Inertia
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InertiaMy son asked me about physics the other day and what it meant. He's been on a bit of a science kick, looking to understand and explain his world. I can understand that because most of us are curious about how things work in our world, not necessarily in a scientific way, but just in general.
I somewhat butchered the definition because I was caught up slightly in the actual concepts, but one of the things we talked about was inertia. Maybe because I'd seen this article on overcoming institutional inertia the same day.
We all have thigns at work that we do a certain way. Maybe we learned it that way, maybe we're more comfortable, or maybe someone yelled at us daily until we did it that way. Regardless, fighting the way people work is a difficult thing to undertake. The article gives a few examples of process changes and how they were effectively moved forward and how the issues were resolved at a high level. It's common sense if you're wondering, use diplomacy and take your time.
I've seen changes occur from both sides of the fence, from someone trying to implement change and from someone who was told changes were occurring. I was never completely comfortable in either situation mostly because with change there's usually conflict. Someone doesn't want to change.
As DBAs we often try to control our world and ensure a high degree of stability, often at the cost of slowing or severely impeding changes in our systems. While I think it's good to aim for a stable, reliable environment, I don't think this should necessarily impede change.
Understanding the business needs and goals is critical both for DBAs in protecting their systems and developers in building new applications. In either case, it also means that the needs of your organization need to dictate how quickly things change.
Not an employee's personal feelings.
Steve Jones
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I'm still on vacation from posting into the forums from the last editorial.
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I was very curious about inertia as a kid. The old SF books by E.E. “Doc” Smith were a fun read. I believe Feynman calculated the inertia of a charged particle due to electromagnetic radiation. Accelerating a charge particle produces electromagnetic radiation. (Common X-Ray machines work by accelerating electrons to a stop quickly – hitting a target.) The calculations produced something looks like inertia. However, the values were not exact. If I remember right, about a third of the mass was missing. Perhaps there are other “fields” that need to be included to get the inertial mass right.
If you look at the electrostatic field of a charged particle, it becomes compressed in the direction of motion as the velocity increases. I think the inertia is the result of having to put work into feeding the increase in the field energy.
I’m still curious about inertia. I still don’t know what it really is. Is there a PhysicsCentral.com?
I better get back to logging the syslock info for a blocking process. There’s a little inertia getting this done.
RandyHelpdesk: Perhaps Im not the only one that does not know what you are doing. 😉
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Also, everything we perceive is basically electromagnetic in nature. If EM fields behave in such a way to appear to compress and slow down, then the human machine based on EM processes will appear to compress and slow down. Might be something to think about when he gets to relativity.
I'm still suffering from inertia. I better get going before a large force is applied....
RandyHelpdesk: Perhaps Im not the only one that does not know what you are doing. 😉
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I learned a good deal about inertia as a kid. Being I was much smaller then the neighborhood kids, I was always getting trampled in front-yard football scrimmages. Eventually I realized that I was much better at tackling after the runner went past me then trying, with painful consequences, to tackle them head on. (I would grab their foot in passing and hold on for dear life.) Maybe it was a strategy, likely it was just clipping or holding. In any case I learned that "overcoming" inertia took massive amounts of energy with limited results, while "harnessing" inertia took little energy and achieved great results.
Inertia is easy to grasp; it is mass multiplied by velocity, with velocity being speed in a particular direction. When we are looking at change in an organization, all three elements come into play. We can change the Mass, Speed, or Direction of a process or culture.
One of the examples given was of software management. IT Directors were less then keen on giving up control of software purchases, while the CIO office wanted to save money by consolidating purchasing under an Enterprise model.
In this case, the Speed of the inertia could be considered the licensing renewal schedule. The Direction was that Directors controlled the purchasing. The Mass was the low cost/benefit ratio perceived by the directors, and the loss of control of purchasing.
Each element of inertia requires its own strategy:
Direction: Require all licenses be consolidated through the CIO office.
Mass: Directors can still control what is ordered for their groups. All savings will appear in the director's budget. Software will be just ordered through the CIO office instead of individually.
Speed: Applies to new licenses and renewals only. In two years when the bulk of the licenses have been documented in the CIO office (meaning the Mass has been reduced), a team will be formed to collect the licenses of any remaining software on legacy systems.
This three pronged approach gets Inertia to work for you. Here the Direction is changed slightly, and over time the Mass is reduced. When discussing inertia, the common phrase is to "overcome" it. Better managers "Harness" inertia to work for them.
William Hug
InertiaViewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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