On a recent visit to the Los Angeles area, I chanced upon the La Brea Tar Pits. It is an amazing thing to suddenly arrive at a lovely grass-filled park dotted with fenced-in pools of tar, plus a bubbling tar lake complete with life-sized statues of prehistoric animals.
It occurred to me that the tar pits at the Rancho La Brea site are much like information systems :
¨ You have to dig through buckets of sticky black stuff to uncover anything of value.
¨ Often what you uncover is the fossilized remains of something that used to be important.
¨ Sometimes the information doesn’t pass the smell test. (The tar pits reek of sulfur. Here's hoping your data isn't quite as pungent.)
¨ You know there is valuable information in there, but you have to get dirty to uncover it.
¨ Sometimes your job is the pits.
¨ The tar pits are surrounded by a fence, only authorized employees who have the right keys are allowed access to the secrets buried within.
¨ At the top of the park there is a clean white building (Ivory Tower) that is totally separate from the black pits. That is where all of the data fragments get assembled into “the big picture.”
¨ Sometimes creatures (projects, ideas, systems) get mired in the ooze, never to be seen again.
If you find too many similarities between this list and your business, it might be time to look for a better solution.
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