Managing Complexity

TED: Simply John Maeda

Noticias externas — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:29:58 GMT

Earlier this year ( Managing Complexity ) I blogged about John Maeda's book, The Laws of Simplicity

TED: Simply John Maeda

Rob Caron — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:21:19 GMT

Earlier this year ( Managing Complexity ) I blogged about John Maeda's book, The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity:

MSDN Blog Postings · The Greatest Story Never Told

MSDN Blog Postings · The Greatest Story Never Told — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 22:31:15 GMT

PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2007/06/12/the-greatest-story-never-told/

The Greatest Story Never Told

Rob Caron — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:54:05 GMT

While reading the comments on Sam Gentile 's post, What's Great about Being a Microsoft Developer , I

re: Managing Complexity

Chris Harris — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 21:51:01 GMT

Hi Rob,

If you enjoyed the book 'The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)' you love my book 'Hyperinnovation: Multidimensional Enterprise in the Connected Economy,' which concentrates on similar issues, and builds a new and ‘holistic’ management model for managing complex ‘multidimensional’ systems innovations at a faster pace.

A review, the table of contents, and excerpt of Hyperinnovation can be found via my blog: www.chrisharrisfutures.blogspot.com.

I hope that you find this of interest and assistance.

Best regards,

Chris Harris.

A Comparison of the Top Four Enterprise-Architecture Methodologies

Rob Caron — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 19:23:30 GMT

For dealing with complexity of a different sort - enterprise architectures - see Roger Sessions' new

re: Managing Complexity

Ken Spencer — Wed, 30 May 2007 22:56:54 GMT

Rob,

I think you are on the right track too.

I use Google to search for stuff and have learned to tweak the search strings so they work better. This gets me to MSDN a ton of the time.

Its hard to wade thru MSDN to find stuff. Specially when whoever builds it messes up the architecture.

Today i find myself using codeplex or the google search mentioned to find stuff. Then if it gets me to MSDN, great.

As for MSDN, i think a simpler architecture would be better. When i go there, i already know i want to find say VSTS. So give me one place to start and make it simple to navigate from there to the next.

Ken

re: Managing Complexity

Eli Robillard — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:32:09 GMT

There's a book by Christopher Alexander that talks about the concept of "centers." For example, a pond is a pond by the characteristics of its "center" not its edges. The edges between a pond and a plain, or a pond and woods is blurry. It's the centers of things that provide their nature.

What that tells me about organization of entities is that you can have both major centers and minor centers. "Minor centers" is just another way to say that some concepts belong on the fuzzy edges, and if the manifestation is a web page, then you need a minor center to reflect that.

Since there isn't a way to show the paths between the major centers in a web page, some other visual cue is necessary. That's where i think that a diagram (but not just a tree view, it's really a web view) could help navigation.

re: Managing Complexity

Mike Azocar — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:24:28 GMT

Rob,

I do like the way you are thinking. The Begining Developer Learning Center do an excellent job of organizing the content.

I am an old foggy, but I remember pre-Visual Studio 6, that the help was well organized and easily searchable. If I had my preference, I would rather have things indexed so that I can quickly find what I need even if I don't know the exact name of what I am looking for.

That being said, I do work often train our college grads who are overwhelmed with the content on MDSDN. More sites like the last one in your post will help me immensely.

re: Managing Complexity

Dave Quick — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:11:42 GMT

Hi Rob,

If I'm interpreting your graphic correctly, it does a nice job of capturing the major subject areas in a product-centric view of MSDN.

Now that I've been a Microsoft customer instead of an employee for a couple of years, I'd also like to see a view that focuses on "Developer Needs" first and views everything else within that context.

I love the idea of providing more context as a way to help navigate through the vast sea of MSDN content. Unfortunately, context changes rapidly. The things I care about on one search may be entirely differnt on the next search. It would be great to see your thoughts on what context information is needed, how to make it as easy as possible to capture and apply that context, and how to retrieve and re-use a set of context information later, once it's been captured.

Dave Quick