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Re: d/b health check

From: Daniel W. Fink <Daniel.Fink_at_Sun.COM>
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 07:31:59 -0600
Message-id: <412C94CF.1010604@sun.com>


Just because no-one is complaining (that you know about) does not mean that nothing is wrong. Within most organizations that I have been a part of, the gap between the users and IT usually limited the communication about performance problems. Users may become conditioned to accept things the way they are and just complain amongst themselves and never to management or IT. Management and IT don't seem all that eager to go looking for problems, when they usually have enough to deal with already.

If we use the analogy of a health check in the medical fashion, we need to consider the difference between reactive and preventative actions. When we have pain, illness or something just does not feel right, we are being reactive. We can describe the symptoms and have an idea of the resolution (stop the pain, feel better, etc.). This is the strength of Method-R (IMHO). It enables you to really drill down to a root cause of the problem. What about times where something is wrong, but you either ignore the problem (and accept it as a part of life) or don't have any symptoms that you are aware of? Not to be morbid, but this illustrates the point. Cancer of the stomach is one of the deadliest because symptoms do not usually arise until it is too late. Aneurisms(sp?) in the brain are very similar. There are tests to determine if there are these types of problems, but I don't think they are all that common in practice.

Just food for thought,
Daniel Fink

Freeman, Donald wrote:

>I may be wrong but the first thing I got out of Carey and Jeff's book is =
>to ask the question, "Is anybody complaining?" I have long thought that =
>should be the primary indicator that something needs checked<g>. When I =
>look long enough, and hard enough, I will undoubtably find something =
>that needs to be messed with, often to my detriment.
>-----------------
>
>



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Received on Wed Aug 25 2004 - 08:28:51 CDT

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