In yesterday’s post I wrote a bit about the fact that perhaps our role is, or needs to change. It seems like this comes up fairly often – where people in this line of work feel like too much time is spent NOT doing the architecture and innovation stuff, but rather focusing on the policing stuff.
Personally, I think this is organizations running hard and being short sighted. I suppose the “running hard” piece is the reason for not looking out a bit and doing the innovation portion. So much going on, trying to hit dates, trying to satisfy the stakeholders, etc. It all adds up to constantly trying to get the next thing out the door as quickly as possible.
Add to that some “lowest common denominator” toolsets and you can see that things can get complicated quickly. And that’s just the right here, right now stuff. Never mind needing to look a bit further out to see what you can do to help out or innovate.
The long-standing thing has always been developers vs. DBAs for data management. While I do still see a split between approaches to storing information, I’ve hoped for a long time that, as roles fuse together, experiences would as well. I really hope that some of the development “in the trenches” stuff bleeds into the DBA “structure, control and accountability” side of things. And yes, the other way around really needs to happen too.
But in the meantime, is the first step a transparent policing of the information in our systems? By transparent policing, I think what needs to happen is to maintain that control, but teach along the way. Teach why that control and management is needed for databases. Perhaps if development teams knew what was needed and why, they would be able to incorporate that thought process into the design and development flow a bit better.
If transparent policing were the fundamental piece that is just there, part of the process, making sure data is being managed and used correctly, perhaps then we could really push forward into the innovation piece.
I think too that the side effect of all of that would be better, more effective teams. The same would be true, of course, if the developers were able to focus on brining DBAs up to speed (where needed – clearly there are a huge number of DBAs and Developers that already know much about the respective “other side”) – then that knowledge could help drive data use, protection and what-not.
Perhaps the first step to innovation is figuring out how each side can leverage the other, rather than “deal” with the other. Would that be possible (if it’s not the case now) in your own organization?