What's in a Name?Deciding how to categorize your products may lead to better strategic advantageBy Joe Celko You probably know Aristotle as the man who set the pattern of Western thought and logic by dividing things into distinct categories. But if you read his writings carefully, you find that he admits that this division is an intellectual decision that gets vague on the borders of those categories and often breaks down in the real world. In August 1993, a colleague sent me an email in which he wrote: " ... maybe sometimes comparing apples and oranges is exactly what is required. The manager of the supermarket says, 'OK, ... we've got this extra bin in the produce department. We're trying to figure out what to put in it. Our analysis so far has narrowed it down to apples or oranges. Which one should we go with?' His team has to compare apples and oranges to answer the question. Comparing apples and apples is a technical decision. Comparing apples and oranges is a management decision." This quote reinforces the fact that things slip in and out of categories in the real world because people have different needs for categories in their work and those needs change. Does the Shoe Fit?One of my favorite IT war stories involves another email I received several years ago that also concerned categorizing things for strategic advantage. It was from a person working at a shoe company who was trying to set up a reporting system that could evolve into a data warehouse. The person had picked up a SQL database and wanted help with the code, but that wasn't the underlying problem. The manufacturing arm of the company wanted reports essentially based on the physical construction of the shoes. Leather or cloth uppers? Leather or synthetic soles? In short, manufacturing is concerned with fairly permanent attributes of a shoe. The marketing department wanted reports based on the niche markets for the shoes. Which stores sold which sizes and models of shoes? Which styles? In short, fashion is flux. The marketing group assumed that the marketing data wouldn't appear in the tables that held the "pure shoe" data, but a lot of the marketing data actually was in the physical description of the shoes. But not where you'd think it was. At the time this email came to me, there were two major groups of customers buying steel-toed work boots: construction workers and teenaged girls into punk rock. The construction workers were size 12 or bigger; the teenaged girls were size 8 or smaller. For manufacturing, size was an attribute that could be adjusted by a few knobs on the machinery. For marketing, size became the key factor in the work boots product line. You didn't want to send the large boots to the same stores as the small boots — it was a good bet that construction workers wouldn't be shopping at punk rocker boutiques very often. Categorizing ChaosJorge Luis Borges, an Argentinean novelist whose stories often centered around libraries, wrote a novella about a librarian with an impossibly large collection. His highly personal, very original, and totally insane system for classifying his materials had no central theme. He was the only person who could access the data, and it was, therefore, lost to the rest of mankind. We can learn a lot from the librarian and Aristotle. Although flexibility in categorizing can help your business project, you don't want to make it so personal that it keeps others from finding data. Joe Celko [71062.1056@compuserve.com] works in the Professional Services Division at Data Junction Corp. He is the author of Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999). |
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