thingamy

travelling

Saturday 29th Thomas and a few of his SAP compatriots will be driving all the way down to Bedoin where we will meet up and go for a charity ride up Mt Ventoux.

If you have not already, flip out your credit card and make a donation to Warchild here!

October 9th - 14th will be spent in San Francisco where I will attend Office 2.0 and have a few meetings etc. But I still have some time on my hands if you're keen to meet up!

Then, week after that, it'll be SAP TechEd in Amsterdam, drop me a mail if you're there - always keen to meet up.
(Still blown away that SAP will cover my costs, thank you good folks in Walldorf, I'll study hard ;))

complexity or simplicity

Complexity is fascinating in poetry and art, but a headache in commercial terms.

A business, a health organisation or a government - is about things - widgets, bikes, medical conditions, roads. Each thing wandering through a series of tasks creating a trail - order sheet, shipping papers, production reports, call reports, reports... and of course a work order for each event.

Say a thing shall pass 23 tasks and events before it leaves the shop - that would create 23 sheets, reports or documents (data or paper) and 23 work orders. That's 46 snippets of information that in one way or the other would represent the thing, the real world thing.

"What things happens" is how we keep track of stuff.

Complex. Error prone. And heaven for all lovers of reconciliation as some info will be contained in more than one of the 46 sheets, reports or documents. If paper based in a folder, if IT based often spread all over the place in .doc files, .xls files and definitely within a couple of mail clients.
Cries ensues for systems and methods so that the stuff could be managed, stored, have revision, organised and found.
Hello SOX and other regulations. Hello middle-ware and collaboration applications. More creates more.

Now to something completely different:

"What happens to things" is how we should keep track of stuff.

Let the thing be the bearer of information, or rather when IT based, have a virtual data thing that is alone in representing the real world thing.

Let that thing bounce from task to task and be the work-order in itself (like a car on an assembly line), let it capture the changes to itself (if suddenly blue you know it's been painted) and who did it and when.

Then after 23 tasks and events you would end up with one - 1 - single data thing.

Less errors, reconciliation a thing of the past and need to manage, store, have revision, organise and find evaporates with one single item.

"What things happens" vs. "What happens to things"

Complex vs. simple.

46 vs. 1

Guess what tack thingamy is taking ;) 

manual experiment

In the never ending quest for usability I've had much help, last on the manual side of things. Nudges, advice and some friendly kicks in the butt - much appreciated!

Niko pointed me in one direction which included the "meaning" of thingamy, and where all business design starts (yep, that is where thingamy starts too).

He even drew me a neat overview while on the Metro (Finns work everywhere!):

Then Sarah sent me a mail describing how she avoids tech terms when explaining adjustments to the rear derailleur (there I go again) on a bike, in full knowledge I would get the point that way, use a tiny spoon ;)

Fully inspired, perhaps not much better at anything, but yes, inspired, I sat down and wrote a three page what-is-thingamy-and-how-do-you-use-it-manual a late evening. Sent it off to the my two advisors...

Sarah was optimistic (but saw need for tweaks) and Niko was lazy and did not want more than one page (laziness is the mother of many inventions) so I threw out two thirds of the yada, yada and ended up with something.

More of an experiment. One page to explain all and everything. Optimistic.

Included it here on the thingamy site if you're curious...

Still thinking though.

thingamy takes on SAP

Cycling, of course!

In two weeks, on Saturday 30th (wind less than a gazillion mph from all directions as only constraint) a hardcore SAP cycling team led by Thomas will arrive Provence where I (and hopefully a few more) will join up for a ride up Mt Ventoux for charity!

Cycling not having changed much last hundred years - a bit more carbon and titanium involved for sure - it is still a sport of pure power and pain and capability...

So there the SAP will have a nose in front of the thingamy, no new ways of getting up there! Just grit teeth and enjoy the pain. Capability will beat potential this time :)

For you who do not know the hill here's a graph of what we're facing - note the 8 kms of about 10%! You'd have a hard time climbing such hills with your jeep with chains on a winter day to put it like that...

This will be the first of hopefully an annual event - so get out your gear and start training for the next one!

In the meantime just pop over here and give for the warchild charity - we on our side will promise to sweat profusely and do our best! Your donations will be much appreciated!

Video and photo crew will document and we'll all blog about it afterwards for your enjoyment!

Here are some earlier posts with more images:

Mont Ventoux, the echo chamber, web 2.0 and a good cause.
to the mountain top an beyond!
And a couple at Hamish' site here.

user friendliness, part one, the semantics

Wow!

Must say putting out the demo video was worth it, thanks all for bothering to look at it and to those who have given excellent (and... eh... well deserved and not unexpected) feed-back!

Some quotes from yesterday's post here and at Gapingvoid:

"I would say that the naming of the categories is key. For example, the word stack had no meaning for me.... usage can be made even more intuitive by choosing category names and indeed icons that facilitate immediate understanding" John here.

"...this was the geekiest demo I've ever seen...  I couldn't easily follow most of what was going on during the workflow build... Now you just sprinkle some Kathy-Sierra-Dust on it..." Tiago here.

"Y'all might think about changing 'language' (Google is very good at using 'humanspeak' for their components) around the components. Like, most people think 'string' means what the cat plays with. And variable? Nobody should have a consumer-facing product with the words string, variable, etc. in it... Classes, containers, tags? Yikes." Tara here.

Folks, I bow to the wisdom, appreciate the kick in the butt and have put on thinking cap.

Semantics are not as easy as I thought it would be, this is after all not a run-on-every computer at every home kind of product. It is a server based system to run your business with very limited access to the "builder" interfaces (which the demo was all in). No excuse, but my competitor's work-flows looks like this:

Kindly borrowed from here, go and read, hilarious stuff!

Or what about the settings for a Work-flow action below (from same article), then "string" and "class" seems rather user friendly :)

Suspect they would not get far building anything from scratch in 15 minutes...

Back to the semantics - the hard bit is of course to be easy to understand while not loosing any precision.

Question will often be - do you need any kind of semantic introduction/training or not? Any semantic "hooks" in daily life that can be used without loosing meaning?

The art of sailing has a semantic threshold: Port, starboard, sheet, clew, cleat and guy. Port is not left, it's the left side of the vessel when looking forward. Sheet is not a rope, it is a rope fastened to the lower leeward clew of a sail.

Do business model and process modeling have a semantic threshold? Yes. Will it have it in the future? Dunno. Will a system (that delivers on all other levels) without that threshold have a boat length or two on the others? Yes, there I agree fully.

So there you go, thinking cap on, sleeves rolled up, will be back - I do love a challenge!

[UPDATE: Thanks to all your great comments and general well deserved kicks in the butt we will now go into a period of "feature freeze" and focus on exactly these issues - usability, semantics, layout and whatnot - goal is "No Manual" and a thumbs up from Tara (have to set high goals or what?). Ah, that felt good to get off my chest ;)]

demo snippet

Not having much to do on a Sunday - except doing four times 12 minutes intervals uphill  (Pre du Lac to Caussols for those in local know) in feeble preparation for the upcoming Mt Ventoux ride - so thus I tried my hand on recording a little demo.

Nothing fancy, just a off the top of my head no manuscript build of a simple procurement process with a couple of report and accounting templates - about 20 minutes including a run, looking at some reports and some fixing of errors...

Will now proceed to hone my demo and video compressing skills... ;)

The demo link is on thingamy.com.

[Update: Forgot to capture the full browser, but it is a browsere, web using server based stuff this etc.]