"Single panes of glass" are horrible

A rant

This is the semi-weekly post for paid subscribers of what’s on my mind and data related thoughts.

A glass bubble… thing(?) from a museum somewhere

This week, I happened to come across a tweet, the specifics aren’t important, but the tweet caused… feelings. It was essentially asking business leaders whether they’d pay for a “single pane of glass” that pulled data from a bunch of places, while also promising a slick UI, analysis tools, and other stuff.

The feelings that message evoked in me was… “I’ve been on a sinking ships like that before”.

The key term that did it for me was “single pane of glass”. I still don’t know where the origin of that term comes from beyond that it’s extremely common in tech circles. It vaguely smells military-ish, like someone pulled the concept of the glass cockpit HUD from aviation and said “we need THIS”. Or maybe they pulled the image of a sci-fi/cyberpunk elite hacker movie with magical floating screens and the power to manipulate the world’s information with their dancing fingertips.

Either way, I’ve been staffed on far too many “build a single pane of glass” projects over my 15+ years of work, and I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded. It’s ridiculously easy to say you’re going to build the one magic dashboard that will replace all other dashboards. It’s quite another matter to actually deliver in a meaningful way.

Whatever the origin the origin of the term, it’s now used as a shorthand for “user has everything piece of data they want or need to make their important decisions in this one place, instantly”. I don’t particularly object to the invocation of magic when specifying a user story since that’s where there’s usually an opportunity, but the proposed magic of single panes of glass seem fundamentally flawed.

Physical “single panes of glass” are special things