The Installed Base

Historians of technology sometimes talk about first-mover advantages. If you’re successful first with a new technology, you often get to set the environment for those who follow. An example is the QWERTY keyboard, which was used by the popular Remington #2 typewriter in the 1870s and became the standard layout, despite its weird obsession with giving your little fingers a workout.

Over time, it has become clear that is too simple a narrative, and there are also often disadvantages. To switch from mechanical to civil engineering, a lot of highways in and around New York were built before national standards were developed and before anyone had good research on geometric requirements, leading to too-narrow lanes, too-tight turns, and too-short acceleration and deceleration lanes. (The FDR Drive is a good example of a controlled-access highway built to pre-modern standards.) The problem is that, once they’re built. they’re expensive and difficult to modify.

This issue has been on my mind lately as I try to design (and yes, that is definitely the right word) some new and better systems for our office. A problem is that a lot of our internal administration was set up in 2007 and 2008, when OSE was three people. It was okay if the logic of a procedure was in my head, as I was either the one performing or it or I was available all the time to the office manager who was. More than fifteen years later, with a dozen full-time people and several part-timers, those systems are creaking a bit.

This is an unavoidable problem of growth. Spending time to research and implement, for example, the comprehensive administrative filing system we have today, let alone the one we will be switching to shortly, would have been a huge waste of my time and effort in 2007. And since most people in the office are engineers who don’t regularly interact with admin files. changing things now is not so bad. On the other hand, the basic structure of our project files is not changing because (a) it’s very simple and it works (our projects are numbered sequentially and each project folder is the same) and (b) changing that now would be a huge hassle. The installed base of some 5000 projects outweighs any possible gains in efficiency from changing things. We have recently tweaked the structure of the typical project folder based on internal discussion – is it “office-sourced” if you crowd-source within the office?

The most important thing I’m working on along these lines is better tracking project buildings…which is a good topic for tomorrow.