Overcoming IT Complexity

Chapter 2. Auditing and Assessing Your IT Ecosystem

How do you avoid the IT complexity dilemma? First things first: to deal with complexity in your application or your IT organization, you need to understand where it comes from.

The first step in understanding complexity is to perform an audit of your application, your teams, your delivery and operations processes, your IT organization, and your company as a whole, to determine what parts of your system contribute to your excess complexity.

Auditing Versus Assessment

Auditing and assessment are two distinct terms that are often used somewhat interchangeably to describe the process of understanding the components that make up a complex system, such as an enterprise application. But what’s the difference between the two?

Auditing is typically defined as the process of creating a controlled inventory. In this context, the word controlled implies governance. For example:

• A bank can count its money, but it has its records formally reviewed by an independent agency for accuracy when it undergoes an audit.

• A company keeps its own financial records, but if it is about to be acquired or undergo a merger, its records are audited independently to ensure they are accurate.

• If you live in the United States, you keep track of your personal finances and you submit records to the Internal Revenue Service every year to specify how much income tax you owe. Occasionally, the IRS audits individuals to validate that the information they are ...