Martin Kaarup

Have you noticed how people that are neck deep in complexity almost always ask for a standardized solution? And they supposedly do this to regain oversight. And in reverse; have you noticed how people that have everything neatly packed in small modular boxes almost always ask for some highly customized guerilla tactic – which inherently adds complexity? Well, no matter how you answer both of these questions, you might know that they are really part of another phenomenon, namely they are about risk. Like particles and waves is a duality in elementary particle physics, so is complexity and risk a duality in corporate management. On the surface there hardly seems to be any overlap in complexity theory and the mathematical formulas of contemporary risk management. For example, think about how risk can be bought and sold like regular merchandise. On the other hand, comp... (more)

Visualizing the Web

The biologist Marcel Salathé, currently associated with the Stanford University, has built a graph component that parses the underlying domain specific language of web pages, html, and visualizes these as colorful minimum spanning trees. What is interesting with Salathé’s visualization is that it’s so straight forward to pose questions about the structure of web pages and then look for answers. Here’s the color legend he uses to differentiate between the groups of html tags: Blue Links (A) Red Tables (TABLE, TR, TD) Green Container (DIV) Violet Images (IMG) Yellow Forms (FORM, ... (more)

What Is Service Orientation?

Businesses tend to focus their architecture on efficiency instead of agility. This clear distinction between optimising for the known versus optimising for the unknown inherently counteracts on businesses in their effort to seize any of the new opportunities that arises around them. This article emphasises the importance of architecting enterprise wide systems with quality capabilities and a service orientation that more properly reflects business agility and enables new opportunities to create much more focused, efficient, and adaptable organisational structures. Describing the ... (more)

My scale-free contacts

One drawback of returning from Avega’s 2009 conference in Karpathos, Greece, is having a head full of ideas and recharged batteries. It manifested itself a couple of days ago. Around bed time, I felt a sudden urge to map all my contacts, and their connections as well, on the professional network site LinkedIn. Supposedly, I should be able to see the scale-free invariance property of a social network. That night I went to bed at around 4 a.m. and I was still miles from completing my data gathering. I didn’t finish the next night either – or the next. The fourth night it dawned on... (more)

Solving the Good Will Hunting Problem

I've seen the movie Good Will Hunting from 1997, starring Matt Damon in the role as a mathematical gifted janitor, twice. The first time I hadn’t taken a course in graph theory, the second time I had. Regarding the mathematical aspect of the movie, it makes all the difference. The second time I could actually understand the problem the professor posed when he threw down the gauntlet. In the movie the MIT professor stated a, supposedly, very tough problem that they had worked on intensely for almost two years before they were able to solve it. It reads: "Draw all the homeomorphic... (more)