Jim Henderson wrote:

> One of the things I find a lot of geeks do, though, is tend to go into a 
> lot of unnecessary detail.
> 
> My point is that sometimes it's more effective to say less.

I like to delude myself that this is one of the things I'm good at.

I've seen computer policy documents that are full of technobabble. I've 
seen procedure documents that have a list of definitions that looks like 
a geek's guide to TCP/IP. It's really not necessary. These aren't 
technical documents, they're *policy statements*.

I get the impression that a lot of the people who write these things 
can't think abstractly. Like, they're so obsessed with individual 
technologies, and even where individual buttons are on a specific piece 
of software, that they can't see the big picture of what they're trying 
to do. It doesn't *matter* to an auditor if you use RAID1 or RAID5. They 
don't give a ****. What they want to know is that you're using RAID, and 
what exactly that means. They don't want to know about stripe sets and 
mirroring and parity computation hardware. All they need to know is that 
you've got multiple drives, and if one breaks the system can continue to 
function. That's one sentence. That's all you need to say.

Now that the IT Director is gone, I'm going to make a serious attempt to 
get permission to take my disaster recovery plan home with me. 
(Obviously, being written as part of my job, my employer owns the IP for 
that, so I need written permission to disclose it outside the company.) 
I think it's a damn fine piece of writing - and I have the likes of 
Roche and Pfizer agreeing with me.

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