Dumb numbers are good. You can?t run out of them and computers can assign them.
A ?dumb number? is a number which does not contain any meaningful internal elements. It?s just a number. A smart number, like the Vehicle Identification Number on your car, tells you all kinds of things such as the manufacturer and who tightened the bolts on the brake pad.
When in comes to identifying equipment in our new ERP, our Maintenance Department keeps insisting on using a smart number that will tell you the location, the process involved and several other pieces of information, because ?people need to know this when they are in the field?. They seem to be oblivious to the arguments that:
Anyone looking at a piece of equipment in the field will immediately be able to grok all this info by turning their head from side to side and processing visual data, and
Anyone using the ERP system will be able to look at related fields and not need to know the secret codes embedded in the number.
During an hour and a half discussion of this yesterday ? which started going around in circles after the first twenty minutes ? someone finally asked, ?Where do they (maintenance) get these numbers they want to use? They don?t relate to anything else we?re doing now.? Unfortunately, I?m the only one old enough to know the answers. The numbers come not from our current system, but from a custom program written on an IBM S/36 which the Agency stopped using in 1993.
Has anyone run into this smart number fetish before? How do we convince these gentlemen, who are not dumb, that all they need is a dumb number?