Complex Landscapes

I have spent the last few weeks reviewing some application management support deals. It seems to me that business is being driven by short term goals rather than long term – and that approach is costing them dearly in the long term, both in terms of flexibility and money.

When a customer buys a hardware solution, one of the major criteria for the choice is the total cost of ownership – it will be cheaper, more economical, or whatever to run it on the latest, fastest more efficient chipset. However it seems when it comes to applications, speed to deploy and cost to deploy are the main considerations. Businesses look at the total cost of acquisition rather than the total cost of ownership.

Surely the quicker and cheaper to deploy is the best in any case? Well normally not. Ill thought out solutions often increase the complexity of your estate rather than reducing it. Ultimately this will end up costing you more in terms of money and flexibility. Let’s take a simple example of a partial Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) implementation that would wrap, rather than re-engineer, the legacy system to expose it’s offerings as services to the rest of the estate. It certainly makes it easier to interface to the legacy system, but at what cost? The solution has solved something by adding another layer (or more) into your estate. You will still have to run the legacy system, still have to it to maintain, you will also have to maintain the new SOA services. Your estate has become more complex.

I am not stating that SOA is a bad thing, it is just an example. There might be good reasons for doing the example I gave above. Perhaps it allows you to isolate the legacy system while you develop a suitable replacement - so that it is easier to replace, in which case this will make that transition easier. This would be a good use of the service – as a means of transitioning. However this is not the normal case in our world. Solutions are performed piecemeal with little long term strategy – what will be introduced as a strategy will be overturned in coming years when that money is required on even more functionality.

So we continue to make our estates harder and more difficult to maintain we increase the complexity of our estates, and we do it often by adding layers of technology which it is ‘supposed’ to make it simpler. In fact it does the opposite.

So what is the solution? Well it is reasonably obvious, we need to stop trying to hide things that are difficult to understand behind a curtain and get to understand them. It is odd that in no other field of business would a businessman say that area is too complex to understand – I’ll just ignore it! Yet the business – IT gap makes that seem acceptable and normal.

The bottom line is simple, just like one of the Brownfield beliefs – embrace complexity rather than ignoring it.

Do this and your world will become simpler.