[Sigia-l] Simplicity

[Antoine.Valot at ins.com]

Ziya,

I'm speaking from the outside, of course, but this is exactly the kind
of place where "goals, not tasks" can save the day.

Presumably, the business has an underlying goal: Make money. No matter
how complex the "process", it is somehow connected to making money. Try
forgetting the process, and looking at the goal. If you were to try to
achieve the goal, using a beginner's mind, what would you do?

If this is too high-level, then go down one level... but if you've got
seemingly irreducible complexity, then I would advocate for raising the
level of the discussion. 

Antoine Valot  |  Senior Information Architect / Business Analyst  |  BT
INS  |  Cell: 303.995.5618  |  Email: antoine.valot at bt.com 

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-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Ziya Oz
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2007 12:47 AM
To: SIGIA-L
Subject: [Sigia-l] Simplicity

Somebody emailed me about a quote:

"Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple."

which I believe is from John Maeda's book, "The Laws of Simplicity."

<http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10933>
<http://tinyurl.com/3385od>

I haven't read it, so I couldn't comment on his take. But I spent the
entire
weekend looking at a 200MB Visio file of a very un-simple business
process,
which when plotted would cover an entire conference wall. My job is to
drastically simplify it. I haven't personally seen many things that are
so
inherently un-simple that they can never be made simple. Have you?

----
Ziya

Usability >  Simplify the Solution
Design >  Simplify the Problem


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