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NASCAR Comes to Market

A new respect for old skills

Randy C. Hice

I'm happy to report that my new exercise regimen is paying unimaginable dividends. I have been hopping up and down two flights of stairs in my home on one leg several dozen times a day, and my thigh is now a piece of granite, capable of deflecting small arms fire. I also have improved my gymnastics skills to the point where I can balance on two poles, vault huge distances, and climb and descend stairs. Last, I have honed my ability to maneu-ver a four-wheel cart with such stunningly cruel speed that I can bump draft the old bats in the supermarket all the way down the cereal aisle, trade paint with them before going low and viciously cutting them off, barely checking my speed just before entering the pits, er, the checkout lane. My skills are becoming so profound that I have recently been receiving congratulatory calls from Kyle Busch.

My new fitness program began when, instead of eating lunch, I sauntered over to the club to play a little squash. My opponent later wrote in the club newsletter, "Randy Hice suffered a devastating injury while playing me, and it was a damned good thing because he was smoking me on the court."

[Reader alert: if you're queasy about gore and graphic descrip-tions of injuries, please skip the following few paragraphs.]

I've been playing racquet sports pretty much since I was 14, and have had dozens of sprained ankles, hundreds of stitches, and two or three concussions that were bad enough to continu-ally erase my short-term memory to the extent I kept repeating the score like some athletic rendition of Groundhog Day.

But this was different.

Imagine a 100-meter sprinter in the blocks with one leg extended all the way back, and with the other leg poised underneath to prepare for a Springbok-like start. Visualize a gigantic rubber band bursting, only this rubber band is inside your skin while coming out of said position. Now imagine a flash going through your leg just like the time you got out of hand at the tavern and had to be tased, but the cop managed to hit the back of your leg.

That's what it feels like to snap your Achilles' tendon in half.

Strangely, in the seconds after the injury, and before the shock kicks in, draining the blood from your brain, the pain disappears quite quickly. But, you realize that your foot no longer operates, and dangles like a wrung chicken.

I called my wife, Erin, after hobbling back to the locker room.

"Hey, what's up? Nothing? Well, I have some bad news, I'm quite sure I tore my Achilles' tendon."

"Oh no! I'll pick you up and take you to the E.R."

"Nah, I've seen these before. There's nothing they can do for me there. It's my left, so I can drive; I'm going to Jacques' (my internal medicine guy) and have him point me to a good orthopedic surgeon."

Within twenty minutes, Jacques returned from his lunch break, and ushered me in ahead of less-critical patients.

"Try pressing my hand with your foot."

Nothing.

"You're right, you popped it."

He left to call one of the best orthopedic guys he knew, also an athlete and, luckily, he was in the next building. Now, Jacques is not a man to pity someone, even though he's a talented physician. He cut me no slack.

"Look, Craig can see you right now. Just go out to the elevator, take it down to the second floor, walk across the sky bridge. Now the elevator is at the other end of the hall, so just hop up a flight of stairs, and he's the third door on the left."

A massive ex-hockey player from Canada, Craig came in, felt the space where my Achilles' should have been, and stood up.

"No need for x-rays or an MRI, you tore the thing com-pletely through. Look, since you're a friend of Jacques', can you come to the hospital day after tomorrow, and I'll fix it. The surgery is simple, about 45 minutes, but, I have to warn you, the recovery sucks."

So, here I am. My stair hopping routine is out of neces-sity and impatience. So, I do several hundred hops a day. My "pole balancing" is short for ‘I'm good on crutches,' and my "four-wheel cart" is the Roll-a-Bout RA-250 Knee Walker. Three weeks down, three to go, before I can put the slightest weight on it. Sure, I've been mowing the lawn on the tractor, and I attended my son's hockey party the night after surgery, but it ain't no picnic.

Crisis breeds a new understanding and compassion for things taken for granted. That's not a skateboard left on the floor by the kids, it's an insidious booby-trap. Those camping trips planned with the boys this summer…toast. The Bledsoe Hi-Top orthopedic boot has become my con-stant companion. Placed on my leg after surgery, I was not allowed to take it off at all for two weeks. Talk about a biol-ogy experiment. I still sleep with the thing, and my wife views me as the second incarnation of RoboCop.

So, now that I must look at simple things in life with a jaundiced eye, I now look at the complex things in my work that formerly seemed simple.

