Signal and Noise

One significant limit to the manageability of information is the amount, the mass of it. It is difficult, it costs some effort, to extract the signal from the noise.

Management is necessarily incremental, i.e. builds upon stability. One of its most effective enemies is redundancy, duplication of information. Ironically, CM, building upon control, favours a reverse logic: it will prioritize ownership, and lead one to express the information from one's own viewpoint, preferably than to build upon an other presentation.

As an example, let's take the page listing definitions of Software Configuration Management.

Let's assume, for the sake of the argument, that all these definitions would be consistent. Then, it should be possible to express them with reference to the first one, for example. We find indeed a lot of resonance between them, but very little references helping to understand how they build upon one another. Little signal, a lot of noise.

-- MarcGirod - 16 May 2009