I just recently read Freaknomics, an interesting book on economics with interesting ideas put forth by a guy who economists claim is more of a sociologist, while sociologists claim he's an economist. The book throws out and makes a stab at answering bizarre questions about seemingly unrelated topics, like "how are teachers like sumo wrestlers?"
So, in the same spirit, I'll start off this post with the same kind of question: What do Freakonomics, Netflix, and my last hospital visit all have in common?
Now, unless you've been stalking me, I really wouldn't expect you to guess how my last hospital visit comes into play, so I'll give you a hint. My hospital is well into the process of converting from thick, massive folders of paper records, over to digital records with a PC in every exam room. While the nurse was going through medical records and scheduling procedures, she apologized for taking so long, and complained that the software layout made no sense for her field, and obviously wasn't designed by someone who knew it.
Figured it out yet? One more hint - the challenge Netflix is currently running to find a better movie recommendation looks like it just might be won, not by some MIT team of CS majors, but by a phsycologist!
Every field, be it computer science, psychology, or medicine, has boundaries. Various ideas and concepts get sorted into the right field based on those lines. An algorithm for traversing a graph? CS. A study of the effects of a new drug? Medicine, further narrowed down by specialty.
There's a problem with those lines, though. No one told the problems we're trying to solve about them!
In the first two examples, exceptional results were found by doing work that happily straddled those lines. In the Netflix example, without psychology, he likely never would have had the insight required, and without CS, he never would have been able to actually implement it.
Likewise, in the hospital example, the fact that the software engineers who created the software weren't intimately familiar with the actual job created a system that didn't match the workflow. Instead of helping the nurses, they end up stumbling around looking for options and fighting the system.
We've all heard the joke about a bunch of blind men who stumble across an elephant, and try to figure out what it is by feeling it: "It's a snake!" "No, it's a tree trunk!" "No, it's a wall!" Well, guess what? We're all a little guilty of it now and then. It's only human to try to look for solutions within the one or two fields we're comfortable in.
So what should we do about it? Recognize that the sum of human knowledge may be sorted by the Dewey Decimal System, but it is not defined by it. Read outside of your field, and see what kind of tricks those guys who went to college in a different building may have up their sleeve. Working in a college myself, I can tell you that it's not too uncommon for someone who's sacrificed any pretense of breadth for incredible depth in one field to struggle with a problem solved decades ago in an apparently unrelated field.
And in the end, ask yourself which one you'd rather be - the guy winning a Netflix prize by fusing together two superficially unrelated fields, or the software engineer who gets yelled at because he used the wrong kind of chicken guts when divining a nurses workflow?
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