Recently, I've been pondering user requirements, both informatics systems selection documents and specifications meant to form the underpinning for project implementa-tion. I have come to the conclusion that upper management at many companies seriously marginalizes the skills required to produce a solid requirements document and, hence, the quality of these documents are all over the map. Not to mention there is a correlation between the size of an orga-nization and the excruciating amount of detail in require-ments documents, and that's not a good thing.

The interesting phenomenon in the business of require-ments development is that there is a certain replicative fail-ure when boilerplate documents are used across the enter-prise to define projects. You can't take the task and pricing mentality from the proposal to expand the parking garage and extend it to an informatics project, yet we see it all the time. As you move up in corporate size, price becomes The Thing. That's not good. When price overwhelms the techni-cal merits of the products being considered, and if it does,it tells me that, (a) there are flaws in how the company is weighting price versus functionality, or (b) the requirements themselves are so bland that all vendors look alike. If there is a perception of all things being equal, then sure, price is going to decide.

But that begs the question: what is price? Careful, it's not as simple as you think. When things are not understood, or not fully understood, people making critical decisions are drawn to a frame of reference they understand. When cus-tomers are left trying to compare apples-to-apples among a series of informatics vendor proposals, the eyes are drawn to things like concurrent license cost, annuity maintenance, and such, because those items can often be compared one-to-one. But the system deteriorates rapidly when services, maintenance and product viability enter the equation.

Perception: Services often are looked at as finite figures in a proposal.

Fact: Quoting services is a black art, and only as good as the requirements on which they are based, and the willing-ness of a vendor to fight a lowball estimate with a more or less litigious approach to cut-and-dry line items in the quote.

Perception: Annual maintenance is a hard number.

Fact: If you consider the cost of updates alone, yes, but what if shotgun releases of incremental bug fixes consume large quantities of resource time? Translation: internal Q.A. processes within vendor organizations have much to do with real costs.

Perception: Parts is parts, and there ain't no difference in the products. Isn't the system that can run in a five-user water lab suitable for a small pharmaceutical company? Isn't a large ERP system claiming to have LIMS functional-ity a smart move for a huge manufacturing organization "because the ERP is already interfaced to LIMS"?

Fact: No, and hell no, respectively. Hey, the same LIMS may not be a good fit in the R&D and manufacturing arms of the same company. Rigidity of a LIMS is okay for never-wavering manufacturing, but death to the fluidity of an R&D group. As to the latter, a smallish number of compa-nies actually activate the link between ERPs and LIMS to close the loop between lot scheduling, sample testing and lot release. Okay, fair enough, but the ERP "LIMS" I have seen are circa 1989-1994 on the LIMS evolutionary scale, and are currently a poor choice for most companies, despite the fact that the CIO was out marlin fishing with the ERP sales rep.

The project landscape is littered with the remains of blown timelines, red-lined budgets and massive reengineer-ing efforts to fix half-baked implementations.

Let's get to my pet peeve…

My orthodontist back in Atlanta is now retired to his multi-million dollar mansion on the beach near Pensacola. A Harvard grad, Peter is a man after my own heart, that is to say, a deranged maniac with zest for life. The guy is now 70, so what comes in my email? A picture of him bungee jumping off an unbelievably high bridge in New Zealand. I love this guy. But, I had a business question when I lived in Atlanta, and Peter sent me to his business attorney in town. After sitting down, the first words out of his mouth, said with affection, were, "I don't know why Peter sent you to me. I've been giving him advice for 30 years and he's never taken any of it."

You do have to be careful when evaluating professional advice. The waterhead who I consulted on our downstairs gas fireplace, and who tours the country lecturing on fire-place safety, removed an inspection plate on our unit, gas leaked out, ignited, and started a fire in my basement that entertained my kids for hours when the firefighters arrived. But, for the most part, expert advice is not always given as a revenue generator, as is the Dilbert mentality. One recent example is a huge biotech company out in California that I tried to tell needed to revamp their workflows before proceeding with their system development. They blew the suggestion off, and now I see ads all over the Internet for consultants to perform workflow analysis for that company.

Okay, enough of that. Time for me to schlep the RA-250 to the SUV because I need to vent some aggression on some combatants at the supermarket. You can bet that when I bang my way through the checkout line first, I'll be turning figure eights in front of the customer service counter.

Randy Hice is the president of the Laboratory Expertise Center. He may be reached at editor@ScientificComputing.com.