pas de problème

"It's always a good problem to have when you have more ability than you had yesterday" Joe Torre (NY Yankees, manager).

Joe was of course talking baseball, it's a problem that I should be having, simply through this natural process of assimilating all sorts of data from all sources of media, it should be a ginormously good problem.

Unfortunately however there always seems to be a gap in ability, you close it, it widens, you take a couple of steps forward only to realise that you need to take a few more steps before you can claim victory.

We have been working on a systems interface for what feels like an absolute age, a tri-party alliance working together globally to get two systems to begin to "talk to each other." We read up on potential solutions, scope parcels of work and build it up bit by byte, all of the time increasing our ability but feeling good about it would be to strong an adjective to use in this instance.

Data and interfaces are the two problem areas which I least like to tackle particularly as both just have that never-ending story feel about them. With data, ownership and cleansing are the main issues and they will dog the project until you switch the system on and beyond. However with the interface it is slightly different, because it is premised in a promise made, a promise made to a senior team when you needed to convince them about of the solution, and just like children with baby elephant memories they remember it and always want to talk about it.

I have got a problem continuum which goes something like this, "Is it an: Issue; or a palaver; a conundrum; or a dilemma; a disaster; or a get out of Dogde-dogde." Interfaces and data are conundrums and they require an insurmountable amount of new ability to conquer.

We have our weekly conference call later to discuss progress, the anticipated solution deadline is 31 Oct 06, I am going to have so much more ability then than I do today, that's for sure, it's going to be a tres bon, problème.