Is there any more room in the bathtub?

I’ve been hearing some disturbing messages from my customers over the last few years. Some of them are beginning to regard IT as a burden and a blocker of change in their business. They complain that the systems they have are costing a lot to maintain and they are difficult to change. Rather than being the bright new thing enabling business change, IT is being seen as a dirty money grubbing blocker on their business. OK, I may be exaggerating somewhat, but if you talk to customer procurement people long enough you begin to believe them!
But they may have a point. I’ve been researching how much big companies spend on operating and maintaining their existing IT systems versus how much they spend on creating new business capabilities. A Forrester report I saw some time ago suggested that the maintenance budget was expanding and the amount of money being spent on regulatory compliance was also growing. The end result? A squeeze on the amount of IT spending available for business innovation. Now the annual squeeze was only a small incremental effect, but it was measurable.
The installed base of IT complexity in already complex environments is gradually but perceptibly growing. Costs of maintaining that complexity are increasing.
Adding a new channel to a system will add complexity. Layering SOA on top of existing systems will make them more useful and reusable, but adds to the overall complexity. Adding new function to an existing system without taking out any existing function will add to its complexity.
The IT industry stopped throwing the baby out with the bath water over 40 years ago when it became possible for business code to become portable without change between business systems. I suspect these days, our metaphorical industry bath tub is therefore overflowing with all ages from infant to middle-aged hippie. Figures I’ve seen suggest a bank or national government department will have 500,000 function points of installed complexity. That corresponds to 4,000 person years of delivery.
And that’s where the industry could hit a downward spiral. As IT environments grow and get more complex, we spend more time integrating and migrating from old to new. The number of potential (and actual) connections between systems gets larger. The testing burden grows and the reduced budget for innovation gets spent on integration and migration.
How bad is the problem? Well the very largest IT operations now spend 90% of their annual budget on the status quo. That’s only 10% left for innovation. Not only that, but we’re now beginning to see big projects where 60% of the overall costs are attributable to integration and migration, rather than the delivery of new function. With some basic high school maths that means only 4% of the IT budget is actually going to make a difference to the business. Ouch.
Now, not everywhere is as complex or hard as the kind of environments we’re talking about, but there is a danger that as time goes by the same increase in complexity will work its way further down the stack.
We need, as an industry, to do something about it and soon. We need to simplify, simplify, simplify – and that doesn’t mean sticking another layer of supposedly simplifying complexity on top of what we’ve got. If we do, the IT may make it back to being the shiny lithe hero of the story, rather than the obese unwashed villain.