I thought I would round up a collection of links that interested me the past few weeks on various topics. First off: NoSQL databases:
- An almost impossibly detailed run-down of NoSQL databases: http://www.vineetgupta.com/2010/01/nosql-databases-part-1-landscape.html. Part 2 should be good too.
- Slides from a talk by Emil Eifrem of Neo4j on the different types of NoSQL databases: http://www.slideshare.net/emileifrem/nosql-east-a-nosql-overview-and-the-benefits-of-graph-databases
- Update Emil Eifrem mentions in his blog post in the comment another very nice overview of the NoSQL ecosystem by Jonathan Ellis of Rackspace.
Then over to Lean and Kanban. Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin just published a new book on InfoQ titled "Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both". If you´re not familiar with Henrik Kniberg´s work, I also suggest "Scrum and XP from the trenches". Erling Wegger Linde´s "A Kanban brown bag recipe" is also worth a read.
And in the spirit of Lean: There is a video of talk by John Seddon of Vanguard titled "Cultural Change is Free". Mainly about systems thinking in the public sector, but private sector aren´t infallible either. Seddon often criticize Lean for being wrong in many places, but I often feel he is criticizing a wrongful implementation of lean ideas, much the same as scrum is often criticized for the misgivings of wrongful implementations. Or rather he is criticizing the tool focus of a lot of lean consultants not the lean principles themselves. And he stresses the differences between the Toyota Productions system and other kinds of organizations. You could also check out is talk "Re-thinking Lean service" on InfoQ which deals with the same topic in a slightly different packaging.
Hey, thanks for the shoutout!
I elaborate a bit more in written form about one section of my presentation from nosql east. In particular, I discuss the four main categories of NOSQL databases and how they differ in focus: scaling to size vs scaling to complexity.
Check it out here if you're interested.
Thanks again for mentioning my talk.
-EE
Thanks, Emil.
I'll be sure to check that out. I'm hoping to switch a small project in development over from MySQL to some flavor of NoSQL store and all info on NoSQL stores is good info these days.
Knut-
I partner with Vanguard (John Seddon's firm) in the US. Often I hear people talk about Lean ideas being implemented wrongly and I hear it so often I begin to wonder why so many bad or misguided implementations.
I come from a strong Deming background. Just as Deming never called what he did TQM, Taiichi Ohno never called his work "lean." Industrial tourists and consultants did that.
Lean manufacturing tools do not transfer to service organizations very well. John often says that in determining whether a tool is appropriate we need to ask 3 questions:
1- Who invented the tool?
2- What problem was he trying to solve?
3- Do I have that problem?
I have argued with what John calls the toolheads (and I reference as the lean hornets) many times. They are indignant. Yet when we see implementations we see them either hacking away with lean tools or when we go to their websites we see tools training or 5S for twitter and things like this.
We believe Taiichi Ohno and Deming were trying to teach us how to think . . . not copy. We know if thinking doesn't change about the design and management of work we fail. I would mention A3 (another tool) is not the answer.
The difference is more than just wrong implementation . . . it is the thinking.
Regards, Tripp Babbitt
www.newsystemsthinking.com
Tripp
You're absolutely right, there is a lot of talk of bad implementations of Lean (in many business areas) and indeed Scrum (a software development methodology if you're not familiar with the field). One problem I see is that a lot of people look for a packaged solution to their problem, and a well marketed methodology with a nice (looking) set of tools is tempting.
In software development, there are a lot of more or less packaged methodologies for running a development project with a range of many to quite few tools/methods. The one most influenced by some aspects of TPS - Kanban for software development - has the fewest and in my mind encourage a lot of thinking instead of applying tools to a problem. And lean for software development as proposed by in chief Mary Poppendieck, is a translation of the ideas of TPS to match software development. Of course, the fields are very different and so the versions of lean are very different. I need to read more of Deming's work, I see :-)
I working on a blog post where I'll try to map the systems thinking concepts and ideas and try to see how they fit in with different software development methodologies of today and software development in general.