Provision Vs Control

Provider, Users and Controls ThinkingOutLoud.DonaldNoyes.200908242349

When one is deciding upon ProgrammingArtifacts?, there can be a tug-of-war between the Providers and Users and the Actors and Actions which are designed to control and dispense what is provided among users.

This is particularly true when attempts are made to change an existing legacy establishment to make it better and more widely useful.

Users are most probably not involved with those who would be the Architects of Change, and are mostly concerned with how changes will affect their using experience. This will involve how the user interfaces with the system, and the effects of the design of new control elements will change from the previous system where controls belonged exclusively to the user and the providers, and which led to inefficiencies and on occasion to inappropriate procedures and outcomes.

In complicated systems involving hundreds and thousands (or more) of providers, some one or some thing served as a moderator of requests, along with factors which allowed the user sufficient permissions and access-rights as to use the selected provider's products and services.

In the present society provisions come with costs which rule out certain users from access unless the costs are borne by a secondary economic resources. It is also true that such things as privilege, proprietary concerns, and secrecy disallow all but a select group of users to become users of certain guarded resources. In some cases the cost of accessing all of the ordinary and allowable resources a user may desire many times are beyond the user's immediate ability to pay what the providers have established as access costs.

Simple economic models such as those encountered in a Supply/Demand relationship are based on the Demand (User) having the ability to pay, and the Supply (Providers) being able to afford sufficient volume as to reach an equilibrium which includes both cost and allowable profit. A more complicated system is one which allows for a third party providing capital to both sides of the equation through loans covered by deferred payments. The third party must have deep pockets or the ability to create by magic or slight of hand the capital required.