How Businesses Create Complexity

There is another problem with the way businesses develop which is in conflict with the underlying principles of IT. This trend usually kicks-off in the wild and wacky days of the startup but becomes entrenched into the way business is done and ultimately is a reflection of poor strategic planning.

There are two primary building blocks within companies and these form the basis for most computer systems. Data and processes – how hard is that? 

Data is, in its simplest form, a definition of the information types that are used by an organization. 

I did a course with Clive Finklestein, an enigmatic Australian academic, who many years ago defined the basis for data mapping ( that “one to many” stuff) and he was adamant that if companies wanted to have effective data systems they must start with a data glossary. How good an idea would that be, everybody would know what every noun meant when used at work.

I’ll give you a good (or is it bad) example of how not to do this – I know one large company that has set up at least two customer management systems, although I’m sure there are many more. One for its customers (the people they sell stuff to) and another one for its shareholders. That’s because the shareholder support group see the shareholders as their customers – fair enough. But how can you ever consolidate those two systems if you have defined customers to exist in opposite ends of the company? That’ll take a very nice piece of complexity to solve in the future.

So if an organization can’t define who its customers are how can it expect any consistency of language through its daily work. 

Processes are the things that we do in our organizations and again tend to be cobbled together in an ad-hoc way to suite the current environment. There is rarely a grand plan on what to do, how to do it and, most importantly, why it’s being done. 

The only exception to this is if safety or legislation dictates that processes need to be formalized. Mind you when they go wrong they are pretty spectacular, I remember seeing the controller of the Chernobil reactor control room exclaiming that he had done nothing wrong as he had followed all the procedures!

When we move things into IT system, unfortunately, we have to define them – awkward I know but unavoidable. When those definitions are made they generally are done under duress by a frazzled BA who has to get his business requirements out before the end of next week as part of the delivery of a tactical computer project. His source of information is a bunch of people who have little interest in any new computer system. What is guarenteed is that he is never under the control of any overall corporate governance defining the use of data and processes. Once completed these then become etched into corporate life in the new system and trust me once they become part of a system there are rarely any changes made  down the line.

This lack of corporate governance over what we call things and how we do them (and why) means that our IT systems are bound to fail, or at least lock us into a far from ideal world. 

Organizations need to take a more strategic view of how they handle data and processes and ensure that they are not only agreed and socialized but that they have a method of governing and changing them effectively in the future. I fear this skill is being lost!

If we rely on IT systems to solve this for us they will fail, and they have been failing for many years.