The asset graveyard

One of my favorite movies of all time is Sergio Leone spaghetti western classic: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Part of the appeal of this movie is the simplicity of the plot; at its heart it is, a treasure hunt, with the three main characters, the good, the bad and the ugly hunting for confederate gold. Between them they know the location of the treasure, buried in a grave in a graveyard, yet only their combined knowledge will lead them to the prize. Towards the end of the film the Ugly a character called Tuco, played by Eli Wallach, comes upon the graveyard, called Sad Hill, and here in one of cinema truly great moment, backed by a unforgettable score, he begins his frantic and haphazard search for the grave of Arch Stanton.

What is impressive about this scene is the sheer scale and size of the graveyard itself, a conservative estimate would put it at over 2000 graves, arranged in a circular fashion. Tuco starts from the center of Sad Hill, where the graves are oldest, and works his way outward initially in concentric circles but soon his search becoming more haphazard as he despairs at the magnitude of the task. Finally, after a dizzy and Groundhog Day like scene of multiple graves passing by he come upon the grave of Arch Stanton, only to find it devoid of any gold, indeed all that remains is a rotting corpse.

Today, this story is echoed in ever IT projects I have ever been a part of, one of my favorites is from within my own group in IBM. It should be noted here that our team is geographically dispersed so although we talk on the phone regularly,we do not get the chance to chew the fat at lunch or around a water cooler. A good friend and colleague of mine on our team, lets call him Bob, was leading the engineering of one the first SOA service registry for an automotive customer in California. One requirement the customer had for the service registry that it performs within certain limits. Unknown to Bob, our group has tackled a very similar problem a couple of years earlier on another engagement. We realized the importance of this work and created a number of assets around it. These assets feel under the broad classification of the requester side caching pattern of which we created pattern specifications, pattern implementation, pattern documentation (including, dW articles, flash movies and a detailed case study). A full listing of these and other pattern asset related articles can be found on my home page.

Bob unaware of the previous asset work we had done in this space and having I am sure ran in circles around his own repository graveyard a number of times, he did what any other good architect would do, he started from scratch and reengineered the exact same asset as we had two years earlier.

Just like Tuco desperately searching Sad Hill for the confederate gold, Bob too faced the same dilemma, in fact I have witnessed that same dilemma on every IT engagement and software project I are involved in. I dare say that this dilemma is not exclusive to IT but that you will find the exact same problem is almost every human endeavor whether it be an engineer building a rocket to put a man on mars to a lawyer drafting claims for a patent application, How do we provide the right assets,the content, to help solve the problem at hand, the context. In other words, how do we automate a context to content mapping to suggest the best assets to our architects, engineers, lawyers to help them?