Solving Complexity – the IT way

How have IT departments solved the problems of entrenched complexity? 

For too many years a culture has developed in the industry that allows anybody who considers themselves to be technically competent to have the right to try and solve issues without any level of "engineering diligence". Now I have no qualms with people who are technically proficient to have the ability to change systems, what I do have an issue with is:

• Technical proficiency is usually self adjudicated and nearly always over-estimated, as mentioned yesterday, it is far broader and deeper than is usually the reality. In other words most technical people over-estimate their capabilities.

• Few technical staff understand all the complexities of an IT environment. During my many years spent in the industry I have probably met 5 people who I would trust to understand the implications of their actions across all layers of an IT installation – I certainly never did! The skills and knowledge required to understand security, networking, servers and PC’s, storage and applications is almost unfathomable!

• Any changes made must be auditable and traceable – just in case something goes wrong. Those long failures that reach the press every now again are usually caused by failed roll-back processes usually as a result of over-simplification of the changes being made.

These problems have been solved, in most larger organisations, by the introduction of stringent change management systems usually within the ITIL framework.

Now I think ITIL is a fabulous thing, it provides a strong and, more importantly logical framework, for dealing with changes to computer systems. Certainly a large amount of money has been spent ensuring that there is a Pink Elephant stuck up somewhere. I could never get over the irony of the name - perhaps Flying Pig would have been better?

Despite all its hopes and dreams of imposing a good procedural framework around the administration of computer system, ITIL has never overcome one major problem and that is this relentless ability that so called “computer engineers” (sic) have to fiddle with things and never tell anyone about it.

As an aside, this syndrome has reached epidemic proportions in the small business world where the ability to impose professional levels of diligence on IT support staff is nigh on impossible. I’m sure we’ve all heard it – “We got some guy in we found in the Yellow Pages. He fixed the problem, eventually, but since then we’ve had two other things go wrong – I’m sure it was him!” Not good.

What does the business see when an IT department is protecting its complexity with ITIL. Simple - nothing ever happens! The imposition of stringent change management  introduces an enormous amount of inertia into the ability of those IT systems to adapt to any business changes. 

This is always bad for the relationship between business managers and their IT staff and usually ends up with that dreaded phrase “I don’t care just get it done!” – usually delivered at 4.55pm on Friday.

There is no denying that processes and procedures can protect an organisation from the risk of failure but what it also does do is alienate the sponsoring businesses from the dream that IT has promised them. This tool that allows them to be lean and mean and flexible is now holding up a hand and saying that these things are now not possible.

How do business managers solve this issue….we’ll see tomorrow.