Blame the system

How often do we encounter the message “No System” or even statements like “Off System”, to go to any merchant, bank, etc? The second, in case the message “System Off”, is even more bizarre, since it presupposes the existence of a kind of layer that covers everything: the streets, squares, malls, and something is out of place, almost as if “system” was a kind of entity beyond matter.

The purpose of this article is not to describe what would be a “General Systems Theory”, but rather to propose a reflection on how the word system has become a kind of fetish object in the postmodern world.

We live in a world that holds an extraordinary technological advance, however, we can observe in many places a series of convulsions, conflict and disorder, whether political, or economic factors caused by territorial disputes, for example. In a context of an impending collision, some people out there calling themselves as activists. Nowadays this type of person is everywhere: at work, on public transport, on bicycles, on social networks, among other places, but with the same speech, to be against the “system” and wanting to shape it according to a group of individuals believed to be the truth. It is not necessary to characterize what is this “system” and why some want to fight, you just put all this feeling in a common place (“system”) and say any slogan against the manifest object.

What reinforces this perception inherent to the object system is that “the system” itself brings an abstract feature and the components that are part of it are difficult to understand, connected and interconnected. In this case, the “system” becomes the scapegoat of the contemporary world and every situation in which we want to find a culprit, to impute responsibility to the infamous “system”.

But what relationship we would have with the above situation and technology? There are many, particularly in the abstract how the system is and how this affects in our perception characteristic when dealing with any kind of technology system.

We can not deny how much technology has advanced and progresses over time, however, there are many components forming a “system”, its architecture is complex, through switches, routers, firewalls, content filters, proxy servers, operating systems, programming languages​​, etc. Perhaps the question we have to do today, in the world of technology, is: what can we do to make it all much simpler, mainly from an administrative point of view of the business? For the user with a smartphone in hand, everything seems very accessible and easy to use, for him it is all a kind of black box, ie, he knows how to use, but does not have any notion of what goes on behind the the device he is using technology.

We hear more and more about cloud computing, virtualization and data centers scattered around the world that store content that is generated by all of us, easy access and simplifies the mobility. This situation impacts on issues including regulation by governments because overcomes the physical barrier imposed by territorial demarcations. But the administrative point of view, facilitating processes, understanding between areas that work with technology as we are? We are actually facilitating the understanding of the people working in the IT field where everyone can speak the same language, be understood and understand what goes into a meeting to define the architecture of a system, for example? First of all, the process of understanding and cohesion between IT teams must first pass a behavioral change of professionals.

The world we live in requires us to have adequate capacity for abstraction to understand “the system” and not that he becomes a kind of “technological ectoplasm”, a dense layer that we dare not dive and dive if we could not see anything. Effective understanding of what a system will bring many benefits for everyone, the meetings, the definitions of a project, the improvements that can be made and in support of the environment, leaving us, we deal directly with the technology, understanding of things so that everything becomes more agile in our day-to-day.

Not “the system” for all is necessary for us, IT professionals, blame; just understand it properly, overcoming limitations and understand what is really behind all abstraction inherent in the technology. This process tends to become more abstract over time and with the development of technology, so the system does not need to be our scapegoat. With proper understanding, our job will be much easier to deal with daily.

Full article: http://corporate.canaltech.com.br

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