Views

From Shadowfax

As an IT Developer I've lost count of the number of times that users request that a piece of software do everything ("we only want to use one system") and then complain that the software is too complicated. True some of the responsibility lies with the developers to make software accessible. But complex problems often resist simple solutions.

Increasingly I am becoming convinced that for many environments it is far better to use a large number of simple tools than it is to use a small number of (or single) complex tool.

The problem is that as systems become larger, they necessarily become more complex both to use and to maintain. Small systems can cope with a niche and they can afford to ignore requirements which do not come from that niche. Large systems have to do everything in a generic way. The problem with being generic is that meeting everyone's requirements usually actually translates to meeting no-one's requirements (out of the box). It scares me the number of large-scale systems which required man-months worth of effort to be 'customised'. It also scares me the amount of functionality that people request and then never actually use.

Modern CMSs try to do everything. Forums. Wikis. Blogs. Ajax. The list of buzz-words goes on. Yet for pretty much any of these buzzwords there are niche solutions which do the job far better and require less effort to set up. Integration can be an issue of course, however, it is often possible to offer the appearance of integration to the web user, whilst having very little real integration at the back-end. It means that editors have to use multiple interfaces, but generally speaking most people don't have a problem with using lots of different pieces of software providing that each one is relative easy to use. It seems to me that they are far more likely to use the key features of many small products than they are to invest the time to learn all the features of one behemoth.