Need to Pick Two of Three Things?

This post was inspired when walking through online education portals after the goat discrimination joke.

You can't have everything? In the evaluation of products, projects, systems, ... you often seek a "performance metrics" and it seems to be organized by a kind of triangle - you want
  • High Standards
  • High Production
  • Flexibility
In education this may mean 
  • High Curriculum Standards
  • Low Dropout Rate (high pass rate)
  • Open Access
From this three goals of education you can only pick two. If the curriculum is difficult, how can everyone pass? You need to select before the entry (difficult enough). Similar with the other pairs.

in discrete manufacturing
  • High Product Quality
  • High Throughput
  • A Broad Product Mix 
If you want precision and low time-in-process you usually choose a flow-orieneted, highly automated production line that is optimized for a certain class of parts. If you want a broad part mix, you organize intelligent manufacturing islands that can do many operations for a broad variety of parts in one set up in parallel. You get much-work-in-process but parts stay longer in the system.

In computing we have more flexibility, because computers are not mere tools but universal machines.

What about quant finance?

At UnRisk we did our best efforts to offer benefits in a triangle that has goals that are not in conflict
  • High Quality of Risk-related Information 
  • High Automation (Throughput)
  • Large Diversified Portfolios (Broad Coverage)
This is enabled by the intelligent combination of the latest own and purchased technologies and the clever utilization of new computer muscles. Based on the underlying principle of optimality, multi-strategy approaches, clever maths and open information.

It is not easy and one would expect it has its price. But we offer it for low license and operational cost.

This Monday, Michael has posted about how this works in one example: Combing UnRisk products with Web Services. Products and technologies orthogonalized.