The Root Causes of Unnecessary Complexity of IT Organization

High mature organizations are nimbler, innovative, and fast for adapting to the business dynamic by building trust, creating synergy, and shaping competency.

Due to the changing nature of technology and an abundance of information, the IT organization has to leverage design thinking for reinventing itself to get digital ready.

Not investing enough time in common IT design issues would cause more unnecessary complexity and make IT suffer from the busyness and lower customer satisfaction; even worse, create the disconnect between IT and the business, and decelerate organizational performance




Siloed IT thinking: Many IT organizations are overloaded and understaffed, spend most of their time and resources on “keeping the lights on” or fixing symptoms only. They get stuck at the low level of maturity as a support center, silo function, with bottom-up, controller’s mindset, and traditional change-adverse attitude. IT investment is costly, and often the most important reason for IT project failure is "not knowing what businesses want" due to silo mentality and misunderstanding. Frequent and early feedback will mitigate directional problems and ensure the solution delivered is meeting customers’ satisfaction.

In the industrial age, businesses value specialization so much that they don't set up systems to consistently facilitate cross-discipline management practices. The only way to solve this problem is "co-design and co-development" and the concept of "fail fast to succeed sooner." Good leaders above the silo are supposed to interface effectively, piece all the individual puzzle pieces together, keep them involved and invested in the greater purpose or vision.

Ineffective IT architecture: IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. IT cannot architecture itself in isolation because IT management is the business of the entire company. IT management takes an inconsistent approach to design or manage processes and procedures or focus on technology only. Poor design and the absence of IT planning for improvement could serve as the main indicator of complacent IT.

Usually, the root cause of unnecessary IT management is a lack of alignment with business needs, the architects need to propel the architecture in the direction to gain the oversight of business capabilities, capture the foresight of business growth opportunities, as well as perceive and manage risks seamlessly.

Non-modular design and implementation: Organizations inadvertently increase the overall cost of IT, non- modular design creates disjointed strategies, silos of data, and integration nightmares. The symptoms of poor design include Outdated & silos of technical knowledge, lack of resilience in design, etc. Put some thought on resiliency or reuse in the design of things to avoid reinventing wheels.

Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system, align the different parts of the digital ecosystem to adopt more points of integration with modular capabilities and processes and have standard open interfaces. Keep rationalizing and optimizing. High mature organizations treat customers, channel partners, suppliers, and industry ecosystem participants as active agents who have permission to combine the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new experiences and expand their impact.

Lack of standardization: Standardardization is a process of embodied technical knowledge accessible to businesses that enable effective and efficient product and process development. There are all sorts of standardization, such as vocabulary - industry-standard codes, language standards, engineering standards, or performance standards, etc. Lack of standardization causes unnecessary complexity and increases cost.

Ideally, standardization should provide benefits through reuse that accelerates solution implementation and reduces expenses and risks. Standardization should be done at the solution level and should only occur when the functional requirements for the different groups are the same or where there is a core set of functional requirements that all groups need and additional requirements are easily added for optimizing design and cost. The goal is to achieve strategic coherence and cost/risk management effectiveness.

Myopic IT application funding and budget assignment: IT faces the pressure to transform from a cost center to a value creator, corporate IT has no choice but to embrace transformational change or literally face extinction. IT investment is not just about keeping the business running today, it needs to invest in the future by maximizing the full business potential. Myopic IT application funding and budget assignment cause IT failures from the long term perspective.

An effective resource allocation scenario helps to take advantage of business resources effectively, optimize cost, set priority, etc, to ensure most of the budget is allocated to cost/value proven business initiatives. The wise investment of advanced technologies can be truly helpful to manage IT budget efficiently, adapt to local changes flexibly, achieve better quality, fewer security risks, and higher IT management maturity.

IT effectiveness and maturity are not based on how many years that IT organizations have been around to support the business, but about how well IT can design to become nimbler, more innovative and how fast IT can adapt to the business dynamic by building trust, creating synergy, and shaping competency.

Posted in: Complexity,IT Transformation