Hiding Complexity

Yesterday I spoke about complexity in IT. Today I’m going to move on to the next phase of deceit which leads to increasing dysfunction - the hiding of that complexity.

I’m not sure where it all started but I think it’s been born from a toxic combination of senior management technical ignorance and IT staff obfuscation– a word that was developed specifically to describe the attitude displayed by most IT “gurus”. 

Over time IT departments have increasingly tried to hide their complexity from their customers. In most organizations, despite, or because of, all the money that has been spent in the past on “cutting edge technology” they are left with environments that are so complicated staff daren’t touch them in case they break.

Now I need to get something really straight here – most business people have no idea what is going on in the IT industry and more importantly they have no idea how IT works in their company. It’s really easy for us, on the inside, to assume that our customers understand what we do – but trust me they gave up caring a long time ago and all they have to go on is the external media messages that keep telling them anything is possible.

The most obvious manifestation of this dilemma is the phrase constantly emanating from executive circles – “I don’t care – just do it will you!” At some point everybody on the coal face of computer administration has been on the receiving end of this message. It leads to some major bouts of creative thinking followed by long nights of trickery to achieve the desired effect. The only real outcome of these actions being another addition to that ever increasing bespoke complexity in the server room.

If they don’t understand what is going on and we don’t tell them how hard it is to change we are on diverging planes of reality that at some point will lead to failure and I think that point has either arrived or is approaching rapidly.

So who is to blame here? From within the IT world we always blame it on ignorant business people setting unreasonable targets. From the outside it’s seen as IT departments who are unreasonably dictatorial and obstructive.

Unfortunatly I think both are right – however it is time for us, as an industry, to fess up to our mistakes. The technological dream that we had and hoped to share with the world has turned into a nightmare and until we start to admit the error of our ways we will never begin to sort things out.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss the business issues that contribute to this problem.