Oracle DRM Blog

For several years, I have opted to do my own gardening. Well it’s not much of gardening at all if you imagine that I just do the lawn mowing and cleaning weeds. I get my enjoyment doing it because of several reasons. First, it’s a form of exercise. Second, it’s a way to get a break from work once in a while. Third, I enjoy being with nature. In reality, I am lousy at it. I spend most of my time zooming through the lawn like a crazed man. I wanted to finish the chore in the shortest amount of time, because deep inside, I think I rather do development than mowing the lawn, as much as I think I enjoy this. Usually it’s 30 minutes before we have to go somewhere. My wife usually complains when I left the lawn un-mowed for 2 weeks, for all the grasses sticking out, or it’d be about those weeds in the back. The weeds in the back are usually left unattended because it’s not an eye-sore when no one sees it from the curb. However, it’s there and we know it. The truth is, that’s no way to make the garden proud. I know the potential of what it could have been. I simply don’t have the time as most of us would complained. The fact is, I realized just because I want to do it myself does not make me the best person to do it. And with that fact, we hired a Mexican friend to do the maintenance for me.

Soon, he came by while I was at work, and when I come home, it was the best lawn I have ever seen with my house. Long grass gone, weeds gone, edges trimmed, leaves cleaned. Boy, that’d have taken me forever to do, definitely not in one day, definitely not up to the same standard, definitely not something I can keep up for the long term even if I want to. And yes, I am going to get him to do what he does best week after week from here on.

Why did I go through this example? Like the title of this blog suggested, “somethings should be left to the professionals”. I reflect back on some of the companies or clients I worked for. How many of you know of companies that did everything right? Probably not many. The next question is how many companies made the mistake of trying to do the work of professionals on their own and making a big mess at the end? I say quite a few.

I was in a project a while back cleaning up codes that was written years ago. It was apparent that the original coder was like me doing the lawn. He/she probably picked up a book from Borders and thought, “I could do this.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with this approach and I fully support learning new things. But you see, sometimes it’s one thing when you do the thing that you just learnt, versus doing the thing that you have mastered. Doing the thing you just learnt is like buying a lawnmower and running with it by the instructions manual. Doing the thing you mastered is having done this for years, know all the tips and tricks, and then applying them to its fullest. It’s not surprising that we also tend to leave things out, because we don’t have time to deal with them. Think of all those batch jobs, hardcoding that are in the codes. Those would simply be the least robust and hardest to maintain. But constantly, I see lots of these in IT environments. And back to the story, it took quite a while to clean up lines of code where the logics or syntax were wrong, comments were everywhere, and a ton of things that just were not fully complete. Sounds like my lawn few months back.

And so I hope you grasped what I am trying to say. If you’re embarking on doing Business Intelligence, Data Governance, MDM implementations or anything else in your company for the first time, don’t make the mistake of thinking you can just “wing it”. Get some professional advice. Get some help if you can afford it or get help even if you cannot afford it — talk to people. Think of the professional help that can make your world really shine in front of your bosses and peers. It’s cool to be cool.