Subject: RE: Concerning draft-pouffary-v6ops-ent-v6net-04

From: "Alan E. Beard" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 16:18:59 -0400 (EDT)

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Jim:

First, my apologies for a grossly delayed reply; since IETF 57 I have been
traveling continuously, and away from email.   I'll try  to answer your
queries below, although I know this response is very tardy indeed.

AEB

On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Bound, Jim wrote:

> Hi Alan,
[...]
> Two quesitons to you and the working group.
>
> First one.  We have gone back and forth on this work and other scenario
> works if we should put in an IETF doc why a user of this should care.  I
> am amoral on this and will go either way.  So I ask should we explain
> why this is important to users in this spec and other specs?
>
Pekka was kind enough to let me know, gently and courteously, that I had
somewhat misapprehended the target audience for the draft I reviewed: that
draft was intended for the guidance of the IETF ipv6 Enterprise Network
Engineering Team rather than, as I had imagined, for the Network
Engineering Teams of commercial or public enterprises.  Now disabused of
my error, it seems to me that the audience for which this draft was
intended, because they are not in a user environment, would have little
need or use for text which explains why an end user should care about any
of the issues.  However, it does seem a shame to fail to make available to
end user administrative managers and end user network engineers
information which could be of significant assistance in planning a
migration to IPv6, particularly since the work done so far on the draft is
sound in structure and content.  If the completed work is to be made more
generally available (that is, beyond the IPv6 Enterprise Network
Engineering Team), then "why we should care" language is probably
warranted and desirable.

> Second question is should we target the audience to be the manager,
> admin, and engineer or just one of them.  My view is mostly the admin
> but enough that the engineer knows to go look at the solutions/analysis
> follow on document to the Enterprise scenarios.
>
The draft now contains information which would be of value to managers,
network admins, and network engineers in commmercial or educational
environments.  In practice, documents originating from the IETF are most
likely to be noticed by network engineers, or perhaps by more astute
network admins.  However, administrative managers, who are largely
responsible for strategic policy decisions, are likely to ignore or
discount such documents as applicable only to technical staff unless the
document specifically announces that administrative managers are among the
intended audience.  This issue is relate to the response above: if we
intend the final document to see wide distribution in end-user
environments, we should probably specify a wider target audience
(including administrative managers) lest the document fail to reach the
persons who might most benefit from its counsel. If however, the final
document is intended as internal to the IETF only, we need make no such
enumeration of target audience.

> thanks
> /jim

The above are my opinions based on observation of the decision-making
processes which frequently exist in commercial environments.  However, I
am far from authoritative on these issues.  And I _did_ misapprehend the
target audience for the draft.  :-/  What think the rest of the group?

Regards,

AEB

-- 
Alan E. Beard <[email-masked]>
AEBeard Consulting; 4109 Chelsa Ln; Lakeland FL 33809
863.815.2529