ChangeThis for Simplicity

There are a lot of REALLY GOOD manifestos over at ChangeThis.com! Back in May 2006 I blogged about Simplicity in Design and included several links/resources on the subject. Turns out ChangeThis.com has a few good manifestos on the subject as well (and gets more every month). Here are the ones I liked most:

• Elegant Solutions: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way, by Mathew May -- This is a distillation of Mathew May's book The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation (also see the Elegant Solutions blog)


• The Simplicity Cycle, by Dan Ward -- "In the Simplicity Cycle, goodness is a general term that means slightly different things depending on a variety of contexts." In technology, goodness represents operational functionality or utility; for an academic discipline, it represents increased understanding; and for system design it reflects design maturity. If the context is art, maybe goodness means beauty" ... increased complexity does not inherently equal increased goodness, learn more by reading this manifesto.


• The Six Laws of the New Software, by Dror Eyal -- The Six Laws are: Single Idea, Collaborate, Disappear, Simplify, Release, Comply.


• Six Design Lessons from the Apple Store, by Jesse James Garret -- The Six Lessons are: Create an Experience, Not an Artifact; Honor Context; Prioritize your Messages; Institute Consistency; Design for Change; Don't Forget the Human Element!

Other manifestos not necessarily related to the above that I found interesting are:

• Software that Lasts 200 Years, by Daniel Bricklin
• Manifesto to Accelerate: 15 Truths, by Dan Coughlin [added April 5]
• The State of Competitive Advantage, by Mitchell Gooze
• A Manifesto for Mavericks: Why the Most Original Business Minds Win, by William Taylor and Polly LaBarre
• Going for the Go Point: The moment when a decision becomes action, by Michael Useem
• Thinking Through Problem Solving, by Valarie A. Washington
• The Bio-Teaming Manifesto: What teams can learn from Mother Nature
• How to Manage Smart People and Why Smart People Defend Bad Idea, both by Scott Berkun
• Managing with Aloha: Using Hawaiian values to change your business, and your relationships with employees and customers, by Rosa Say
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz
• LESS: What Customers Want, by Bruce Kasanoff
• The Answer is Biodiesel, by Michael Briggs (Trade-in your Prius and buy a VW! What's better than hybrids and fuel-cells? The answer is biodiesel)
• Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, by The President's Council on Bioethics
• A Physics of Ideas, by Nova Spivack
• Slacker @ Work, by Brendan Connelly
• Make Art, Not War, by Mary Anne Davis
• The CEO of the 21st Century, by Mark Goulston
• How to be Creative, by Hugh Macleod
• George Lakoff Manifesto, by George Lakoff
• How To Get Better Teachers -- and Treat Them Right!, by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

BOOK on ERP for IT

Charles Betz' book Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children really ought to be required reading for anyone that fancies themselves a "CM professional" (especially Software CM) or an "Enterprise Architect."

I've been following his erp4it blog for over a year now (and his corresponding erp4it YahooGroup). Those looking for a taste of what the book is like can look there, and also at the paper ERP for IT which I understand was an early precursor for the book that has since been vastly updated and expanded in the latter.

Even though the subject of the book and the blog doesnt explicitly scream "CM", the content in the book and the blog are filled with often fundamental and profound insights about CM from the enterprise view (not just IT/ITIL) and where software CM, infrastructure CM, and network/element CM all fit in to the bigger enterprise picture. Several of his post that are among my favorites made their way into the book in some form or another:

• A Data Architecture for IT Service Management -- you'd never know it from the title, but this is practically a primer on what is a configuration and what is a configuration item (and much more)
  
• A Configuration Management Maturity Model
  
• Element versus Enterprise CM
  
• Two key distinctions to help scope your CMDB -- about the difference between Configuration Items and Events (quick - what's the difference between a "release" and a "baseline"?)
  
• Is CM a process?
  
• DBMS Configuration Management -- and the difference between Software CM, Element CM and Enterprise CM
  
• Model-Driven CM
• A Value-chain approach to IT
• A simplified ERP for IT architecture -- the CM system figures prominently in this one
• IT portfolios, service catalogs, and enterprise architecture -- change management (at all levels of scale - including governance) links them all together across the value-chain
• Fundamentals of integration metadata
• A story of too many tools
• A metadata rant
• CMDB Chaos and Confusion: Making Sense of the Madness

And if that weren't enough, the book also puts together three of my favorite topics: CM, patterns, and architecture.

Recursive Make Reconsidered

In an earlier blog-entry reviewing the book Code Craft, I mentioned the classic paper by Peter Miller entitled "Recursive Make Considered Harmful" ...

Anyway, I recently ran across a bunch of webpages that examined or revisited the issue. I thought several of them were worth sharing, so here they are:

• Recursive versus Non-recursive Makefile architectures benchmark
• Recursive Make isn't all that bad
• "Recursive Make Considered Harmful" Revisited
• Recursive Make Reloaded
• Implementing non-recursive make
• Non-recursive make for Linux kernel
• Non-recursive Automake
• Makepp manual pages on recursive make in legacy makefiles and problems associated with recursive makes

Five Things About Me

I've been "tagged" amidst the recent spree of fellow bloggers who are being "asked" to disclose five personal tidbits about themselves that most people don't know. I won't disclose who tagged me, and I won't be tagging anyone else, but I will comply with the request just for the heck of it ...

1. I don’t drink beer or wine – I hate the taste!

When it comes to alcoholic beverages, the only ones I like are those sweet mixed drinks where you can barely taste any alcohol (you know, the ones that are for "sissies").

2. I got inebriated once when I was two years old (in China no less)!

Or so I'm told ... I don’t remember any of it, but as it was told to me, my folks were flying the family to China, and the airline lost our luggage. As consolation, the airline put us up in a hotel and threw a party for us (and several others in a similar situation). Apparently someone spiked the fruit-punch and I never knew what hit me. My sister says I was walking late at night on the shoreline of Taepei, swaggering, swaying, and hiccuping every couple minutes. Eventually my father picked me up and carried me with my head resting over his shoulder, still hiccupping with a giddy grin on my face, pointing at everything I saw and giggling my head off like only a toddler can. (Hmmn – could this explain #1? :)

3. I lived in Taiwan during 1966-1967, and in Hawaii during 1969!

My Dad was a political science professor, and was at the time one of the foremost experts in his field on US-China relations. He would travel to China or Taiwan every now and again for extended periods of time (weeks or longer). One time he took all of us with him and we lived there for a year. In 1969 he had an exchange program with another professor from University of Hawaii on Oahu. Our house was at the top of a very big hill (or a very small mountain :). I went to pre-school at Noalani elementary school in the Manoa valley.

4. I used to be a dancer, and had 20+ years of classical training!

My mom was a dance teacher, and got me started when I was 4 (along with my older siblings). When I got older I decided to stick with it and got to be quite good at it. All in all I had about 20+ years of classical ballet training, along with modern/contemporary, jazz, and a bit of tap and African. I was in a local dance company during my college years and for a short while after. I was good too! I kept up with it until my mid-30s when I was eventually diagnosed with degenerative disc disease. Sometimes guys would try and give me a hard time about my dance background (that's right about the time I would "let it slip" that I also held black-belts in two different martial arts :-)

5. I have Tourette’s Syndrome (TS)

It's noticeable but mild in my case - not like the more pronounced cases you typically see and hear about on TV shows like Oprah or 20/20.

So there it is; I've done the deed!