Real Time Conversation with a Mid Tier Wizard
December 9, 2010
I am not making this conversation up. I gave a talk to 43 20 somethings at Skinker’s, a delightful place near London Bridge tube stop. No, I did not buy a Skinker’s T shirt, but it did look smart. My topic was real time search. More accurately, I was explaining the engineering considerations in delivering low latency indexing and querying which most vendors and second string consultants happily tell you is “real time search”.
The most interesting part of my evening was a short conversation I had with a mid tier consultant, what I call an azure chip consultant or generally the azurini. To be a blue chip consultant is easy. Just get hired by one of the two three or four management consulting firms, do some notable work, and not die of a heart attack from the pressure. Thousands of Type A’s who crave constant stroking takes a toll, believe you me. The mid tier lad introduced himself. He reminded me that I had met him before. In the dim light of Skinker’s I would not have been able to recognize Tess, my deaf white boxer. No matter. A big grin and warm handshake were what the azure chip lad thought would jog my memory.
The basic idea is that real time is not achievable. There are gating factors at three main points in any content processing system. The first is the green box, which is the catch all for the service providers, ISPs, and others in the network chain. The pink boxes represent the vendors providing services to the client who wants low latency service. The yellow boxes represent the different “friction points” behind the firewall or within the organization’s hybrid infrastructure. Resolving these points of “friction” boils down to brains and money. If an organization lacks either, the latency of the system will be high and increase over time. Users, of course, don’t know this. The problems latency produces range from financial losses to field operations personnel being killed due to stale intelligence.
It didn’t.
Anyway, three observations.
First, the topic of real time content processing struck the lad as a bit old fashioned. I agree. I am 66 and by definition anything i do is old fashioned. My comments about latency and the misrepresentation of high latency systems as real time systems did not interest him on whit.
Second, I mentioned a number of companies I was tracking. Guess what. Each company I named was not just analyzed top to bottom but each was a client. “A very large client” I recall hearing. Imagine that. Companies that are essentially operating in stealth mode are already known to a mid tier consultant who is billing these outfits for expertise. My goodness, I was humbled.
Third, to test the limits of the azure clad lad, I whipped out my knowledge value method and showed on example of using its analytic method to identify where the action in content processing is at that very moment, December 1, 2010, 9 pm Greenwich time, Skinker’s, London Tube, T shirts at the ready.
I learned that the method was not too interesting.
I was relieved. A mid tier consultant who finds knowledge value old hat, who does not see real time content processing of interest, and already is working for companies that are essentially hidden by their corporate owners and Health & Human Services is smarter than this goose.
The only question, “Why bother to turn up at Skinker’s on a cold, snowy night to learn about stuff that one already knows?” I am not a mid tier consultant, just an addled goose. Enlightenment may arrive one day. I just need to be patient.
Stephen E Arnold, December 9, 2010
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