Talkitecture

Talkitecture - Architecture based loads and loads of discussion situated in a fantasy world. Most often performed by Terries with "Chief Something or other" in his title.

I have been in numerous meetings over time with Terries from our Chief Technology Office who have titles like "Chief Architect of " and I can tell you that %99 of these discussions have been useless -- completely useless. Why you ask is this so generally the case? The answer is easy: these guys specialize in what I call Talkitecture. This is the dark art of endless (often circular) discussions about a topic without ever actually resolving any issues or (gulp) implementing anything.

Take for example, the seemingly endless discussions around whether or not to do Fibre to the Premise (FTTP) versus Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) that go on in just about every Terry Telco outfit these days. These discussions often go like this:

Question: Why do we need to upgrade our access plant to support FTTP/C?

Terry: Well, architecturally speaking, we've had technologies like PON available for decades. The problem is that there has never been a business case to do this. After all, what would anyone do with all of that bandwidth anyway?

This same discussion will go on and on (seemingly forever at some Telcos) cycling between FTTC as a compromise, and FTTP beacuse its "cool". At some point, some pointy-haired manager will request that we bring in the "big guns" from the CTO office to mull over the problem with them. Heck, they've likely been on full-time research projects related to FTTP/PON since the late 1970s, so they should know a thing or two about this stuff anyways. What happens then is they come in and bring their Talkitecture to the party. They talk, talk, talk and talk some more -- often across months of meetings. At some point in the discussion, we will cycle through all of the arguments that the original architecture team has gone through, and finally -- the coup de grace -- will be to cycle back and revisit the original discussions that even the CTO Terries brought forward. Hence, completing the cycle of Talkitecture.


The smart operations cut out