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  • "sooner or later, your company will modernize its catalogue or reorganize its organizational structures. Items will then have to be organized differently" - if this logic were followed to conclusion, the firm would never organise its catalogue. It would just list one damn item after another and be unable to speak in shorthand about any common features. Better to think of product organisation as something that, once settled, provides a valuable conceptual framework and mnemonics for the business. Change destroys that value, but you don't avoid the costs of change by never producing the value. Commented Jul 21, 2020 at 13:39
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    @Steve companies do this all the time. I even have examples where people came with a structure at the beginning of project to learn from thier boss the new structure before the end of the project. Changes are necessary. 30 years ago, IT ressellers had catalogues with 16 and 32 bit computers as main categories. Nowadays this categorization is useless. keeping it would have destroyed value. So let business people decide on business value. At our level we promote agility in catalogue management: sequential numbering is invariant, and item attributes can change as often as needed :-) Commented Jul 21, 2020 at 13:48
  • My argument is not against necessary changes. My point is that the costs of it have to be factored against the gain and then swallowed - they can't be pre-empted by avoiding commitments. Making everything abstract itself imposes costs or leads to deprivation of value. Either "Sedan" (or "16-bit") is a meaningful category for the business for the time being, and the cost of changing those categories and that vocabulary has to be swallowed when the time comes, or else it becomes impossible for anyone in the business to communicate about sets of items with a shared vocabulary. (1/2) Commented Jul 21, 2020 at 14:20
  • And in reality, what happens in such cases where a business does not provide categories and vocabulary for them, is that people devise their own categories local to themselves or their team or their division, and the catalogue-keepers devise their own unspoken categories (and maybe even keep secret cheat-sheets), so in practice the business ends up with what you were trying to avoid (a rigidly organised catalogue), and all the costs of change when change happens, but the organisation of the catalogue is not shared in common or under anyone's control. It really is a fool's gold. (2/2) Commented Jul 21, 2020 at 14:26
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    The argument pro-sequential-numeric also applies pro-meaningless-unordered-alphanumeric types, such as a GUID. The issue isn't whether it's sequential or not, or numeric or not, it's whether the value has any inferred meaning to it (e.g. "all blue cars' IDs must start with BL"), which is the thing you're best to avoid so as not to have to rework your identification when the content of the article changes (e.g. we no longer track car color) Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 12:14