While technical people don't usually think of it this way, it's an interesting human characteristic to desire parallelization. Anyone driving on a busy road instinctively knows that adding lanes will speed up traffic. Most people are not aware of it, but such a solution increases parallelism-allowing more work to be done in a given period of time.

When businesspeople can't find a single computer to run their business on, they will ask, "Can we run each division on its own computer?" Without knowing it, they are asking if they can parallelize their divisions' IT operations.

As DBAs, when faced with a large, time-consuming data import, we instinctively ask, "Can we break up the import by users, and then run them all at the same time?" We are trying to parallelize!