Architect Center, a Professional Community for IT Architects

I’ve been priveledged to be involved in a small way in the creation of a new on line community (which is still only an alpha release) known as the Architect Center.  Check it out and the article that started it all.

My favorite quote (from the aforementioned article) made it on the landing page:

“Defining and designing complex structures is a common activity performed by almost every discipline, profession, and artisanship throughout the centuries. All the disciplines of old discovered that skills and knowledge required for the composition of large complex systems don’t match the skills that are required for small bottom-up assembly activities. In IT, the same problem became noticeable about 10 years ago, and the gap between core engineering and high-level system design has grown ever since. Grady Booch’s aphorism, you can’t build a sky-rise the way you build a doghouse, encapsulates the common dilemma facing high complexity, high interdependency, and low transparency projects: The sheer amount of detail required in complex compositions is so overwhelming that a function of analysis, decomposition, and abstraction becomes vital for the success of such endeavors.” — Miha Kralj

Outliers – a very cool read for BI folks, and everyone else too…

 

I had to do a a quick post about the book Outliers (left).  My friend Sherri from AcceleratedK passed it along and I haven’t been able to put it down.

It’s changing the way I think.  Check it out.

VHS, Blu-Ray and Wii – Inferior Technology that Wins

I’ve been following the remarkable success of the Wii.  It’s the oldest game system out there.  It has less storage, memory, and CPU power than its competitors.  It has poorer graphics too.  In November 2008 it sold 2,000,000 units while its next closest competitor, the XBOX 360, sold 836,000 copies (see 1Up.com’s article for more details).  It’s so successful that I’ve even heard folks discussing Sony pulling out of the market.  (I think this is crazy talk, but who knows…)  Why?  Let’s look at the other examples.

Blu-Ray’s success led to Toshibo pulling its HD-DVD offering when Warner Brothers announced they would only release their films in the Blu-Ray format (see this article on Home Theater View). Strange since if you look at viewer comments you’ll see most people felt sound and image quality were better for HD-DVD.

It’s the same story for VHS and Betamax (see WikiAnswers this time).  In all of these cases the format that won (or is winning) was the one that has the broadest adoption.

This leads to my very simple belief that the product that gets used by the most folks is the best, regardless of the specifications.

So how does this happen?  I think Scott Weisbrod does a good job in his blog  relating how Nintendo used Blue Ocean strategy to identify the key areas of performance that are making it the best game system in the world.  If you’re not familiar with Blue Ocean it’s worth the investment.  It provides a framework for identifying how to diverge from your competition that’s termed value innovation.  For me it’s a great tool that helps answer my favorite BI question, “Are you measuring the right things?”  If you’re not including adoption in your key metrics you may want to think about where Betamax and HD-DVD are today…