Brownfield's everywhere

Last week I was privileged to present to the UK’s National Research and Training Initiative’s Large Scale Complex IT Systems (LSCITS) project. LSCITS is a £14.6M programme looking addressing some of the problems of complex systems and creating a new breed of Engineering Doctorates (EngD) skilled in dealing with them.

To quote their own Initiative Rationale:

The motivation for the LSCITS Initiative is the on-going growth in the size and complexity of information technology (IT) systems. Our ability to develop, maintain and manage such systems is falling behind the growth in their complexity. There is a high risk that we will find ourselves reliant on IT systems that we don’t fully understand and that we cannot effectively manage.

The roots of complexity in IT systems are their increasing size; the increasing involvement of many different organisations in their construction and use; and the increasing rate of business and social change that they have to accommodate. To manage and control complexity, we need better technical tools and methods of system development.

People after my own heart!

Presenting alongside me were representatives from Rolls Royce and BT. Each company had been asked to provide its own perspective on the problems of systems complexity and where they thought LSCITS might be able to help.

Extraordinarily, despite the fact the companies were presenting from very different backgrounds (complex aero-engineering, national telecoms provision and commercial system development) we all had very similar things to say. In particular:

• We all suffered from a lack of rigor caused by lack of formal tooling use. Even when tools were available, people were not happy using them. As a result the level of documentation was poor, reducing the opportunity for reuse of existing assets.
  
  
  
• People were much happier using tools that they were familiar with (Word, Excel etc.) it was unlikely that we could move large numbers of people off them, so we need a better way to control and share information using such informal tooling (one representative lamented the failure to establish a single source of truth almost verbatim from the Eating the IT Elephant book!)
  
  
  
• There was an acknowledgement that no-one can start from a Greenfield perspective. Incremental change and re-engineering is the only cost effective route going forward. No-one can afford a lengthy design or implementation period for a new system or product.
  
  
  
• Not only that, but the self-contained design and engineering teams are a thing of the past too – no-one can afford to create everything in house, so components and other elements need to be sourced from outside the organisation. This causes all kinds of problems when the capabilities and limits of these sourced elements are not known.
  

All in all, we were all looking at new degrees of both organisational and technical complexity. Communication of that complexity was the root of each of our problems. Perhaps Brownfield is a pattern for success with all complex IT systems, not just for use by Systems Integrators?