My house dates from the 1920s, with additions from before and after World War II. I tell you this because it explains why my plumbing is a nightmare. In fact, last week one of the ball-cock valves in a toilet expired despite my best efforts to repair it over the previous five years.
The valve, manufactured in the 1940s by American Standard, I believe, is made of solid brass and is designed upside down – instead of connecting to a water supply pipe that enters the tank from the bottom, the valve is fed from a pipe that enters the tank from the top.
This valve is not easily replaced, but I came up with a solution: Using a variety of piping and elbows along with a ball-cock valve from an air conditioner, I created a workable replacement that I immediately classified as a fine example of Frankenplumbing.
My house is full of Frankenplumbing. There’s a maze of copper, galvanized, brass and plastic pipe-work lurking under the house, and some of it is sound though much of it is decaying. And it is draped from one beam to the next and winds around and through joists. It has been cut off, capped off, welded, brazed, extended and joined.
This got me thinking. My house and office networks are also full of Frankenplumbing. I have wiring that has grown organically over a much shorter period than my plumbing but has become even more labyrinthine. On top of that I have network services and tools that have become hard to reorganize without a complete strip down and rebuild – the prospect of which makes me shudder.
Now my network hardware and software is obviously smaller than yours, which leads me to wonder how much more Frankenplumbing we would find in your IT infrastructure? How intricate is your collection of services and connections? Do you even believe you know the full horror of your system?
The problem is if you do anything that disturbs the status quo of your Frankenplumbing your life will become much harder. Any minor change will usually break something, and major changes are guaranteed to cause chaos.
Part of the reason things break is that your network is really just an extension of your business processes and those processes are just as much a part of the organization’s Frankenplumbing as the core IT systems are.
So what are you to do with your part of the mess? Nothing. There really isn’t anything major you can do, because if you were to clean it up you would find that within a couple of years at most and weeks at least, whatever bright, shiny, highly organized and logical system you created would degenerate into a different but fundamentally similar mess as the one you just cleaned up!
This then is the real foundation of IT, particularly at the enterprise level: The IT group is there to fix, add to and sometimes replace the Frankenplumbing for as little cost as, and with the least disturbance to the system, as possible.
That tells you something important about the kind of people you need in an IT operation. Among all the groups, the analysts, the programmers, the support techs and so on, you want to have a fair number of MacGyvers who are happy to grapple with the Frankenplumbing and capable of using some digital bailing wire and virtual chewing gum to create a workable fix.
This quality of creativity and problem solving is much underrated in IT and separates the outstanding IT shops from the rest.
For my house, I need to find a creative and problemsolving plumber to start refurbishing the Frankenplumbing even though I know that in another 10 or 20 years the house will have to be refurbished all over again. Once my house plumbing starts getting fixed, I will be able to start refurbishing my network Frankenplumbing. Unfortunately I know that my network won’t stay pristine for anything like as long as my real plumbing.
MacGyverisms to backspin@gibbs.com and see Gearblog for the sheer pleasure of it.
