The Pankian Metaphor 3129

for a little drift, sometime after we took the early out in 92, one of the major airline res systems were talking to us about the ten impossible things that they couldn't do.

i went away and a couple months later came back with an implementation that solved all ten impossible things. that was when they started wringing their hands ... and eventually let slip that they actually didn't want us to solve the problems ... they just wanted to be able to tell the board that we were consulting on the problem for the next decade.

the issue was that many of the impossible things were a result of there being a large staff manually performing many of the steps. if all the manual steps were automated, then much of the difficulty went away and things got much simpler. some of this had all been layed down based on the technology of the 60s and never really revisited (technology may have been looked at over the years for some simple, linear scaling but never from the standpoint of enabling fundamental paradigm change).

to some extent, the status of the executive in-charge was related to the size of the organization. if the size of the organization was cut by three orders of magnitude, then the executive's status was also impacted.

various past posts mentioning airline res systems (only some referring to this particular incident):

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