Intelligent numbering or not? That is the question.

Let's accept it. We all love intelligent numbers. You can see it in our product masters. It is full of well-intended logic. Why do we do that? Well, we are all humans. Humans like parsing things. Making sense of data with a simple glance is very tempting to us all. Yet, we cause more problems for ourselves in the long run than we initially notice.

Everything changes. Business changes. We offer different products. We sell them into different channels in different parts of the world. Within a short time, the parsing technique (the intelligence) that we have brilliantly come up with struggles to accommodate these changes and slowly starts to lose its original meaning. We don’t easily give up though. We patch it. We extend it. We desperately try to make it work. Along the way, the logic becomes more complex.

In the meanwhile, one more thing change - the business people. People come and go. The meaning the former business people gave to these structures is lost in transition. The new crew maintains them for the sake of maintaining them. The intelligence in the numbers is gone. We cannot make sense of them anymore. They become a collection of inconsistent numbering techniques patched together that can no longer be parsed with a simple glance. The purpose is lost. How can we overcome this problem?

Let’s first look at why we like parsing stuff. Humans like classifying things to act on them later quickly and effortlessly. We observe our world, assess events, and take action through these classification lenses. It is in our DNA. It helped us to survive through millions of years. The good news is that we can classify data without embedding intelligence into their numbering schemes. In modern business applications, there are several data entities that help us with classification such as dimensions, hierarchies, attributes, categories, assortments, etc. We can use them not only to classify things but also to analyze our business as well.

When legacy systems lack such functionality, business people tend to put intelligence into the numbers and rely on ad-hoc analysis (mostly done in Microsoft Excel) to make sense of the data. Thus, in new business application deployments, we all need to be very disciplined about how we number things. This is one of those rare moments that some significant good can be done by simply taking as much intelligence out of those numbers as possible and putting them into the right data entities. As you can imagine, such a fundamental change would require well-thought-out change management as well, since these data entities pretty much touch everyone in the organization.

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My name is Cem and this has been another gem.