Daniel J. Dick

What do YOU think?

Is Information Technology an art, or not?

Did you ever see managers and individual contributors fight over this controversy?

Managers want employees who set policy and execute on those policies predictably. But some of the most intelligent and caring IT professionals consider themselves “artists”. They want freedom. When they work, they want autonomy to explore and create new methods and software.

But management is paying their salary. Still, the employee can choose whether to take the job or whether to keep the job just as surely as the manager can decide whether to keep the employee.

Collision – Art Meet IT Production

Information Technology is constrained by many standards:

• HIPAA for medical privacy and access to data
• Sarbanes-Oxley or SOX for proper financial ethics.
• ISO 9000 – Do what you say and say what you do
• ITIL – for maintenance and support
• Security – CISSP, Database, Network, Enterprise Software
• Disaster Recovery
• Change Control/Management Policies
• Testing/QA for Deployment, MLOPS, DevOps,, etc.
• Backup Policies
• Power backup
• Fire Prevention and Protection
• Cutover procedures to backup data centers

All in all, when you’re dealing with a large enterprise IT environment, a disaster of any kind will demand answers for why it happened, detailed documentation of how it was resolved, and who was involved.

What you do not want is to be the one who brought down the environment with a foolish or “artsy” decision. And if you were that person, then you do not ever want to be caught covering your error with a lie.

For the person who would pass the blame to someone else dishonestly, that dishonest person may escape being fired. But his reputation may be ruined as the victim finds employment with another company. And no honorable person would want to live life knowing they had brought injustice to an innocent person.

When IT Thrives as Art

Sometimes in production, unfortunately. And when the shin hits the SAN, a manager is asking a little too late whether the wrong person was chosen for the role.

It may be better to use artsy people in artsy roles and meticulously rigid people in roles that require consistency.

What about other IT roles outside Software Engineering? For instance,

• Infrastructure Administration–Operations, Systems, DB, Security, Network
• Infrastructure Design–Network topology, Database Modeling, Website Development
• Graphic Design–Icons, Photography, Video Production and Editing?

What Art Is

A great Evangelist or revivalist of the 1800s, Charles Grandison Finney, gave up his career as an attorney at age 29 to become a minister. He wanted to stop arguing his case for men and spend the rest of his life arguing his case for God, the principles of God, the salvation of Christ.

At first, I hated his writing and I felt adamant that he was completely wrong about his entire view of the Bible and what it meant about almost everything. And yet again and again, I would search to prove him wrong and find myself forced to accept the truth in what he had said. He had proven his case without a shadow of doubt.

And one thing I noticed about his rigor was how he would start defining terms by the following:

• What the term is.
• What the term is not.

In his Revival Lectures, he spoke of what revival is, and what revival was not. He spoke of what prayer was and what prayer was not. He spoke of what repentance was and what repentance was not.

So, How to Divide What Art is From What Art is not?

Let’s go to the great compendium of respected world-class research of utmost quality: wikipedia. (I really do hope you see the humor in that statement.)

Wikipedia says,

Art is a diverse range of human activity and its resulting product that involves creative or imaginative talent generally expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas¹. The dictionary definition of art says that it is “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination, especially in the production of aesthetic objects”². Art encompasses diverse media such as painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, photography, and installation³. Art is essential to society as it stimulates creativity, reflects culture, fosters empathy, provokes thought, and offers a medium for expression².

Sound rigorous? I didn’t think so. From such a definition, I think it would be impossible to identify what is not art.

Does art “encompass”, or “employ”? Is the media the paper, the paint, the clay, the objects used in creating the art? Or is the media the art itself?

Or if art “encompasses” the media, what does it mean to “encompass”? Does business “encompass” media when it sells the products from which art is created? Is business therefore art?

Art or Software Engineering Tautology?

Perhaps we should stop after the first sentence in the quote above. The second sentence is almost a tautology. Art is the intentional creation of art related stuff.

Ok. Let’s be fair. It is a bit more than a tautology as it is “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination to create” imaginative things or artistic things. And dogs are canines.

