our discussions was how data flows through and across an organisation – and more importantly, how it is documented and portrayed to non-technical stakeholders of that data.
To investigate, analyse and communicate the data flows, some of the companies had Systems Analysts who used formal Data Flow methodologies such as Yourdon/DeMarco, SSADM and Gane-Sardon. Others had only basic Visio diagrams to try to document how applications and functions within those applications interfaced with other applications. Some companies, however, had no documentation at all.
Recent Comments