People care a lot about technology augmentation, refinement and fine-tuning. We talk about performance acceleration, pushing processing power and the required levels of storage we need to underpin modern IT needs. It’s a never-ending cycle of regenerating work all focused on producing the optimal performance out of our technology stack at any one moment in time.
The ‘optimal’ word is important; it has produced a technology term that falls into a sub-classification all its own.
Arguably more than any other single word exposed to the transatlantic incongruence which sees the use of the letter S replaced with a Z, the term optimisation (or indeed, optimization) is one we fight over with a passion. This passion is a result of the close feeling of ownership we attribute to optimisation. We care about it and it’s a sensitive thing. But what does it mean?