January 8, 2007
the thingamy manifesto
Well done to Sig, for writing The Thingamy Manifesto, which is all to do with a new generation of enterprise software he's working on i.e. Thingamy. He also includes a ton of links, pointing to where these ideas are discussed in greater detail.
The manifesto has eleven points. Here's a taster:
1. The Organisational Hierarchy is kaput - as single purpose executor of the Business Model it requires reorganisation every time you need to get better, an utterly futile exercise most of the time. Replace it.Thanks, Sig!2. Managing is a waste of time. Leadership I need, getting out of bed in the morning I can do myself.
3. Legacy software models the "way we always did things" - usually a model from the days of paper, quills and desks. Model reality instead.
4. Tree-structures are faulty. "Where it resides" is only two dimensional and suitable only for places. Use tags and any other means to enhance the knowledge and make finding easier.
[Disclosure: I have a small stake in Thingamy.]
[Manifesto submission guidelines are here.] [Manifesto archive is here.]
It's nice to hear about other small software companies and their ideas, most firms seem to be too paranoid to share any (real) information or vision during their development process - you just get the same old corporate happy-talk (thanks for that phrase Hugh, I use it a lot!).
I agree with all but one of these, I don't get the big thing about tree structures?
What we try to do at my little software outfit is to design a data structure that's relevant to the business problem you are modelling (and ideally flexible too - we rarely get it right 1st time!), if you need attributes (or tags) and other descriptive/categorisation mechanisms then we try to design the data structures accordingly.
Ultimately I see the "tree" bit as only how the underlying data structure is surfaced in a U/I and so providing several different ways to surface the same underlying data model is key to meeting all the various needs of punters; picking on poor old trees seems a bit arbitrary, why not reports, these seem to be much more widely "abused" as vehicles for data in my experience?
Just interested..
Cheers, Steve