Overcoming IT Complexity

Chapter 6. Starting the Conversation

We’ve covered many topics in this book. We started by exploring the IT complexity dilemma, describing how the decisions IT teams make can impact the complexity of an application, which in turn can impact the cost and the organization’s ability to be agile and take advantage of industry developments.

We then discussed how to assess your organization and your products to understand what they are composed of and how those parts work together.

Then we looked at how adaptive architectures can give you agility in making decisions when used appropriately, taking care that they do not inadvertently add complexity and fragility.

Next, we discussed managing knowledge. How can you organize the information required to keep a modern application working correctly without contributing to system complexity or increasing system vulnerability?

Finally, we talked about innovation and showed how and where your investments in your organization can affect it. Will an investment positively disrupt your business? Will it simply enable the business to keep moving forward? Will it have a positive or negative overall impact?

All of this discussion was centered on one overriding concept: how do you create and encourage organizational change to improve your application and your organization? These are the kinds of questions you need to ask: Can you modify the course of your product or company to enable increased innovation? Can you drive disruption in your industry as ...