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"Chaotic Architecture" At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
New submitter CarlaRudder writes: NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) is ditching old, rigid, legacy tools and adopting a much more flexible approach that allows people within the company to pick and choose the technologies that help them do their jobs better. CIO Jim Rinaldi and IT Chief Technology Officer Tom Soderstrom are calling it "chaotic architecture," and they are using it to better prepare for change and to attract the next generation of IT talent to JPL.
They probably just signed a contract with Jebediah Kerman's Junkyard and Spaceship Parts Co.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
What the Mechanical Engineering world badly needs is an open Parameteric CAD Standard. Right now it's horrible. Each company uses it's own proprietary file that cannot be easily shared with other software. There are some portable formats but you basically give up all of the engineering data. A CAD file should be an engineering document not just a model of what the perfect part should be. It should contain all of the important parametric data and the tolerances, GTOL's, surface finishes, fabrication notes, etc. It is amazing that this still doesn't exist and the costs of dealing with it are astronomical.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
A few things I have learned from 20 years in IT:
1) On every project, (individual) people have been the critical success factor, not process.
2) While you will always need process, process is not a replacement for good people. Most common IT processes attempt to ensure that errors made by poor performers are caught, but they also ensure that your best people will not be operating at peak performance. This is sometimes called "predictable mediocrity"
This Chaotic Architecture thing sounds like a step in the right direction... putting trust (with oversight) in people rather than an ivory tower dictating company-wide policies. The real trick is how to organize that oversight without ending up with the same dictatorship by corporate architects. This requires effective management at all levels; daring to delegate and trust rather than dictate... but I've noticed a bad shortage of such Leaders in the places I've worked the last few years.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Anyone who has ever worked or spent much time at JPL knows that the real architecture is chaotic too - a maze of buildings built over decades, and (like MIT) described only by arbitrary numbers.
Eh, you're in danger of being tarred with the dinosaur brush yourself unless you recognize that mainframes at JPL died 30 years ago and the systema being replaced are probably Oracle Applications and Microsoft Exchange.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
JPL doesn't use a lot of Ruby and NoSQL.. most of what we develop for spacecraft is in plain old C and some C++. Science data processing is often FORTRAN, because there's an enormous legacy base of processing codes in FORTRAN.
More python recently. Some LISP in days gone by. Some Java.. some enterprise apps (payroll, etc.) are Java against an Oracle back end.
Put IT people in charge? Oh , you mean like at Google for example? Or Microsoft?
Plenty of IT people become businessmen, but you never hear of an MBA graduate becoming a master programmer.