(Taking the cue from Charles Dickens’ weekly serials, I’ll share my thoughts on this topic over a series of posts, with one post each week. On June 16, I briefly touched on the motivation behind Kinetic. Now, let’s dig even deeper into the underlying motivations.)

The central premise behind Kinetic is: Useful diagrams must reflect increasingly-complex ideas and systems. Since Kinetic’s goal is to explore better approaches to diagramming complex systems, let’s first answer the question:

“Well, what’s wrong with the today’s tools to create complex diagrams? Why can’t we just use Microsoft Viso for diagramming complex systems?”

First let me be clear: I absolutely love Visio. In fact, as a Solutions Architect for Motricity (note: Kinetic is personally-funded and is not associated with Motricity in any way), I create and review hundreds of Visio diagrams each year. Anything from high-level technical architecture diagrams to low-level software component diagrams to business process flows. My good friend Sean C. (and the best database engineer I know) jokes that I’m utterly useless without Visio. And he’s right. Visit my desk on any workday, and chances are, you’ll probably see some Visio diagram on my monitor.

Diagramming software such as Microsoft Visio or Omnigraffle allow users to draw boxes, and then drag-and-drop arrows to link the boxes. For simpler diagrams, this intuitive approach works well.

But where tools such as Visio fall short is in dealing with complex diagrams. What do I mean? When diagramming systems that contain hundreds of interacting components, the Visio connector lines start to criss-cross in a spaghetti-like mess. Just for fun, here’s a particularly atrocious example:

Image from: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Customer-Friendly_System.aspx

Too many times, soon as the diagrammed systems or processes cross a certain threshold of complexity, the Visio diagrams become unwieldy and unmanageable.

In the next post (next Tuesday), I’ll share my thinking on the unwieldiness, and how Kinetic deals with it.