Monday, March 10, 2003

Email and the Shuttle. NPR had a few sound bites from one of the engineers on the Columbia mission earlier today.  He was commenting on the fact that he thought that his "worst case scenario" emails probably made it in front of the right people, and were at least considered.  The more I think about it, the more alarmed I become. Surely there aren't so many people working in the engineering groups at NASA that a newsgroup-like system might not be more appropriate.  Email is fine for point to point stuff, person to person -- but when you're sussing out a complex engineering problem don't you want to have a fairly wide group of minds look at it? If the shuttle engineers had been using effective workgroup software, or a newgroup-like system, perhaps more alarms would have been raised. Email is astonishingly good a hiding information in an Enterprise.  It speeds certain kinds of communications, and eliminates others.  Be wary.  The key piece of information you need to make your business problem go away, or your shuttle not blow up, may have been one too many email degrees of freedom away from you. 9:06:52 PM