Blogs

One of our recent projects involves a rather complicated list of contacts, and it’s pointing out the ways in which people are also described by metadata, processed by workflows and treated as report elements. On the one hand, it’s a little disconcerting to realize that, at least from someone’s point of view you are a bit of unstructured data. On the other hand, it’s easier to make the right decisions if you stop thinking of people as being special.

One of the drawbacks of blogging about the work you do for a small company is how quickly the information you provide allows the reader to identify a single person. In order to avoid that, I’m going to go all hypothetical on you, and talk about a football team instead of our company. I don’t have an abundance of knowledge of how football teams are organized, but if you cut me some slack, I think I can put this in words. Let’s start with the fact that the football team isn’t the football team – it’s an organization. If we focus on one way of defining the team: who gets a Super Bowl ring, we see that the organizational includes:

• Every member of the active roster
• The coaching staff
• The entire front office and ownership
• And, depending on ownership's decision, the list would include the cheerleaders, members on the Injured Reserve list and members of the practice squad.

Actually there are more possible recipients; apparently the owners can give a ring to anyone they want, but this list will be more than adequate to illustrate our challenges.

Who’s In Charge – When you look at an organization, you often need to know, or report who is in charge, but this gets complicated when we extend that to include what they are in charge of. We might have a coach, but he might be designated as the head coach, or the defensive coordinator. One or more players might be designated as team captains, and need to be included in correspondence or meetings based on that designation. It’s conceivable that people could be performing roles on the field on game day and back-office roles during the off-season. If we want to be able to rely on a single entry per contact, those entries need to be able to be tagged with all relevant roles (metadata), or included in all related lists.

Duplicates are Unique – Huh? Consider that a football team might have a receiver who is also on the kickoff return team. Or, consider that a coach might have a primary responsibility on defense but might also coach special teams. We often get trapped by the fact that we know that this is a person and that he will adapt, but we actually do need to be able to list him on all the various reports and detail rosters. We have a tendency to understand this requirement better when the “content” is inanimate. When we are dealing with people, we often think of the current people and move to the conclusion that “…oh, he will know” or “he would be at both meetings anyway, so…” We have to avoid those conclusions, because people change and people’s roles change over time; our systems have to work regardless of who is filling the various roles.

Forget who they are – While it might be unlikely to see a cheerleader move to the active roster, it’s quite likely to have a player move from the active roster to the injured reserve list, or to the practice squad.  If we lose our focus on people, we would see these transitions as the same activity and we would build in the generic capability to manage the move. When we stop and think about the people involved, we are more likely to try to add or remove capabilities in certain situations, or create a series of unique pathways for anticipated movement. Who cares if a cheerleader is unlikely to ever play the game, unless the specific pathway would involve a different process it’s actually easier to allow for the unlikely capability.

Metadata vs. Lists– Once we have the contact entries for the entire organization, it’s relatively easy to add / remove people from lists; but we can’t rely on lists alone to manage our organization. For example, players on the injured reserve list can’t be assigned to any squad during a game. This means that those players shouldn’t appear in the selection group for any of those lists, and perhaps a workflow should remove the person from certain lists when they become injured. This makes perfect sense, except when we start to consider “but everybody knows who is injured…” Contacts are content, your solution will be better if you don’t treat them like people.