Writing by Jorgen on Thursday, 23 of October , 2008 at 8:59 am
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,(I know his name, no matter)–so much less!Well, less is more… Robert Browning (1812–1889) The expression less is more is based on the notion that simplicity is to be preferred over complexity. By keeping things simple it is possible to focus on the core message or the essence. This opposed to a situation where a subject is overloaded with extra elements that have no or little added value. In other words: simplicity leads to clarity which leads to better understanding or use. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is also often associated with less is more. KISS is often used as a directive during a design phase to focus on the absence of unnecessary elements. Philips, one of the largest electronic firms in the world, uses the following pay-off in all their commercials: “Sense & Simplicity”. They too have understood that in order “to make things better” the focus should be on delivering products that do exactly what they need to do (a vacuum cleaner is for vacuuming) and that it must be very easy to understand and use the working of these products. Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, has given name to a principle that is called Pareto’s 80/20 rule. This rule is often used to focus on 20% of a population because it holds 80% of the associated volume. For example: 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your revenue. Therefore you can focus on those 20% (instead off 100%). This way you can save a lot of money in sales & marketing costs. The same can be applied to management information. By focusing on the most important performance indicators (KEY performance indicators) you will cover 80% of your business. The rules of simplicity can also be applied to reports, graphs, and dashboards. Because a tool vendor gives us so much functionality it doesn’t mean we actually have to use it all at once. I have seen bright multi colored, 3 dimensional pie charts that would look great in a bakery but are absolutely worthless if it comes to decision making. If we apply the rules of simplicity to Business Intelligence it could be argued that a report is only finished when there is nothing more that can be deleted or omitted from it. Simplicity is often associated with boring or superficial. This is not true. Just look at the work of Ludwig van der Rohe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Mies_van_der_Rohe). He is a famous architect and one of the founding fathers of a movement called Bauhaus. Although he focused on simplicity his work has given us some pretty amazing buildings. If often tell business intelligence consultants that their work should not only be accurate (the numbers have to be correct) but that the result must also look good as well (Content is king and GUI is Queen). I call this SFS or Super Fancy Sexy. If the report, graph or dashboard looks great chances are that they will be used more as well. This leads us to an interesting apparent contradiction. How can we make BI solutions simple and look SFS at the same time? Stephen Few has been thinking about that for some time now. Check out his work on http://www.perceptualedge.com/. He shows us the importance of visual business intelligence and the role simplicity plays. It has made me thinking about adding another S(imple) to SFS. 
Category: BI Thoughts
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