At Bruce Eckert’s Mind View site I read:
If somebody comes up to you and says something like, “How do I make this pony fly to the moon?”, the question you need to ask is, “What problem are you trying to solve?” You’ll find out that they really need to collect gray rocks. Why they thought they had to fly to the moon, and use a pony to do it, only they know. People do get confused like this. — Max Kanat-Alexander
Everyone has their own “true” version of that story that can be swapped over beers at a conference.
Or at a “Users say the darnest things,” session.
Is that the key question? “What problem are you trying to solve?”
Or would it be better to ask: “What end result do you want?”
To keep it from being narrowly defined as a “problem,” it could be an opportunity, new product, service, etc.
And to avoid the solution being bound to include Lucene, Hadoop, MySQL, SQL Server, the Large Hadron Collider, etc.
Let’s find out what the goal is, then we can talk about solutions and what role technology will play.
Think of it this way, without an end result in mind, how will you know where to stop?