Posts Tagged ‘complexity’

Can We Make IT Any More Complex Than It Is?

Thursday, February 5th, 2009
The World Has Become More Complex, But Has IT Become Too Complex?

The World Has Become More Complex, But Has IT Become Too Complex?

One of the reasons that the rest of the company doesn’t seem to really like those of us in the IT department is because we seem to make everything so much more complex when we get involved. First it was our networking issues (Frame Relay, ATM, Ethernet), then it was our server issues (multicore, Intel vs. AMD, caching), and lately it seems to be software design (SaaS, Cloud Computing, Web 2.0). When will this ever end?

Have we screwed things up? Is the CFO and the rest of the financial side of the business correct when they accuse us of buying the latest technology just to play around with it? It turns out, that everyone is probably just a little bit correct this time around.

So here’s the scoop: yes, information technology IS becoming more complex. Sorry about that. The reason that IT is becoming more complex is because the world in which we work is becoming more complex. I mean think about it, everyone is going global, expanding (yes,even now), and developing new technologies. What’s an IT’er to do?

The so-called “traditional” ways of managing IT no longer work. Now to be fair to us, we have made a lot of progress in simplifying the stuff that we already have. We’ve been hard at work standardizing and consolidating IT infrastructure and it’s starting to show results. But then there’s that SOA thing…

Server and storage virtualization has definitely been a double edged sword. It has reduced the number of boxes that we mange, but how we manage the ones that we’ve got has become more complex. The same can be said for all of the new-fangled software architectures that we’ve been dreaming up: SaaS, SoA, Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, etc. These new approaches to assembling software components help us to meet regulatory needs and better ensure data security; however, they sure seem to use an unnecessary number of acronyms to get the job done!

When you introduce mobility into the mix, you’ve just about sealed the deal. Trying to support a wide range of devices that were never designed to work together, getting legacy apps to talk to mobile devices, and keeping everything secure makes life even more complex.

Great, so the world is becoming more complex, IT is becoming more complex, and everyone thinks that we’re just sitting around playing with hi-tech toys. How can we possibly stay on top of all of this complexity? Here are five suggestions on how a hard working IT person can actively keep complexity to a minimum in your life:

  1. Standardize: Simplify your life by standardizing everything that you can get your hands on. Once you’ve done this, start to consolidate as much as you can.
  2. Get More Bang For Your Buck: make sure that you are spending your IT time and money where it’s going to produce the greatest return. Too much time spent on the wrong things will just make life that much more complex.
  3. Prune – Don’t Cut: There will always be times when the IT budget needs to be cut back. When these times arrive, don’t do wholesale across the board cuts, instead trim projects as needed. You may even boost budgets of critical projects.
  4. Use What You’ve Got: Make sure that the rest of the company has access to the IT assets that you already have. Putting information online and providing access to enhanced analytical tools can go a long way in showing IT’s value to the rest of the organization.
  5. Outsource Only When Necessary: Outsourcing does not simplify things, rather it creates more management complexity.  If you are too quick to outsource work, then you’ll find yourself sitting on top of a management nightmare.

Do you feel that your IT shop has become more complex in the past few years? Do you think that the rest of the business thinks that it’s harder to do business with IT because of increased IT complexity? What steps are you taking to simplify your operations? Are they working? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in business alignment | 8 Comments »

Wicked, Wicked IT Strategy Problems

Thursday, September 18th, 2008
Some IT problems can't be solved - these are wicked problems.

Some IT problems can't be solved - these are wicked problems.

Some problems just can’t be solved. As an IT guy with an engineering background, I find this hard to believe – it goes against my grain. I mean, back in school I encountered lots of problems that at first blush appeared to be impossible to solve. However, once I had gotten a little deeper into whatever class I was taking at the time things started to become more clear. New tools that I had learned could be used to solve what had previously appeared to be unsolvable problems. In the world of IT, the IT department can even help keep a company out of an economic stall and so I though that there was no problem that an IT department couldn’t solve. It turns out that real life is not nearly so neat.

Dr. John Camillus has spent the past 15 years studying how companies create their own strategies. During this time he has uncovered what he likes to call “wicked” business problems – strategy issues that are difficult because our traditional processes for solving problems just can’t resolve them. IT departments face these types of problems internally as well as facing them as part of a company’s overall strategy planning process. Wicked problems can be especially trying for IT departments because they seem to resist being solved by our standard techniques of gathering more metrics, revisiting the core issues and creating a more detailed definition of them, or even the time honored technique of breaking the big problems that we can’t solve down into smaller problems that we hope that we can solve. Dr. Camillus says that not only do our traditional ways of dealing with problems not work on wicked problems, but they can also make things far worse.

Dr. Camillus recently wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed wicked business problems. In it he stated that organizations, like an IT department, will most likely encounter a wicked problem when they are facing either a period of constant change or have encountered challenges that are bigger then they have ever seen before. Within an IT department, it won’t just be the technological complexity that make a problem a wicked problem, but rather all of the social issues that come along with it that will turn it into a wicked problem.

How can you tell if your problem is a wicked problem? It would be nice if wicked problems came labeled as such. However, they don’t. Having the ability to identify a wicked IT problem early on can save any IT leader a significant amount of time and grief. You won’t be able to tell just by looking at the problem itself, but rather you have to take a look at what surrounds the problem. Specifically, if a problem is causing confusion, discord among your IT team, and there has been a distinct lack of progress in creating a solution for it so far, then there is a good chance that you are looking at a wicked problem.

Just to make sure that you really do have a wicked problem and not one of those more common really, really hard IT problems, there are some additional criteria that you need to check before you can call an IT problems a wicked problem:

  1. Too Many People Are Involved: A problem that has too many people who are impacted by it starts to look like a wicked problem very quickly. Each person who has a different vested interest and is working on a different set of priorities will contribute to making a difficult problem into an unsolvable wicked one.
  2. The Cause Of The Problem Is Not Clear: There is no single cause for the IT issue that you are dealing with. Generally there are multiple sources that have fed the problem including competition, issues with employees & staffing, company strengths that have become decrements, and a traditional domestic vs. international focus can also compound the problem.
  3. The Problem Is Shaped Like A Blob: This is an especially tricky characteristic to deal with – the problem seems to change shape everytime you try to deal with it. This makes it hard to “get a grip” on the problem and so you may not have any idea as to where to start.
  4. You’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before: How can you solve a problem that doesn’t look like any other problem that you’ve ever seen before? When you face a problem that you’ve never seen before, the question of what tools or techniques to use to solve it becomes even more critical.
  5. There Are No Signs Showing You The Right Direction: Most problems come with some sort of indication of what the correct next thing to do in order to solve it is. However, wicked problems have no such indicators. You are truly on you own here.

So what’s an IT leader to do once he/she has spotted a wicked problem? One key thing that Dr Camillus has learned is that wicked IT problems can not be solved. Instead, you need to find ways to mange them. How to do that is what we’ll talk about next time…

Have you encountered any wicked IT problems? Did you know it was going to be a wicked problem right off the bat or did it take awhile to discover this? What did you do about it? Were you ever able to solve it or does this problem still exist? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in strategy | 8 Comments »