This is something I have believed since a long time, though I seem to make more connections now. Our whole life is a balancing act, our actions are based on balancing acts.
Ying-Yang, and all conceptual variation of it, do hold and can be identified through careful observation. Take for example, when designing interfaces, you want to balance innovation with usability (familiarity); take security protection, you have to balance usability with security, you can't expect users to enter 18 different passwords within 128 seconds and a 3-limit wrong password lockout. I bet this configuration could prove quite secure, but rather unusable. May be thats too much Yang. Have a system that is too usable
, say you missed a capital letter, and the program warns you specifically at this time, check usage of capital letters. Worse yet, no login system...it is an open system, you enter your name from a list at one point and the system identifies you! Too much Ying!!Trying to be more technical - You have a risk present, you implement controls to mitigate the risk. When the system is under-controlled, the risk is beyond an acceptable level, when the system is over-controlled, you may be hurting other factors such as efficiency, usability etc. It is this balance that is needed. As a side note, that is where real
auditors come in, auditors investigate the risks present and controls to deal with the risk, check if the implemented (or said to be implemented) controls are effective, and check if the "implemented" controls are sufficient or is an overkill.I hope no one takes any offence by the term "real auditors", there is the stereotypical image of auditors (contrary to what you may expect, they are not real auditors ... at least in my mind) - people looking for the kill, they smell your fear, and dig deeper and deeper till they can find some bone to chew on ... eeekkk....
Coming back to the balancing act, take anything, you have to make decisions to do something. When you are making decisions, you are evaluating different setups (because of the lack of a better word); you come to a conclusion (balance) based on weighing the different setups. Granted, its not 2 things you are always weighing (at least at first glance ... thats topic for a whole new post
), its still balancing, at different levels, that you are doing.Until next time ... ciao
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