But how can this separate what art is from what it is not? Cats are not dogs. But German Shepherds are. Why do German Shepherds get to be dogs, but cats must endure seemingly unfair exclusion?

What rule makes a cat not a dog?

What makes Software Engineering not an art?

Why can’t Software Engineering be truly an art?

Printing Presses and Rubber Stamps

Is a printer an artist? Centuries ago, sacred texts were copied meticulously by hand. Was that art? By what definition?

If it was copied with calligraphy, who would question whether this was art? In fact the very meaning of calligraphy comes from a combination of two Greek words, one meaning “beautiful” and the other meaning “writing”.

It’s beautiful, so it must be art. Right? But colorful birds in Australia fly out of the trees down to the ground to pick seeds on the campus of Flinders University in Adelaide. Those birds are beautiful. Are they art?

Perhaps they are. Maybe they are the artwork of a great, awesome, loving, and creative God. Or perhaps mountains are likewise art. Maybe every beautiful thing in the universe is art.

But some question this. Some say beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Is a banana duct taped to the wall “art”? I understand it fetched quite a sum of money at an art auction. But does that make it art? How much creative intention did the “artist” employ?

Is Software Engineering Art?

How much creative intention does Software Engineering involve? Perhaps a great amount. Perhaps it is merely the act of carrying out routine actions.

• Decompose the project into smaller projects or tasks.
• Keep dividing these down to their most atomic tasks.
• Schedule out the order in which to do those tasks.
• Carry out those tasks.
• Design appropriate tests for each task.
• Run those tests, unit testing, integration testing, etc.

Are Repeatable Processes Art?

All this sounds pretty clinical. Routine. Mechanical. Not necessarily very creative.

And yet what artist does not employ repeatable methodologies to accomplish their “art”? Does the pianist practice Hannon’s for hours every day to develop dexterity? Does Phillip Farkas’ book on the Art of Brass Playing avoid conveying what to do mechanically to achieve the best embouchure, tone, flexibility, breath control? Did Rembrandt avoid reusing the same shading techniques to cause light to appear to come from a specific angle lending a feeling of realism to his art?

Does the use of mechanical or predictable means imply that there is no creative exploration or thought? Are they mutually exclusive?

Monet used little splotches of paint in his Impressionism paintings. His paintings did not resemble anything real until you backed up and looked at them from a distance and they became deeply beautiful.

So what makes Software Engineering art or non-art?

Often businesses need fast development of the highest reliability to compete. There may be no time for “art”.

Even UX “design” eschews design as art. UX design has become a set of processes, best practices to provide function effectively, efficiently, reliably. These meet business needs and user needs, both of which are necessary if not sufficient.

We need art to feed our souls. Art is not needed to make machines run. We hunger for art. Machines don’t. We love art. Machines don’t love or hate or hunger or cry or laugh.

Software engineers are often thrown into a complicated situation to meet a business need as fast as possible. And sometimes they throw together a bigger mess because they don’t start out decomposing the problem at hand properly.

Everything needs to be decomposed. Database Design. AI Feature Engineering and even Feature Selection. But it’s a mechanical thing.

Decomposition is King

You want a machine learning model, a decision tree, a random forrest, a neural network, an SVM, a convolution net, an RNN, but you have a result you want to produce. And you have to think of it first before you even decide what kind of model you want to use or develop.

So you grab a zillion features, see what correlates with other input variables and what correlates best with the desired output.

And what are you even analyzing? Data? Numerical or Qualitative? Pictures? Sounds? You have a user community. What do they want to do? What are their current business processes? Your project decomposition will be very similar to your decomposition of everything else.

You are going to have to learn a ton of skills and be very creative.

And you could accomplish it in an infinite number of ways. Which one is best? Ten software engineers or data scientists can take ten different approaches and all come up with relatively good answers. But are they artistic?

When business leadership wants to know how these models work and why their results can be trusted, how are the intermediate results illustrated graphically or in reports or spreadsheets?

Is it art? Or is it only a repeatable routine with no creative thought and no heart?

What do you think?