Re: database systems and organizational intelligence

"Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com> wrote in message news:c92dtl$oan$1_at_news.netins.net...
> I first used the term "trustee" instead of "steward" -- would that be
> preferable?

I like the word "steward" just fine, although "trustee" is fine, too.

I wanted to use this a springboard to jump into one aspect of COBOL that has been largely overlooked for the last forty years.

I should say at the outset that I'm no fan of COBOL. My connection with COBOL is limited to some classroom examples showing how to use embedded SQL in a COBOL program, and how to use the precompiler. I had to teach from these examples when I taught Rdb/VMS programming, back in the 1980s. But COBOL has a marvelous side to it that almost no one appreciates.

A lot of people, including a lot of COBOL fans, fail to understand how radical Grace Hopper was in her thinking, way back in the 1950s. The idea behind COBOL was that business analysts would be able to <b>read COBOL programs</b>, even if they didn't know how to write them. What good is that? Because they would be able to detect certain kinds of fundamental flaws in the programs that other people would not.

Now what in hell does this have to do with "stewardship"? A lot. Where there is a steward, there is also an owner. The steward acts in lieu of the owner and on the owner's behalf. But, at some point, the steward has to account to the owner for the acts of stewardship and their consequences. And that's where I think IT has gone astray. The practitioners of IT have become so enveloped with their "stewardship" that they no longer hold themselves accountable to the owners of that over which they have stewardship. And that's a problem.

Very shortly after COBOL "caught on", it stopped being used as a combined programming and documentation language. Essentially, if the program "works", who cares how it looks? The owners have not only gone along with this, but they have also been "enablers". It's an abuse of stewardship.

The same thing can happen to data. But this post is already too long. Received on Wed May 26 2004 - 19:55:08 CEST