test objects design

JP of confused of calcutta writes about visualization and patterns:

As we see information continue to disaggregate and atomise, and as we see its velocity increase, we are going to need better and better visualisation tools and techniques. While there has been much progress in visualisation over the last decade or so (…), for some reason this has not made its way into business life. We’re still stuck in a world of PowerPoint presentations of scorecards and dashboards and RAG indicators, fed by Excel spreadsheets and simple databases, and with considerable manual intervention. Considerable use of derived data. Considerable throwing away of useful information. Considerable scope for sins of omission and commission when interpreting the derived data.(…)

We have the ability to take the sensed information and move it around so much more quickly. And in this digital age, we have the ability to connect different sources of information more effectively, both by use of semantic tools as well as by heuristic learning methods.

Almost everytime I have to search in Lotus Notes email for something I keep wondering the same thing. Some say ‘Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy’ but Lotus Notes wins because…?
It makes me wonder if Agile Methodology’s emphasis on proximity, people sitting in the same room within an earshot, so barriers to communication are dealt with ’structurally’ and not ‘politically’ is perhaps a type of subversion rather than natural evolution. It seems there are so many barriers to communication in a modern business organization, one of them for example is the fact that in order to have a meeting you have to reserve a room in advance and if you want a projector you have to reserve that too and somebody from facilities office will show up and open a room for you and set up a projector. Infrastructre is not set up for communiction to occur where immediate feedback and self organizing can produce breakthrough conversations on a project. Communication in such infrastructure is all about manually planning the maybeness of some sort of kind of knowledge transfer that might happen, sort of.

What I am saying is that we waste enormous amounts of time and effort using tools that aren’t fit for purpose, and then somehow we manage to convince ourselves that all is well