It’s Leaving Stuff Out That’s Hard

Less is More is a popular theme these days. The phrase (thanks to Mies Van Der Rohe) has come to suggest leaving out anything that doesn’t add value.

Leaving stuff out won’t be a new challenge to Twitter users. The fact is you can’t get much in to 140 characters, so the post has to be short, sharp, on-topic. And it doesn’t matter if the grammar is less than perfect.

Bloggers who review their work, and benchmark against the best, quickly find short simple pointed observations read better, and get read more often. Blogging isn’t a language test – it’s a context test.

Now the concept of Less is More is spreading to the main stream. Everybody wants to “cut through the crap” and “get to the meat”.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the concept is beginning to spread to software.

Traditional software makers historically focused on adding features so the consultants can tick the boxes. Ultimately the result is higher cost, lower quality, more complexity, less adoption. None of us have to understand too much about Word before this becomes obvious.

For the new breed of software makers this is an anathema. Why build something people won’t use (or probably even buy)?

So the benchmark for tomorrow’s software is Less Features. Less Features equals less cost, more quality, less complexity, more adoption.

The problem for the designers is deciding which bits to leave out. If leaving stuff out reduces function the software won’t do the job.

The answer is making the software more flexible – reducing what it does to generic master data and process so the user can adapt his/her use to fit the need today, and change if to fit the need tomorrow.

Actually users already do this on their own. There’s much more of the world’s information stored in sticky notes, email, spreadsheets and even paper files than there’ll ever be in enterprise software.

To engineers this won’t be news – the whole concept of six sigma quality manufacturing is focused on reducing complexity in process steps, and increasing their capability (flexibility).

As thought leader Suzi Pomerantz reminds us in her blog post Flexibility Means Influence even management theorists promote the value of being flexible.

It’s well worth a read!

Forrester: Economy has led to software pricing changes (macworld.com)
When UI Rules, What Drives Consolidation? (readwriteweb.com)

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Tagged as: Business, Business Services, Customer relationship management, Enterprise, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Manufacturing, Twitter

{ 3 comments }

admin February 7, 2009 at 2:19 am: Thanks John

I’ll check out the book – sounds interesting

Steve
John Reddish Get Results February 5, 2009 at 10:18 pm: I see both the beauty in the elegantly simple and in the brevity urgency overwhelming all communications. Where once we savored the story and the intricacies of plot, we moved first to the journalistic inverted pyramid (to help us prioritize and not have to read on to the end), then on the the sound byte, and now to 140 characters and spaces preformed in real time. There is much to know, much we want to know and an increasing understanding that the more we know the less it is. As we now tweet meetings with the President of the US in real time – scooping the journalists just outside, and Flip Video our news and interviews for instant uploads and broadcasts, I have to wonder if it is all that desirable?

When it comes to streamlining software, I am concerned that with targeted functionality we risk becoming dysfunctional, of becoming a heap of almost complete possibilities that just doesn’t come together. I am all for special purpose software that is easy to deploy, use and master, but I am concerned that unless we develop and build it ALL with an eye to interoperability [if we keep our black box thinking and proprietary ways] that our productivity will grind to a disconnected halt.
Simplicity, YES. Plug and play, YES. Build a stronger overall platform, YES. But make all of it open source, so that, even if it is a jigsaw puzzle, we have a chance at putting the picture together.

A good book on software over-building (and then what!) is Goldratt’s “Necessary But Not Sufficient.”

John Reddish, http://www.thesuccessionplanner.com, helping entrepreneurs and other leaders who want to master growth, transition and succession to get results faster, less painfully and in ways that work for them. This happens through consulting, coaching/mentoring, training and/or speaking.
widespreadram February 5, 2009 at 5:03 am: Absolutely agree about Less Features.

I hate having to wade through piles of stuff I don’t need to get to the stuff I do!