Keep It Simple, Smartly (from Andrew McAfee’s Blog)
A very long time I did not posted in this blog.
Well, here is an interesting blog post from Andrew McAfee, an Harvard professor, who is also the inventor of the term Entreprise 2.0.
Keep It Simple, Smartly
There are two kinds of people: complexifiers and simplifiers
Just a reference to this blog posting.
http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2006/there-are-two-kinds-of-people-complexifiers-and-simplifers/There are two kinds of people: people that make things complex and people that simplify.
- Complexifiers are averse to reduction.
- Simplifiers thrive on concision.
The author bring genetic here. Not very scientific but not impossible. (different instinct of survival).
Anyway, it should not be too difficult to guess which category has ma preference.
HBR article and podcast: "Simplicity-Minded Management."
I just wanted to mention this interesting article and associated podcast related to complexity:
Ron Ashkenas, managing partner of consulting firm Robert H. Schaffer & Associates and author of the December 2007 Harvard Business Review article "Simplicity-Minded Management."
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?articleID=r0712h&ml_action=get-article&pageNumber=1&ml_subscriber=trueThe podcast is available at:
http://hbsp2.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=284772
Complexity and XBR
As I am now listening very interesting
postcasts of Interviews conducted by Jon Udell , I found this relatively old posting related to a discussion of Jon related to XBRL, and in particular the concern about the complexity of this system.
see:
XBRL follow-upNote: As I am trying to collect information about complexity, I realise that not real research exists on complexity of information systems (which I consider as something that appears of critical importance in Information Systems). Well, this is not exactly true, since there has been a lot of work on the complexity of algorithm (NP-complete, exponential, etc.), or complexity according to complex Systems approach (fractals, etc.). But I believe this kind of research is not able to cover a very important point: Complexity of an information systems related to architecture and agility, and the property of an information system to be able to change with an adequate level of effort and resources. For instance this point is related to ideas such as locality (being able to change something without having some side effects), or simplicity of the number of concepts manipulated (Razor of Ocam) and in particular being able to understand the system without having first to understand a Zillions of concepts.
The Law of Standards
The Law of Standardsby John F. Sowa
In 1991, while I was participating in some standards projects, I sent an e-mail message to my colleagues, in which I formulated the following hypothesis:
Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X.
I just wanted to record an interesting resource related to standards and complexity.
One of the reason of 'World of Warcraft' success: simplicity
The secrets of 'World of Warcraft's' success CNET News.com"The first mantra of Blizzard is definitely 'easy to learn, difficult to master,'" Pardo said. "Depth comes first and accessibility later."
He said some other game companies make the mistake of trying to build all their games' levels at once, and in the process, they forget that a game must have a deep sense of fun or players won't stick around.
Atlassian Developer Blog: Simplicity and XP
Interesting blog posting
Atlassian Developer Blog: Simplicity and XP:
"Simplicity and XP"
I like simple things. Why bother making something complex if the simple thing works. This reminds me of the story, where NASA spent one billion dollars inventing a pen that would work in space while Russians simply used the pencil. Read more about The billion-dollar space pen myth.
Simplicity is one of the four values of Extreme Programming."
Indeed, I also believe that eXtrem programing has some connection with simplicity
