Ricky & Stick - One Final Thought
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One day, as summer was coming to an end, Ricky told his mom how much he was dreading the start of school. "I hate those dumb tests, and those dumb assignments. When the summer started, I thought I was finally free, and now it's all starting again!" He was near tears.
His mom was understanding, but reminded Ricky, "Sure, Honey, summer was a fun time. But don't forget, summers are always too short, and autumn always comes, and then you always go back to school. And school always means you'll have new teachers, with new things to learn, and tests and assignments for you to do."
This was the first time that Ricky had ever consciously paid attention to the idea of perpetually going into new grades. He knew, of course, that there were older kids in higher grades, but he had never quite thought about school in this never-ending way.
Suddenly, he got a horrible vision of the rest of his life filled with new school years, hateful assignments and tests, and teacher nagging him to learn ever-harder subjects. He was beginning to understand that a new term would never be a once-only event to be gotten through, but part of a larger, ongoing process. The prospect filled him with a great dread.
After Ricky had gone to bed (usually, before being told to), his dad asked his mom, "What's wrong with him?" She smiled. "Don't worry," his mom said, "He's just begun to put it all together -- realizing that he'll always be moving into another grade, with unfamiliar teachers, and new subjects. He doesn't want it to the true, poor kid; he wants time to stop and for things to stay just the way they are now. But he's starting to understand that he doesn't have much choice in the matter..."
Owners of modern software systems, particularly information systems, are increasingly aware that the stability of their systems is constantly being undermined. Familiar tools disappear, new ones appear, Web services evolve, commercial products are updated, users demand new capabilities, and so forth. And the pace of this instability is only increasing. It's normal to find this unsettling, and to try to nail down islands of stability that last while the rest of the world changes around you. But that strategy will only work for a little while -- about as long as the endless summer that Ricky thought he had finally found.
The real solution, difficult as it may be, is to embrace the march of technology and to make it work for you; to accept that change really will be never-ending. This means developing a strategy that somehow encompasses and expects the inevitable earthquakes to your system, and makes them opportunities for improvement and growth.
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