A Problem Well-Stated Is Half-Solved

Doctors deal with problems - sometimes life threatening ones, and sometimes in emergency situations. When your database is sick and needs intensive care, knowing the root cause is only half the solution.

Doctors are always talking about eating right, getting lots of exercise, drinking plenty of fluids, and getting the right amount of rest - but most of their time is spent working with people who have ignored most or all of that advice. That is to say, they deal with problems - sometimes life threatening ones, and sometimes in emergency situations.

I’m in the database business, and when a business’s database is sick, the organization is unhealthy, its customers are unhappy, and its reputation suffers. We have patented, award-winning technology that keeps databases healthy - but most of the calls I get are from people whose databases are sick - and sick databases are always an emergency.

You can’t solve a problem you don’t understand - unless you do it accidently, and it’s much more likely that flailing around will make the situation worse instead of better. Furthermore, in the general fog of an emergency, the first information you receive is almost always wrong - so if you work off of this information, you’ll be wasting your time.

That’s why you must insist on getting to the facts, cutting through the fog, and establishing with great precision both what is going wrong and how you know that to be true. I’ve built my company into one of the Top 100 Companies that Matter Most in Data by creating tools that precisely frame problems - and rapidly solve them. So trust me, a problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.